The RAF operation in Mesopotamia was to use the modern term about “Shock and Awe”. By showing that nowhere was beyond reach, it was hoped the rebels would realise the futility of their struggle and stop. To a large extent it worked. Harris appears to have set about it in a thorough and, by the standards of the time, humane manner. It may have been naïve to expect the warnings to be complied with, but a land campaign would have been long and bloody on both sides with many more civilians unintentionally killed. Chalton was repelled by the consequences of an attack the victims of which he saw in a hospital. I doubt he had direct knowledge of the events that caused them. Even today the laws of war expect the defending party to take a degree of responsibility for the protection and evacuation of civilians.
Air Policing makes it sound like bullying a few dozen recalcitrant tribesmen, it wasn’t. Winston Churchill’s view was it would take over 100,000 British and Indian Army troops to defeat the rebellions by the same number of armed Kurdish and Arab tribesmen. It was achieved by 14,000 and two squadrons. About 9000 Iraqis were killed and circa 500 Imperial troops were killed and 11 aircraft “destroyed behind enemy lines”.
It has been said that one of the reasons the Roman Empire lasted so long, unlike the British, was their policy of co-opting local elites. Not only to govern and tax their homeland but also into central government. Had colonists been sitting in parliament, the American rebellion might not have happened. Having freed them from the Ottoman yoke, Britain had tried to impose its own officials and rules on the cradle of civilisation, not unsurprisingly many took against it. Britain then imposed an alien (though Arab) king, the consequences of these mistakes are to be seen in Iraq and the wider Middle East today. The reponsibility for that lay with politicians not airmen, soldiers or sailors.
Harris’s statue and others have value if they prompt us to examine and debate history. For that reason alone, they should stand.
As I said to a member of this forum “As a history student I was taught to examine the evidence and come to a dispassionate conclusion discarding the filter of current mores; I am (perhaps unfortunately) irritated when others do not.”