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When nature and man conspire to expose the lies of the powerful, the truth will out

by Open-Publishing - Monday 26 September 2005
4 comments

Catastrophes USA Robert Fisk

What we were actually doing in Basra was to turn a blind eye on abuse, murder and anarchy

By Robert Fisk

"Water is your friend" was the advice regularly given to a truly good friend of mine here in the Middle East. The speaker was a member of the One-Thousand- Litres- a-Day-Keeps-Dehydration-at-Bay Brigade, although I have to say that the Arabs take a different view. After generations of sword-like desert heat, they take tea in the morning, endure an oven-like day without sustenance, and then sip another scalding tea at dusk. The less you drink, the less you perspire, the less you need to drink. In a land with few oases, it’s a craft worth learning.

The problem is that today, water is not our "friend". It comes smashing into New Orleans; it drowns the nursing home elderly in their baths; it assaults Galveston and Houston; it kills millions in Bangladesh, dozens in Andhya Pradesh; it floods south from the great ice-cold green bays of the Arctic; it carries 19th-century houses through the centre of Prague, and it bubbles into the bars of English pubs from the ancient, overflowing river-banks of Kent. Water has become our enemy.

There is a beautiful, delicate, inevitably cruel irony at the way in which nature and man conspire to uncover the lies of the rich and powerful. Just as President Bush’s disastrous environmental policies are now destroying the southern coast of the United States—yes, it is global warming that causes this massacre of the innocent—America is preparing to receive its 2,000th dead soldier back from Iraq. No bodies, please—let’s not dishonour the dead of New Orleans by taking photographs of them. Nor the American dead of Iraq by taking pictures of their coffins en route home. Death, as usual, is what happens to other people.

But the photographs of British soldiers, cowled in fire, hurling themselves from the top of their Warrior fighting vehicle in Basra this week, were the final iconic images of our uniquely British folly in Iraq. Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara’s henchmen have concocted another monstrous lie about all this, of course. The Iraqi policemen who protested at Britain’s destruction of their prison—and the crowds who set fire to the Warrior (and its crew) — were only a few hundred people. Who were we to suggest they represented the millions of Shia Muslim voters who solemnly went to the polls last January? Ho, ho, ho. Yes, and who were we to suggest that the "few hundred" Saddam "remnants" identified as troublemakers in mid-2003 represented a Sunni insurgency? And who were we, back in 1971, to suggest that a few hundred stone-throwers in the Falls Road and Short Strand in Belfast represented "the vast majority of ordinary peace- loving Catholics" in Northern Ireland?

I speculated some weeks ago as to when the bubble will burst. With the insurgent capture (and massacre) of a US base in Iraq? With the overrunning of the Green Zone in Baghdad? Every day now brings Vietnam-style evidence of our collapse. The Americans batter their way into Tal Afar and kill, so they say, "142 insurgents". Get that? US forces manage to kill 142 of their enemies, not a single innocent man, woman or child among them!

But let’s go back to the Brits. Remember how we were told that our immense experience of "peace- keeping" in Northern Ireland had allowed us to get on better with the Iraqis in the south than our American cousins further north? I don’t actually remember us doing much "peacekeeping" in Belfast after about 1969—the rest, I recall, was about biffing the IRA—but in any case the myth was burned out on the uniforms of British troops this week.

Indeed, much of the war in Northern Ireland appeared to revolve around the use of covert killings and SAS undercover operatives who blew away IRA men in ambushes. Which does raise the question, doesn’t it, as to just what our two SAS lads were doing cruising around Basra in Arab dress with itsy-bitsy moustaches and guns? Why did no one ask? How many SAS men are in southern Iraq? Why are they there? What are their duties? What weapons do they carry? Whoops! No one asked.

What we were actually doing to "keep the peace" in Basra was to turn a Nelsonian "blind eye" on the abuse, murder and anarchy of Basra since 2003 (including, it turns out, quite a bit of abuse by our very own squaddies). When Christian alcohol sellers were murdered, we remained silent. When ex-Baathists were slaughtered in the streets—including women and their children, a civil war if ever there was one—our British officers somehow forgot to tell the press. Anything to keep our boys out of harm’s way.

