Rant Number 405985
I’ve been itching since I wrote previously to discuss this whole Iraqi civilian torture photo thing but I’m not quite sure what to say exactly so I’m just going to start and see where it takes me…
The photo’s of British troops beating and pissing on Iraqi Civillians are most probably fakes if you believe the wide variety of ‘experts’ that have come out to condemn them. However, there is real concern about what these photos actually represent in REAL terms
Firstly, the Mirror tells us that the photos were taken by british soldiers who served (they don’t say if they still serve with) the British Army in Iraq which raises two important questions. If they are, and the scenes depicted completely made up , then why have they felt it necessary to do so? and secondly if the photo’s are fake but the scenes based in fact why did the soldiers not first report it to the military police or follow the formal chain of command? The rumour that they have both been paid £10000 for their stories may go some way to explaining both these things i.e they get more money if the stories have more impact with photographic ‘evidence’ and then if the allegations are true they would know their identities would not remain a secret for long so why not make a bit of cash on the side and only then tell the Military police everything?
Secondly, the impact of these photo’s real or otherwise on the reputation of the British army. We as Brits have a strong tradition of military excellence and should rightly be proud of the skill of our armed forces - but we often forget that the British past isn’t as nice and ‘honorable’ as we often like to pretend or imagine. British troops have participated in a wide variety of attrocities over the last hundred years - from British murder and rape of Indian civilians to more recent collusion with loyalist terrorists in Northern Ireland., or the 650 Kenyan women who are currently taking the British Army to court after allegedly being raped by British Soldiers. Attrocities happen in war, they are sadly to be expected and when they do their perpetrators should rightly, feel the full weight of the law upon them; are these current allegations true - we can’t know for certain; will there be more allegations of British attrocities - almost certainly; and I will gaurantee you that some of those allegations will be true…
Thirdly, there comes the Question that Andrew Neil asked on ‘This Week’ tonight…if those who supported the war last year (as I did) knew that a) there would be no chemical weapons stock piles found after over a year of the army being in iraq, b) that the Coalition lacked any reall plan about the post war reconstruction of Iraq or c) that Iraq Civillians would be being tortured and brutalised by US troops (and possibly British troops as well) whould we still have been for the war?
For me I would have to say yes. Firstly, chemical weapons were not the reason we went to war, we went to war because Iraq was in breach of UN resolution 1441, and although I , like the intelligence agencies of every western government (including those opposed to the war) believed that Iraq still had a significant chemical weapons capability, for me it wasn’t what drove me to believe that war was probably the only outcome we could have had. I felt, and still do feel that we stood back behind the political rhetoric of sanctions and UN security council resolutions whilst the Iraq government openly abused, murdered and tortured its citizens - and as I have said before I do not believe that our own political self interest should be the only thing that takes us to war - I believe and I know many people will disagree with me, that war can be morally the better option to sitting by and watching the murder, starvation or oppression of civillians by a regimes.
I do however feel let down by the US and British governments by the complete lack of planning for the reconstruction of Iraq - I’m not sure how it could have been differently, perhaps by having more political control rather than leaving it all up to the army, perhaps by folowing the Soviet example for when they marched into Germany and kept the majority of the German civil servants ,police and even Gestapo in place and thus facilitating a smoother transition of regimes, certainly by less dependancy on non-governmental organisations for the delivery of humanitarian aid - because as we’ve seen in Iraq and Vietnam before it, the NGO’s become targets for groups wishing to help further separate the people from help and thus increasing their own power base.
Its been a difficult time for those who have supported the war. I’ve felt myself questioning whether or not we did the right thing in going to war…To quote that great american president Harrison Ford “Real peace is not just the absence of conflict, but the presence of justice” and I do believe that by freeing the Iraqi people from the oppression of Saddam Hussiens regime although, leading to this temporary turbulance and turmoil within Iraq, we do have a real opportunity for lasting peace and stability.
I just pray that history proves me right….and that Bush loses the next election….but thats another story.