Britain in Iraq; Iraq in Britain
LEVEL PLAYING FIELD
The Hindu, 15 July
The British government response to the failed terrorist actions in London and Glasgow was markedly more measured than in the past. The “war on terror” rhetoric was toned down, there was no threat of yet another round of anti-terror laws, and greater care in speaking about and to Muslim communities. That’s more than I expected from Gordon Brown, and it’s a relief. But Brown and his government continue to deny reality by insisting that the attacks are on on “our way of life”and have no connection to British policy in Iraq.
Speculating about the mind-set of would-be mass murderers is an uncertain business, and to some extent a diversion from over-arching questions. What we know of those who have been involved in planning or perpetrating such acts in Britain in recent years is that they are diverse in background and in the paths that led them to violence. Some are entirely home-grown, products of British society in every respect; some have spent most of their lives elsewhere. No stereotype fits. Doctors and engineers, students and unemployed, isolated people and well-integrated people, some who’ve lived mainly among non-Muslims and others who have not. This time individuals involved in the bombings had no links to madrassas in Pakistan but did to Rajiv Gandhi University in Bangalore.
Islamism in all its forms combines the religious and political. But all experience of violent Islamism confirms that it is the sharp edge of political grievance that ignites, fuels and determines the targets of the jihad. Britain became a much more politically significant target after its involvement in the Afghanistan and Iraq invasions. If the motor force had been the Islamist indictment of western society in general, then one would expect the terror campaign to range much more widely over Western Europe as a whole
In this case, those who would deny a link with Iraq must conjure with the fact that the man arrested delivering the car bomb was a British-raised Iraqi who had spent the last several years qualifying as a doctor in Baghdad, and had friends who had been killed in the US-led assaults on Fallujah and Ramadi.
Iraq remains a stubborn breach in British public trust which the new Brown administration has done nothing to heal. But the nightmare in Iraq is sensed here as a remote tragedy, a chaos of violence and schism, and the role of occupying troops, including British, is glossed over by the BBC and most of the mainstream press. Deaths of British soldiers (now 158) are reported but there is little real news from Iraq’s various battlegrounds, except for sectarian atrocities in Baghdad and other cities. Of the US-British assaults on “insurgent strongholds” – including the bombardment of densely populated urban areas – almost nothing.
It has not been widely reported in Britain, for example, that on 17 June, in the course of a British operation against Al-Sadr supporters (not Sunni or al-Qaeda) in the city of Amara, an air strike killed eleven civilians and injured 34 others. The planes shelled houses while locals were sleeping on roofs during intense heat. According to residents, cluster bombs were dropped during the attack.
Even the British role in the strategic, oil-rich hub of Basra is scarcely examined. A damning report by the International Crisis Group, entitled “Lessons from Basra”was released at the end of June but largely ignored. It was initially assumed that southern, anti-Saddam, Shia-dominated Iraq would welcome the US-British invasion and that therefore the British had drawn the easier billet. Once it became clear that the populace would not accept the imposition of rule by the pro-US elite groomed in exile, the occupiers, in a turnabout that proved of huge significance, were forced to elevate various Shia parties as the expense of Sunni, Baathist and secular forces, thus promoting competition among armed sectarian groups for resources and power.
In response to rising factional violence, the British launched Operation Sinbad in September 2006. The aim was to rid Basra of the militias, the means (house to house searches, detentions, checkpoints) were predictable, as was the upshot. One British soldier told the press: From “the end of January to March, it was like a siege mentality. We were getting mortared every hour of the day. We were constantly being fired at.” In April, Operation Sinbad was called off. Within weeks, militias returned to the streets. According to the ICG, the 5,500 British troops have been driven by “relentless attacks” into “increasingly secluded compounds”. Meanwhile, British administrators “appear to have given up the idea of establishing a functioning state”.
Of course, Britain is targeted by terrorists not because of the specific actions of British troops in Iraq but as a result of the British government’s role as the US’s pre-eminent military and political ally in the invasion and occupation.
The US’s five month old security “surge” in Baghdad has proved no more effective than Operation Sinbad in Basra. US and allied Iraqi forces control fewer than one-third of Baghdad’s neighbourhoods. Violence has spread to areas which were previously quiet. Meanwhile, increased reliance on air power has generated so much extra traffic that US air bases in Iraq have installed new lighting and control systems to operate on a round-the-clock basis. In one week in March, the Pentagon reported 327 missions – a 50% rise over the previous year, and with it inevitably, escalating civilian casualties.
The death toll as a result of invasion and occupation has now reached, in all probability, the one million mark. The John Hopkins mortality study published last year suggests that at least 31% of these died directly at the hands of occupying forces. In Baghdad, they still get only one hour of electricity a day. Economic production is said to be down by 80% from 2003. Deaths of Iraqi children from preventable disease are running at double pre-invasion levels. Violence of all types has left over 4 million displaced, 14% of the Iraqi population.
The occupation has already proved one of the greatest examples of human-inflicted suffering since World War II, and it grows more destructive by the day. In an act of folly, the UN Security Council, which had refused authorisation of the invasion of March 2003, subsequently gave the US-British forces a mandate to govern Iraq; in light of their breaches of international law, attacks on civilians, failure to provide basic services and minimum security, that mandate should now be revoked. Until it is, and US-British forces are made to withdraw, the UN and the international community will be prevented from offering Iraqis the assistance they desperately need.
The Iraq war was not merely a dreadful error committed by lame duck politicians. It is an ongoing atrocity, a crime in the course of being perpetrated. As it is a crime in which the British government is a major culprit, the consequences are likely to continue to be visited on our shores.
