Majorityrights Central > Category: War on Terror

All British and United States troops serving in Iraq will be withdrawn within a year in an effort to bring peace and stability to the country.

The news came as defence chiefs admitted privately that the British troop commitment in Afghanistan may last for up to 10 years.

The planned pull-out from Iraq follows the acceptance by London and Washington that the presence of the coalition, mainly composed of British and US troops, is now seen as the main obstacle to peace.

According to a senior defence source directly involved in planning the withdrawal, Britain is the driving force behind the scheme. The early spring of next year has been identified as the optimum time for the start of the complex and dangerous operation.

The source explained that troop numbers were expected to decrease slightly over the next 12 months but that the bulk of British and American forces, who make up 138,000 of the coalition’s 153,000 troops, would be withdrawn simultaneously.

... The source said: “Our presence [in Iraq] is now part of the problem. That is a situation which is now accepted by both governments. We are viewed as an occupation force even though, at the moment, we are in Iraq at the invitation of the government.

“Every time we go out on patrol we run the risk of drawing fire and taking unnecessary casualties. The security situation will not improve in the short term, whether we are in Iraq or not.”

From an article on the Telegraph website, quoting unattributed sources.

If this is right, the most ill-conceived, dishonest, expensive and pointless foreign adventure in modern times will end in humiliation as Sunni and Shia “extremists” compete to send coalition forces home as bloodied as possible.  That may not be very bloodied, as these things go.  But it won’t be easy for the government machine in Washington and in London to claim the much-craved honourable exit.  “Obstacles to peace” cannot exit honourably.

After that, what are the chances for democracy in Iraq, or for any operational longevity of the Iraqi Defence Force which must underpin it?  What is there to prevent the country splitting into its three warring factions?  And if this isn’t the result the White House - and, poodle-like, Downing Street - foresaw at the outset, who will pay the political price after so much deceit and waste?

Not many, one would think, who are neither neoconservatives, Blairites nor arms manufacturers.  The more one ponders Iraq present and future and the mired progress in Afghanistan, the more difficult it becomes to see a durable enhancement in security for the West at the end of all this.  And that, surely, is the only honest measure by which we might justify all that has been done in our name, including the sacrifice of our sons.

The stakes are appallingly high, with a nuclear revenge attack on Western soil being considered “inevitable” by some US specialists.  Will an outside chance of victory in the WoT and even the establishment of American Empire and its hegemony in the ME really be worth that?

Beyond Iraq, here’s a swift tour of the good ole WoT in the ME.  Judge for yourself whether this is shaping up nicely for neocons or whether it has already spun out of control.

READ MORE...

... and let us hope the last.  The release of the identity of the Belgium women who blew herself up in Baghdad on November 9th occasions more pity than anger, I think.  The Times article reports:-

After a conventional upbringing in industrial southern Belgium, during which she briefly dabbled in drugs and alcohol and held a series of jobs, including as a baker’s assistant, Mme Degauque said her daughter became “more Muslim than Muslim”.

When she married her second husband, a Belgian of Moroccan descent, Degauque took to wearing the chador - the head-to-toe dress worn by devout Muslim women. “The religion was totally ingrained in her. She only lived for that. She had learned Arabic,” her mother said.

Mme Degauque described her daughter’s gradual estrangement from the rest of her family and subsequent disappearance. Mme Degauque said she suspected her daughter’s involvement in the suicide bombing as soon as she heard a Belgian woman had been involved.

“I had a bad feeling,” she said. “For three weeks, I had tried to call her but there was no answer.”

READ MORE...

The news has also been eventful here in Australia.

Yesterday morning police arrested nine men in Melbourne and seven in Sydney who had formed a group to carry out a jihad or holy war.

Another man in Sydney saw the police coming, drew a handgun and shot and wounded a policeman before being shot in the neck himself.

The Melbourne group had raised funds by using the panel beating shop of one of its members to rebirth stolen cars. The money was used to buy large amounts of chemicals, similar to those used in the London bombings.

After their court appearance there was more drama. Five of their associates viciously beat up a cameraman, Matt Rose - a bashing which was broadcast around the country last night.

One of the Melbourne plotters, Abdulle Merhi, is reported to have been desperate to become Australia’s first suicide bomber. Other members of the group were worried that his rants about infidels and beheadings might alert people to their activities.

A lot of hard things were said back in those turkey-shoot days of Operation Desert Storm, when the fateful decision was taken to cease fire and let the southern Iraqi people rise up and deal with a supposedly weakened Saddam.  The ODS forces were not an army of occupation anyway.  Who today would argue that the cautious voices of 1991 were wrong?

This time round, of course, it was going to be entirely different.  An allied army of liberation - not occupation - would be greeted everywhere with sweets, music and flowers.

Two and half years and tens of thousands of lives after those seminal pictures of Saddam’s statue toppling in Baghdad flashed around the world and the music and flowers seemed a genuine possibility, we are at last told by the military how much longer “liberation” will take.

WASHINGTON - It will take up to two years for the Iraqi army to have the military leadership and supplies it needs to operate on its own, the commander of U.S. forces in Baghdad said Friday.

READ MORE...

YouGov has conducted a very revealing poll of British Moslems for the Telegraph.

The vast majority of British Muslims condemn the London bombings but a substantial minority are clearly alienated from modern British society and some are prepared to justify terrorist acts.

The divisions within the Muslim community go deep. Muslims are divided over the morality of the London bombings, over the extent of their loyalty to this country and over how Muslims should respond to recent events.

READ MORE...

CNN reports from Cairo:-

The father of one of the hijackers who commandeered the first plane that crashed into the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, praised the recent terror attacks in London and said many more would follow.

Speaking to CNN producer Ayman Mohyeldin Tuesday in his apartment in the upper-middle-class Cairo suburb of Giza, Mohamed el-Amir said he would like to see more attacks like the July 7 bombings of three London subway trains and a bus that killed 52 people, plus the four bombers.

READ MORE...

I don’t often travel to London these days.  I can’t feel the same for the place as I did in my childhood.  But it happened that last Thursday I was required to catch the 8.20 from Lewes to Victoria.  The previous evening a Portugeuse client had flown in to London to meet with me next day at 10.00am in a Bayswater hotel.  These guys pay the piper.  So a trip to town could not be avoided.

Actually, it was a pleasant enough journey - quiet carriage, no twenty stone slab of lard sitting next to me.  The rush hour was mostly past.  The train didn’t fill until it reached multicultural East Croydon.  It got in to Victoria shortly before 9.30am.

The next two hours of my life were spent going nowhere very fast and being dragged to the inevitable conclusion that my Portugeuse client would have to lunch alone.  I learned from the station tannoy that the Underground was closed due to “incidents”.  Other travellers, no less frustrated than I, had come into possession of the knowledge that somewhere a bus had been bombed.  Then the tannoy confirmed it.  Bus services were also suspended.  Outside the station, London’s amazingly ubiquitous black cabs had become as rare as hens’ teeth.  My mobile phone did not function.  I assumed that weight of call traffic was the cause (only later did I learn that the system was switched off for fear of remote detonation of terrorist bombs).

It was time to get out of town.

READ MORE...