Simon Akam Scribe, £25 Rating: The British Army, according to journalist Simon Akam, went into the ‘wars of choice’ in Iraq and Afghanistan convinced that it was ‘the best little army in the world’. It came out of them, he says, with its reputation diminished, both in its own estimation but also – and importantly – in the view of our American allies whom, embarrassingly, we had hubristically denigrated at the start of the Iraq operation. There is little doubt that ultimately the British military failed badly in Iraq by ceding control of Basra, in 2007, to the sectarian Shia militias that we had hitherto been fighting.