Majorityrights Central > Category: War on Terror

A reposting is required, I’m afraid.  My facts were wrong last time and the NYT article was from exactly a year ago.  I’m done cussing at myself, so you’ll just have to imagine that part as vividly as possible.  The question remains, however, as to why this story is still so very elusive, ie avoided by the usual suspects.  Ian Bruce, the journalist, has posted it at the Glasgow Herald, as mentioned below, and at Mathaba.net - and that’s it, it seems.  Where is the mysterious Pentagon report?  Is it merely Bruce’s treatment of the report that is out of the ordinary and unrepeated elsewhere?

Anyway, here goes a second time ...

Bo Sears sent me a link to this article from the Glasgow Herald.  It’s a week old now - and was, therefore, published one day after the 3,000th American casualty in Iraq.  It draws on an apparently secret Pentagon study.

As its headline indicates, the article reveals that the bulk of the casualties are young, white soldiers from “rural, farming communities scattered from backwoods Louisiana to Ohio and the Great Plains states of Dakota and Wyoming.” Since the main killer is the perfectly indiscriminate roadside bomb it is fair to assume that the victims are a representative sample of American forces in Iraq, and fair also to extrapolate from that a picture of the kind of young man who believes in the myth of America enough to take up arms.  It is equally fair to conclude that other ethnicities are, in the round, correspondingly less patriotic.

Let it be said, they are less susceptible to their President’s betrayal, too - no bad thing.  But the ethnicity of American patriotism revealed so starkly by a newspaper published, of all places, in Scotland is obviously significant and obviously sensitive.

This weekend saw much commemoration of the Battle of the Somme.  It is ninety years since the artillery fell silent, that first whistle blew and, bayonets fixed, the men went over the top.

I can’t deny that military action holds a fascination for me.  I would be surprised if any man of my generation has not wondered whether he had it in him to do what his grandfather and, twenty-five years later, his father did.

Some of our sons are answering that question for us today.  This weekend also saw the latest deaths of British servicemen fighting the War on Terror - in a fire-fight at Sangin in Afghanistan.

Take some time to read this account of an otherwise unreported firefight that took place at the precise same moment.  Forty-eight soldiers of C Company of the 3rd Battalion of the Parachute Regiment - with an attachment of airborne troops from the Royal Irish Rangers – fought off a very determined “bunch of Afghans in rubber sandals.”

Excitement aside, the account made me wonder whether the lightly-equipped, friendship-toting British Army has any utility in Helmand.  If it isn’t there to occupy the area in the conventional, lock-down sense, and if it can’t possibly win the goodwill of the people, what is its mission?  The Times’ correspondent, Christina Lamb, doesn’t venture much on the matter, but gives us this:-

I thought about John Reid, the former defence secretary, glibly saying he hoped to complete the three-year British mission to Helmand without a shot being fired.  If this wasn’t a fourth Anglo-Afghan war, it felt very much like it.

Why were we there?  Why had we thought the Afghans wouldn’t fight - they defeated the Russians after all.  And why did everyone in Kabul and London keep insisting that nobody in Helmand really wanted to support the Taliban but were being forced to?

What if they were wrong?  After all, almost everyone in the province now depends on growing poppies.  Whatever the British commanders might say, villagers must see the presence of British troops as threatening the opium trade.

Of course, the operation in Helmand is not at all concerned with poppy cultivation.  It studiously avoids all such inflamatory considerations.  It is a peacekeeping initiative under NATO control (NATO having taken over strategic coordination of the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan in the summer of 2003).  NATO’s brief is to facilitate the Afghan government’s “ownership of and, eventually, full control and responsibility for” the country.  So, is order imposed from Kabul an objective which the villagers of Helmand would welcome, surviving as they are principally off the narcotics trade?  We would be living in a very strange logical universe if it was.

In a sense wider than just utility, then, I find myself brought back to Christina Lamb’s existential bastardisation, “Why were we there?”  On what basis does NATO, an agent of the elevated and far-distant “international community”, justify its intervention?  And does it lend any real moral legitimacy?

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The official inquiry into the 7 July London bombings will say the attack was planned on a shoestring budget from information on the internet, that there was no ‘fifth-bomber’ and no direct support from al-Qaeda, although two of the bombers had visited Pakistan.

The first forensic account of the atrocity that claimed the lives of 52 people, which will be published in the next few weeks, will say that attacks were the product of a ‘simple and inexpensive’ plot hatched by four British suicide bombers bent on martyrdom.

Far from being the work of an international terror network, as originally suspected, the attack was carried out by four men who had scoured terror sites on the internet. Their knapsack bombs cost only a few hundred pounds, according to the first completed draft of the government’s definitive report into the blasts.

Mark Towsnend, writing in The Observer today.

So these well-adjusted, Westernised young men, all born in Britain and led by a married thirty-year old special-needs teacher, were entirely self-motivated and self-trained.  There was no AQ hand at work.  There was no international flow of funds.  There was no connection to the wider world of Islamic terror at all other than via a few “How To” websites and a rant by Ayman al-Zawahiri, which someone tacked on to Mohammad Sidique Khan’s video broadcast by Al-Jazeera.

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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.

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... 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.”

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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.

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