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A sobering
account and prophetic warning by a British journalist reporting on the
make-believe Cheney referred to as ‘insurgency in its last throes”. It helps after
reading this to read Friedman’s Giving the
Hate Mongers No Place to Hide, and the OpEd by National Security
Advisor Steven Hadley and Frances Townsend, What
we saw in London: we should fight terrorism as we did totalitarianism,
both linked below. But it all
points to the conclusion that the Bush preemptive doctrine of military warfare
to combat global terrorism was the wrong choice and must be altered if we want
to avoid further disasters, remembering, as I posted yesterday, that senior
Defense officials project that “increasingly violent suicide and roadside attacks are expected
to continue at a rate of 65 day/500 per week” for another six months. What the White
House and Pentagon may be planning for any Phase II major offenses in the new
primary strategic area for world terrorism will be much more difficult and
risky if the US loses it major ally, Britain. It’s no wonder that these same military officers are
speaking up as they can, before all checks and balances are removed by an
increasingly insular and imperial Executive Branch. Maybe Tony Blair has revisited
the Book of Revelations and decided that Armageddon is not linked to oil
security in the Middle East. But it doesn’t appear that George Bush has entertained
any second thoughts, and doesn’t intend to. KwC Iraq:
This is now an unwinnable conflict
As
he completes another tour of duty in the chaos of Iraq, award-winning reporter
Patrick Cockburn charts how Bush and Blair's 'winnable war' turned into a mess
that is inspiring a worldwide insurgency The Independent
online, published 24 July 2005
The Duke of
Wellington, warning hawkish politicians in Britain against ill-considered
military intervention abroad, once said: "Great nations do not have small
wars." He meant that supposedly limited conflicts can inflict terrible
damage on powerful states. Having seen what a small war in Spain had done to
Napoleon, he knew what he was talking about. The war in Iraq is now
joining the Boer War in 1899 and the Suez crisis in 1956 as ill-considered
ventures that have done Britain more harm than good. It has demonstrably
strengthened al-Qa'ida by providing it with a large pool of activists and
sympathisers across the Muslim world it did not possess before the invasion of
2003. The war, which started out as a demonstration of US strength as the
world's only superpower, has turned into a demonstration of weakness. Its
135,000-strong army does not control much of Iraq. The suicide bombing campaign in Iraq is
unique. Never before
have so many fanatical young Muslims been willing to kill themselves, trying to
destroy those whom they see as their enemies. On a single day in Baghdad this
month 12 bombers blew themselves up. There have been more than 500 suicide
attacks in Iraq over the last year. It is this campaign
which has now spread to Britain and Egypt. The Iraq war has radicalised a
significant part of the Muslim world. Most of the bombers in Iraq are
non-Iraqi, but the network of sympathisers and supporters who provide safe
houses, money, explosives, detonators, vehicles and intelligence is home-grown. The shrill denials by
Tony Blair and Jack Straw that hostility to the invasion of Iraq motivated the
bombers are demonstrably untrue. The findings of an investigation, to be published soon, into
300 young Saudis, caught and interrogated by Saudi intelligence on their way to
Iraq to fight or blow themselves up, shows that very few had any previous
contact with al-Qa'ida or any other terrorist organisation previous to 2003. It
was the invasion of Iraq which prompted their decision to die. Some 36 Saudis who did
blow themselves up in Iraq did so for similar reasons, according to the same
study, commissioned by the Saudi government and carried out by a US-trained
Saudi researcher, Nawaf Obaid, who was given permission to speak to Saudi
intelligence officers. A
separate Israeli study of 154 foreign fighters in Iraq, carried out by the
Global Research in International Affairs Centre in Israel, also concluded that
almost all had been radicalised by Iraq alone. Before Iraq, those who undertook suicide
bombings were a small, hunted group; since the invasion they have become a
potent force, their ideology and tactics adopted by militant Islamic groups
around the world. Their
numbers may still not be very large but they are numerous enough to create
mayhem in Iraq and anywhere else they strike, be it in London or Sharm el
Sheikh. The bombers have
paralysed Baghdad. I have spent half my time living in Iraq since the invasion.
The country has never been so dangerous as today. Some targets have been hit
again and again. The army recruiting centre at al-Muthana old municipal airport
in the middle of Baghdad has been attacked no fewer than eight times, the last
occasion on Wednesday when eight people were killed. The detonations of the
suicide bombs make my windows shake in their frames in my room in the al-Hamra
hotel. Sometimes, thinking the glass is going to shatter, I take shelter behind
a thick wall. The hotel is heavily guarded. At one time the man who looked for
bombs under cars entering the compound with a mirror on the end of a stick
carried a pistol in his right hand. He reckoned that if he did discover a
suicide bomber he had a split second in which to shoot him in the head before
the driver detonated his bomb. The bombers, or rather the defences
against them, have altered the appearance of Baghdad. US army and Iraqi government positions in
Baghdad are surrounded by ramparts of enormous cement blocks which snake
through the city.
Manufactured in different sizes, each of which is named after a different
American state such as Arkansas and Wisconsin, these concrete megaliths are
strangling the city by closing off so many streets. For all the newspaper
and television coverage of Iraq, the foreign media still fail to convey the lethal and
anarchic quality of day-to-day living. The last time I drove into west Baghdad from the airport
in early July we were suddenly stopped by the sound of volleys of shots. This
turned out to be the police commandos, a 12,000-strong paramilitary force which
is meant to be the cutting edge of the government offensive against the
insurgents. On this occasion they had loaded coffins wrapped in Iraqi flags,
containing the bodies of two of their officers murdered that morning, on to the
backs of their pick-ups and were weaving through the traffic, firing over our
heads. Drivers slammed
on their brakes since people detained by the commandos, often for no known
reason, are often found later in rubbish dumps, having been tortured and
executed. The government, whose
members seldom emerge from the Green Zone, make bizarre efforts to pretend that
there are signs of a return to normality. Last week a pro-government newspaper
had an article on the reconstruction of Baghdad. Above the article was a
picture of a crane at a building site. But there are no cranes at work in Baghdad so the paper had
been compelled to use a photograph of a crane which has been rusting for more
than two years, abandoned at the site of a giant mosque that Saddam Hussein was
constructing when he was overthrown. The same quality of make-believe mars British and American policy in
Iraq. The current motto of both governments is to "stay the course in
Iraq". This may be useful propaganda at home but Iraqi government
officials counter that London and Washington have no "course" in
Iraq, only a policy of endless zig-zags. For future historians Iraq will probably
replace Vietnam as the stock example of the truth of Wellington's dictum about
small wars escalating into big ones. Ironically, the US and Britain pretended in
2003 that Saddam ruled a powerful state capable of menacing his neighbours.
Secretly they believed this was untrue and expected an easy victory. Now in 2005 they find to their horror
that there are people in Iraq more truly dangerous than Saddam, and they are
mired in an un-winnable conflict. http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article301250.ece Recommended: Friedman Giving the hate mongers no
place to hide http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/22/opinion/22friedman.html? Hadley, Townsend: What we saw in London. We should
fight terrorism the way we fought totalitarianism. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/23/opinion/23hadley.html? Reference: Defense Dept admits
rate of attacks by insurgency will continue unabated for another 6 months http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2002397618_iraq23.html |
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