From:
[EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
On Behalf Of Karen Watters Cole
Sent: Sunday, July 24, 2005 10:14
AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: [Futurework] Napoleon
revisited
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
