Lenin has many more pictures and links to YouTube footage of yesterday’s Stop the War Demo in London, though from the virtual UK news blackout you’d’ve never known it had happened at all.
War on Iraq
Queen Is Mum
Observer’s Pendennnis column:
Silence rules
The Stop the War coalition, never slow to seize the limelight, has written to Prince Charles and the Queen to ask, now that Prince Harry faces a tour of duty in Iraq, whether they’d like to sign up. So far, peculiarly, they have not received a reply.
Repost: “How Unlike The Home Life Of Our Own Dear PM”
I wrote this post some weeks months ago, when it first looked as though the newly passed-out-from-Sandhurst Prince Harry was likely to be sent to Iraq. Judging by the number of hits from google on the topic we’re getting and the fact it’s buried in the uncategorised archive, I’m republishing it, as I think that what I said then is just as relevant now.
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The UK media is reporting that party nazi, alleged art ‘A ‘level faker and 3rd in line to the throne Prince Harry, who was recently commissioned as an army officer, is to be posted to Basra, Iraq by next May:
Prince Harry preparing to lead troops in Basra
PRINCE Harry is set to go to one of Iraq’s most dangerous areas next year, it emerged today.
Defence sources disclosed that he will be a troop commander and is likely to patrol the hazardous border with Iran.
The third in line to the throne is to join the Army’s 1st Mechanised Brigade which will be deployed in Basra and the surrounding area in May 2007. The prince has told colleagues that he is determined, like his uncle Prince Andrew in the Falklands, to go out on operations and be treated normally.
He does not wish to be kept out of danger and as a Cornet – the equivalent of a second lieutenant – in the Blues and Royals he will be in charge of 11 men and four light tanks.
The Reconnaissance formation will go on ten-day patrols along the lengthy border with Iran.
Defence chiefs will have to devise plans that will ensure his life and those of his troops is not put in any greater danger because of his identity.
Stupid, but gutsy.
Although I consider myself politically a republican, having just spent time with my own potentially army-age sons (who are US citizens and thus potentially liable for any future draft) I can’t help but empathise with 2nd Lt. Wales’ family, as I can as with any other parent or relative whose child is in a war zone, however voluntarily they went there. Once they’re adults, they make their own decisions, no matter how painful it may be : all family can do is wait, watch and worry.
Despite their unwarranted wealth and position the royal family are still human beings and by all accounts the Queen is as fond of her grandsons as any other proud grandmother, which must make Harry’s posting all the more excruciating. Given Her Maj’s exalted position, imagine how tempting it must be to use her power as Commander in Chief to prevent her grandson from being put in direct physical danger. However voluntarily the child undertakes danger no parent ot grandparent would think twice. If you could, with a stroke of a pen, take your offspring out of the path of a bomb or a bullet or a kidnapping, wouldn’t you do it and to hell with any consequences?
But the Queen hasn’t yet and I have to wonder why: is it an attempt at expiation? Seeing the criminally tragic results of the invasion of Iraq on television daily, does she feel guilt? Does she look back on those pre-2003 weekly audiences with Blair and wish she had stopped him? Does she feel terrible for not having done enough to prevent her government from perpetrating this illegal and immoral war – and is she willing to sacrifice a member of her own family to atone for that?
If that’s what’s happening (and I do admit it’s pure speculation on my part ) then despite my deeply-held anti-monarchical views, I’d have to admire the woman. It would mean that she’s aware that for her family’s position she has to pay a price, for all her immense power and wealth; one that’s paid in actual blood. Unlike some other heads of state ( say, President of the United States, to use a serendipitous example), to this monarch at least being Queen appears to mean voluntarily putting your family’s privileged lives on the line for what’s done in your name.
I ‘d love to be a fly on the wall at the next Blair/Queen weekly audience. – will the newly tangoed and relaxed Blair feel any shame at all that not one of his own enlistment-age family – currently living it up on a freebie with Dad at a Bee Gee’s mansion in South Florida – is volunteering to join up?
I think we know the answer to that question.
To Make A Hollow Laughing
Those of us who have been solidly against the war from the beginning, with our slogans of ‘Bring The Troops Home Now’, Not In My Name’ and ‘No Blood For Oil’ should be ecstatic -shouldn’t we?
Shouldn’t we be cheering, shouldn’t we be happy, that it’s been anounced that British troops will be completely withdrawn from Iraq between now and the end of 2008? Haven’t we finally got what we wanted?
Hardly.
There’s the thousands upon thousands who’ve been jailed, murdered, maimed, tortured, bombed or otherwise destroyed, there’re millions of refugees on the move, a nuclear standoff with Iran and the Middle East on the verge of total regional conflagration. That’s just for a start – then there’s the broken British Army, politicised, demoralised and damaged – oh yes and then there’s the fact that our country will be forever associated with the extralegal atrocities of Bush and his corporate military goons. There’s those things.
And then there’s the fact that we sent naive, ill-equipped teenagers, who thought they’d joined up to defend their country, to almost certain death in the full knowledge that this illegal, war of aggression was being pursued simply to secure US corporate dominance over world oil markets. We turned those young people into de facto mercenaries, killers for Halliburton, Exxon and the American way.
I say ‘we’ particularly because it
Happy? Don’t make me laugh..
Everyday reality of Iraq
Inside Iraq has a post up about what the aftermath of one of those suicide bombings we hear about on the news and then forget within five minutes is like for the family of somebody killed in it:
We were asked to send the next of kin to whom the remains of my nephew, killed on Monday in a horrific explosion downtown, can be handed over. The young men of the family, as was customary, rose to go.
“NO!” cried his mother. “Isn’t my son enough?? Must we lose more of our youth?? You know there are unknowns who wait at the Morgue to either kill or kidnap the men who dare reach its doors. I will go.”
So we went, his mum, his other aunt and I.
I was praying all the way there.
I never thought a day would come when it was the women of the family, who would be safer on the roads. All the men are potential terrorists it seems, and are therefore to be cut down on sight. This is the logic of today, is it not? To kill evil before it even has a chance to take root.
When we got there, we were given his remains. And remains they were. From the waist down was all they could give us. “We identified him by the cell phone in his pants’ pocket. If you want the rest, you will just have to look for yourselves. We don’t know what he looks like.”
Now begins a horror that surpasses anything I could have possibly envisioned .We were led away, and before long a foul stench clogged my nose and I retched. With no more warning we came to a clearing that was probably an inside garden at one time; all round it were patios and rooms with large-pane windows to catch the evening breeze Baghdad is renowned for. But now it had become a slaughterhouse, only instead of cattle, all around were human bodies. On this side; complete bodies; on that side halves; and EVERYWHERE body parts.
We were asked what we were looking for, “ upper half” replied my companion, for I was rendered speechless. “Over there”. We looked for our boy’s broken body between tens of other boys’ remains’; with our bare hands sifting them and turning them.
We found him millennia later, took both parts home, and began the mourning ceremony.
Can Hollywood match our reality?? I doubt it.
I had to quote the whole post, as cutting it off at any one point would not get through the sheer horror of it.