Iraq:
This Is Now An
Unwinnable Conflict
By Patrick Cockburn
The Independent -
UK
7-24-5
- 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.
-
- © 2005 Independent News & Media (UK) Ltd.
-
- http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article301250.ece
-
-
-
- Comment
- From Leslie Bell
- 7-24-5
-
- Youth are subject to two strong forces; idealism and
fads. This fad, if thought of and adopted by the Resistance during WWII,
would not have needed the American invasion to end WWII against the
Nazis. Not one tiny little bit.
-
- There is no way on earth for old men (both old
soldiers and old cowards) to win against the idealism and fads of youth.
No way. There is absolutely no difference between a young American or
Briton enlisting in our armed forces and one of these young men
enlisting in terrorism, except that their way is 1000 times more
effective, and they will inevitably win whichever way anyone chooses to
look at it.
-
- If we finally wise up and give them what they want
(remove Israel AND ourselves from the Mideast) we both win and
Armageddon is averted; if we "are forced" to go all the way and kill
them all to "end terrorism" (and we will be; human nature dictates no
other possible outcome), only they will win, for their destruction will
have turned us completely and utterly into
Nazis.
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