Gosh us Brits are great. Seriously, we really are some of the darn nicest people in the world. Take a look at Iraq for example. In we went without a care for our own safety to make everything better for those poor, downtrodden Iraqi's and now with our mission accomplished we are striding back out again leaving behind a land of daffodils and fairy castles. Yep, we rock.
If only real military 'victories' on the ground in Basra were as easy to conjure
as the sickening propaganda successes we've seen on our television screens over the last few days.
Gordon Brown can spin it anyway he likes, the bottom line is we have left Iraq, and Basra, in a worse state than we found it. And we are leaving our mess behind for them to clear up.
The scale of the chaos we have abandoned them to has been revealed by the Basra Police Chief who told the ITN News ""They left me militia, they left me gangsters, and they left me all the troubles in the world."
He described the breakdown of law and order in Basra with the murder of women for being unIslamic. "They are being killed because they are accused of behaving in an immoral way.Some of them have even been killed with their children because their killer says that they come out of an adulterous relationship."
Not quite the picture that has been painted by the British Government who called the timing of the handover as "appropriate."
The only good to come out of this outrageous debacle is that the right wing militarists have been so thoroughly discredited that they have been forced to accept that we cannot forcibly impose our values on other races or religions.
As for this British Government, it was complicit in over 1 million Iraqi deaths, 4 million refugees, Iraq's society destroyed, the countries infrastructure destroyed, the presence of terrorists where there was none before and a country covered in DU and cluster bombs.
Feel as proud of yourself as you like Mr Brown but don't you dare try and portray this as anything but an unmitigated disaster from start to finish.
Reuters
6 comments:
"Feel as proud of yourself as you like Mr Brown but don't you dare try and portray this as anything but an unmitigated disaster from start to finish."
He is though! Or at least his mouthpieces are... Here's what Major General Binns said yesterday:
"I came to rid Basra of its enemies and I now formally hand Basra back to its friends,"
A commenter to a Times-online thread made the best response to this:
"The Army officer in the article actually means that he initially went to Iraq to install a puppet government, and he has now handed it back to the Iranian controlled militias. Clearly he is a puppet of his political masters in Whitehall. Whichever way one looks at it Britain's 21st century attempt to reintroduce colonialism into its foreign policy has utterly failed. Thank Goodness."
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/iraq/article3060241.ece?CMP=KNC-LBN&HBX_PK=basra&HBX_OU=50
That's a little confusing, Lucy. You seem to be playing for both bands here, or else I've missed a chapter and I'm all confused.
First, Brown seems to be getting the blame for the entirety of England's involvement in the war, when he's the new guy. Of course, I don't know what involvement he may have had before replacing Blair, so perhaps you can clarify that.
Secondly, weren't you all for ending the occupation until this post? It seems that this post echoes the argument - mostly from the right- that the answer to Iraq's ills is a continuation of the same tactics that created them in the first place. What would you prefer done, if not a withdrawal?
I have said a few times Joe that we should not pull out and leave the Iraqi's to their fate, my philosophy has always been we broke it so we should fix it. My Blog archive thing is not showing old blogs past October for some reason so i cannot find the posts i have written to this effect at this moment.
Gordon Brown was second in command to Blair at the start of the War and mentioned on numerous times that he fully supported Blair and would of done the exact same thing. He is not a new guy, he has just stepped sideways in the same way Cheney would do if Bush went before an election.
My irritation with it all is that to pull out and leave Basra in a worse and more dangerous state than we found it, and then to try and declare it as some sort of victory is just wrong on every level.
No prob, if you say you've said it before I believe you.
"my philosophy has always been we broke it so we should fix it."
I can vouch for this too. It's one of the few things that I totally disagree with Lucy about! :-)
"Gordon Brown was second in command to Blair at the start of the War and mentioned on numerous times that he fully supported Blair and would of done the exact same thing."
It may seem slightly rough to pin as much blame on Brown as we did on Blair... particularly bearing in mind that he and all the other MPs only got to see the 'intelligence' after Tony Blair and Alistair Campbell had cooked the books and doctored it all beyond recognition, but... hopefully... this episode will teach Brown (and others) to trust a smarmy sanctimonious pathologically dishonest Prime Minister and his thuggish, paid-liar of a Spin Doctor.
After all, it was fairly obvious to others in the government what was happening... (e.g. Robin Cook being the most notable).
The doctrine of collective responsibility says that if Brown, as a Cabinet member in Her Majesty's government, voted for it, then he's equally as responsible as everyone else who voted for it.
Fair enough. And, as Lucy says, even now he hasn't reappraised the situation (publically).
This just makes me sad. Honestly, these people are suffering because we let the fundamentalists get the power. Now what? A rock and a hard place.
I think of where women were prior to the oil grabbing and I want to hit something. Now they and their children are dying because someone doesn't have enough sense to keep the power out of crazy hands. But we're making progress. Yeah, right.
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