But this is what has been happening in Basra. As the locally recruited police force (paid by the occupation authorities) sucked into its ranks the riff-raff of every local militia—as it did in Sunni areas to the north—we ignored this. Even when an American reporter investigating this extraordinary phenomenon was murdered—almost certainly by these same policemen—the British remained silent. We were "controlling" the streets. In Amara—by awful coincidence, the very same Kut al-Amara with whose name, I’m sure, my favourite prime minister will soon be ennobled—British soldiers now operate just one heavily armed convoy patrol a day. That is the extent of our "control" over Amara. Now we are reducing our patrols in Basra. You bet we are.

And a familiar bleat is rising from the sheep pen. "Outside powers" are interfering in southern Iraq. Thirty-five years ago, it was the Irish Republic that was assisting Britain’s IRA enemies. Now it is Iran that is supposedly urging the Shia of Basra to revolt. In other words, it’s not our fault—yet again, it’s the bloody foreigners what’s to blame.

Alas, it is not. Iraqis do not need Iranian weapons or military expertise. Their country is afloat with weapons and they learned how to make bombs—in their millions—during the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war. Half the Iraqi cabinet are linked to Iran—have the British forgotten that their honourable Dawa party government officials in Baghdad worked for the very same Dawa party that blew up the US and French embassies in Kuwait, and tried to kill the emir in the late 1980s? That these same gentlemen belong to a party which was effectively controlling the western hostages in Beirut during this same period?

No. All this is forgotten. Blame Iran. Later, no doubt, we’ll blame those ungrateful Iraqis and then we’ll declare victory and do what Defence Secretary John Reid claims we won’t do: cut and run. And there again, we’re in danger of forgetting the origin of such things. Faced with the imminent destruction of his vessel, a sailing ship captain would cut his anchor or sail ropes to allow his ship to move away from rocks or from being overwhelmed by the waves. Cutting and running was often an eminently sensible thing to do. But not for John Reid. We’re not going to cut and run. We’re going to be blown on to the rocks.

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/article314760.ece

Forum posts

  • Yes, blame Iran. We all know, except for True Believers, that Bush and his neo-con cronies decided even before he took office that it would be desireable to invade Iraq, Iran and Syria, and dominate the entire Middle East. This is part of the published strategy of the NEW WORLD that the Bushites want to dominate, involving preemption, bullying, aggressivity, stealth and deceit. The Bushites have NO moral principle. What they have is a lust for power in all its forms, including wealth and strutting about like conquerors to disguise their cowardice.
    We all know that Cond Rice has been threatening Iran for the past several years, and Bush is just waiting for a good excuse that the Republican senators will buy (and they will buy anything that Bush proposes) to invade, once he has sufficient troops and ammo to bring Shock and Awe, along with his famous brand of Freedom and Democracy, to Iran.
    He is a detestable tyrant, pitiless, without scruple, and willing to murder anyone who gets in the way of his assumption of imperial reign. All the rest: his smiles, smirks, grins, handshakes, pat on the back, intense look, etc. is all window dressing for his stupid crowd of True Believers. In truth, stupidity is on the rise in America, whose gullible people will buy almost any scam.

  • Please stop blaming Global Warming; there just is not enough evidence to demonstrate that any differences in the earth’s temperature (however small it is...also, a heat/humidity index is much more accurate but never done.) is caused by humans. In fact, much research (never published by major media outlets) shows that changes on the earth are due to the Sun. Just look back 3000 years, like independent and non-government funded studies have done, and you will learn that the earth was warmer then it is now.

    The more we blame Global Warming the more we fall into the hands of the same nasty people that cause America’s biggest problem - DEBT. This would be the government puppets that are run by the BIG lobbyists who profit from fiat money. And by the way, a bigger government will not fix imaginary warming problems anyway - accountability does.

    Please do your homework with regards to Global Warming fallacies and teach everyone that the solution is to break up the two party monopolies called the Democrats and Republicans. You can start by reading Michael Crichton’s "State of Fear." Or review this Petition Project on line to learn more from Scientists who have had enough - http://www.oism.org/pproject/s33p36.htm.

    Carl

  • Well, if Robert Fisk says we are turning a blind eye on abuse, murder and anarchy in Basra, then all of us must practically be headless when it comes to Darfur. The people of Darfur are disappearing because they are being murdered by their government and the janjaweed, and yet this has not been a main focus of the bellaciao posters who always screech that they are for the downtrodden. Frankly, the bellaciao posters only take a position when the US is involved in the matter otherwise they could care less. Things like this shows up the average bellaciao poster as anti-american and not a voice for the poor and downtrodden.