The British Betrayal of Basra
I have been thinking about how best to write this post for a few days now I can’t seem to find a good way of doing it. Partly because it is such a large topic, and partly because for me it is such an emotive one that any attempt at coherent argument is bound to end in farce.I have attempted to keep it brief but unfortunately it isn't, so for those of you brave enough to read on you can find the majority of it in the comments section. I think it should be read though, if I may say so myself. I’d like to know what you think, fellow countrymen and Atlantic cousins alike.
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I think Britain has betrayed the people of Basra, Iraq and our Coalition allies. A few weeks ago we withdrew what few troops we had left and isolated ourselves in an airport come fortress on the outskirts of the city. Before this we had effectively barricaded ourselves into Basra Palace and achieved little more than absorbing significant numbers of hostile bullets and mortar rounds. On Sunday we handed power back to the Iraqi security and police forces. Mission Accomplished!
Well no, far from it in fact. This was a retreat. The proud British army has failed in its task of restoring stability to the area. Paramilitary organisations, many with strong connections to the weak police and security forces have stepped into fill the power vacuum. These militias continue to fight one another and persecute the innocent civilians of Basra. Women are brutally murdered and their bodies put on pubic display for failing to wear their burqa correctly or for being caught wearing makeup. Shop owners are beaten to death in the street for daring to sell alcohol. Men that used to work for the British have been forced to flee. We have done little but overseen a transition from the organised tyranny of Saddam to the chaotic tyranny of religious and ethnic cleansing.
Is this what we fought for? Is this what men died for?
Cont…
posted by Benjamin Nakizo @ 12:35 am
1 Comments:
Things become all the more galling when you consider what high hopes we had. During the early days of the occupation our troops patrolled wearing their berets. We built friendships with the locals and tried to help them out. How we in Britain loved this. Our boys were the moderate, professional and caring ones. Veterans of the peace keeping operations in the former Yugoslavia and Northern Ireland. Keeping warring factions apart is what we excelled at. And oh how we looked disapprovingly at the Americans who patrolled from inside heavy armour and dare not enter neighbourhoods without first calling in the Air Force to obliterate every man, woman and child. We were so sure of ourselves. We were different. British soldiers were more in touch with the world, and we would quickly bring peace and prosperity to our small corner of Iraq.
It didn’t happen. We did not do our homework and we initially approached the situation as if it was a European nation that we were dealing with. The tried and tested approaches of Northern Ireland and Bosnia failed to work. Arabs have a totally different culture and perhaps we were afraid to admit that. Casualties mounted and each and every set back was broadcast live to the folks back home. Sipping our lattes and reading our Guardians we smugly went about our day, confident in the knowledge that, just as we said, war was a mistake and the military was a brutal and shameful aggressor. We wrote letters to MP’s, we shouted at Tony Blair and we burnt American flags in the streets. We marched and we yelled “bring the boys home”.
Bring the boys home? A favourite slogan of the educated and liberal professional classes of Britain. Could you ever envisage a more short sighted policy? It was surely neither educated or liberal. Iraq was a horrible, horrible mess. But what the righteous masses seemed to forget was that it was our mess. It was our responsibility to sort it out. The pressure to withdraw grew and grew and resulted in firstly starving our boys of the equipment and numbers they needed to even stand a chance. Secondly it meant that the minute the cowardly Gordon Brown stepped into 10 Downing Street it just became a matter of how quickly we would run away. Those Iraqis who have been killed, and will be killed, by the murderous bands of religious maniacs have a right to be angry with Britain. Cowardly political point scoring in Westminster has led to their deaths.
America has long had the more difficult job of bringing law and order to Baghdad and the wider Iraqi nation. To put it kindly things got off to a bad start. Reports of American soldiers murdering and raping Iraqi civilians, then the shocking abuse at Abu Ghraib prison and there was the insult to human decency that was, and still is, Guantanamo Bay. However, America had a President with a one-track mind and a far greater public willingness to support the troops. Ribbons tied to trees, prayer sessions and victory parades would make the average British person choke on their tea. Yet regardless of how obscenely distasteful these rituals may be to us in the more mature civilisations, it does mean that when America goes to war it tends to do it properly and sees it through to the end. In this case America had the manpower, equipment and political backing to change its approach and try new things. This is what America does best. When America hits a brick wall it will first try to go through it. Often it fails and we in Europe get a good laugh out of it. But then whereas us Europeans would stop there, the Americans just get more determined. They try again and experiment with different methods, and then they’ll look at ways to go under, over and around the wall. It is just a matter of time before they come up with some innovative way of solving the problem. Iraq appears to be just such a situation.
In 2004 America went for the all out war option in taming the troublesome city of Fallujah. They surrounded it, poured terrifying amounts of high explosive into it and then set about clearing it out, building by building. This proved to be ineffective. They flattened the city and killed so many innocent civilians that it won them few favours. Recently however their tactics have changed and results have been immediately forthcoming. Adopting the British tactics (just on a far wider and hence more effective scale) America is now working with the various factions, playing them off against one another and building alliances. I personally believe it was cultural arrogance (“America rules – hell yer! – woo!”) that prevented America from adopting this tactic earlier. Then they had the troop surge. Just as Britain was desperately looking to drop its guns and run, Bush sent in 21,000 more soldiers into Baghdad and the security improvements were dramatic. They are also attempting to build a wall to separate Sunni neighbourhoods from Shi’a ones, whether this is effective or not remains to be seen but at least they have the gumption to actually try something different. Oil production is finally back to pre-war levels and utility provision is on slowly catching up. Violence is down in Baghdad and people are beginning to return. The same cannot be said for Basra.
Now I know full well that I am painting a far too rosy picture of American controlled Iraq and that many of the recent improvements are down to many other factors. Iraqis are returning because neighbouring nations like Syria have had enough of them and are kicking them out. Attacks on American troops are partly down because of a disgraceful trend of so called ‘search and avoid’ tactics whereby American troops on patrol go and find a quiet corner to hide in before returning back to base pretending to have done a days work.
Yet the point remains. Britain has a long history of being excellent at peace keeping and anti-insurgency operations (a little known anti-insurgency operation in Malaysia worked a treat during the 1950’s) and while Basra was by far the largest challenge it has taken on, it is shameful that our boys are coming home after four years of political betrayal and failure. The British presence did have a positive effect, but our job is far from done.
Where was our troop surge? Where was the equipment, funding and political backing to see this thing through? Sure, British lives will now be saved and headlines will be kinder on Brown. But more Iraqis will die, tyranny will grow and global security will weaken.
It’s a tough call to make, but a Prime Minister is supposed to be able to make them.
Further Reading/Watching:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/panorama/7148670.stm
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1695741,00.html?xid=feed-cnn-world
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/30/opinion/30pollack.html
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