With great fanfare, Britain has now handed over its responsibilities in Basra to Iraqis. Few will reach for their hankies. The overwhelming feeling within the area, according to a BBC poll, is “good riddance” and who can blame them? Locals are reported as feeling a sense of joy and relief.
After all, who in their right minds want foreign soldiers, most barely out of their teens, strutting around their neighborhoods, setting up checkpoints and smashing in doors during the middle of the night? It’s not only frightening but humiliating. It’s a violation that bores deep into a person’s soul and will stay with them forever. We know about the deaths and injuries — or some of them — and we know about the orphans, but nobody’s counting the nightmares.
Those who have the ability to empathize — to stand in the shoes of someone else in one’s imagination — may like to ponder on this. What would you do if your country was bombed and invaded on false pretences, counter to international law? How would you feel if your father had been randomly picked up, hooded, tortured and jailed or your child left without limbs because he had picked up a cluster bomb thinking it was a toy? How would you react if your baby were born with cancer or physical deformities because foreign armies had strewn your land with depleted uranium tank shells?
Wouldn’t you be tempted to tell the invaders “don’t let the door hit you on the way out”?
Britain’s Foreign Secretary David Miliband who attended the handing-over ceremony, admits his country leaves behind no “land of milk and honey”. That’s surely the understatement of the year. Basra today is a violent and lawless place, whose resources are being fought over by three main Shiite militia groups, more powerful and better equipped than the new Iraqi Army and police force put together. Long cleansed of Sunnis and Christians, it’s now fertile soil for religious extremists, who believe they have the right, nay the duty, to murder women for what they call un-Islamic practices, such as walking in public without a head scarf. An Iraqi general says as many as 40 women have been killed in recent months; some together with their children.
I feel a personal sense of shame at my country’s role in turning a functioning — albeit imperfect — country into one of gross dysfunction. They promised a paradise. They promised freedom and democracy. They promised to leave behind a country whose citizens could live without fear of the knock in the night; without fear of torture. Iraq was supposed to be showplace state that nations of this region would be inspired to emulate. Those promises have turned out to be sick jokes.
Britain will leave Iraq minus 174 soldiers who lost their lives fighting windmills with nothing positive to show for its efforts in regards to either Britain or Iraq.
Maj. Gen. Jalil Khalaf, the Iraqi police commander now in charge, sums the situation up with no frills. “They left me militia, they left me gangsters, and they left me all the troubles in the world,” he told the Guardian. He forgot to say “they left me the long arm of Iran”.
The 2003 invasion of Iraq will no doubt enter history books as Blair’s fiasco; a man who was willingly led by the nose into subduing his own country’s interests and reputation in favor of a foreign ally’s. And for such a display of subservience he was recently honored with a bit part in the Bush family “Seasonal Greetings” home video starring presidential pooch Barney.
Gordon Brown doesn’t come out of this unscathed either. He may be keen to exit Iraq and he has certainly done his best to show he’s no President Bush’s man, but we cannot forget that he was No. 2 in the Cabinet when the decisions were made and the spin was spun.
Moreover why does he insist on keeping 4,500 British troops in Basra Airport for the foreseeable future? They are not enough to be an efficient rapid reaction force and they are too many to be kept around for the purposes of training Iraqis? Isn’t it likely the real reason they will remain is to give political cover to the ongoing US presence and to lend credence to the myth of a continued “coalition of the willing”? I wonder how those soldiers would feel if they realized their ongoing presence was nothing more than a PR exercise to make Washington look good. No one knows how many will die for that privilege. It’s even more dismaying that Brown refuses to discount being a participant in any future military action against Iran even though a US intelligence estimate (NIE) states Iran is not pursuing nuclear weapons. Indeed, he is pushing hard for further UN sanctions.
I can’t help thinking of the words of a song by Pete Seeger: “Where have all the flowers gone?” with a chorus that asks time and time again “When will they ever learn? When will they ever learn?” We know the answer. Never!
