Articles with the Tag War on Iraq

Excuses, excuses

War on Iraq
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It was entirely predictable that when the news of the looting of the National Museum of Iraq broke, the usual idiots would start making excuses for the coalition’s inaction. Let’s take a look at them.

  • “The liberation of 24 million people is more important than guarding some pottery.“
    It isn’t an either/or question. This socalled “liberation” does not require the destruction of musea.
  • “It was a choice between guarding the museum and guarding the hospitals.“
    They didn’t guard the hospitals either. Nor was Iraq’s main nuclear site.
  • “
    There weren’t enough soldiers to stop the plundering, they were needed to deal with the last strongholds.
    “
    But there were enough to guard the ministry of oil, the ministry of interior and irrigation.
  • “We didn’t know this would happen.“
    Au contraire. There were plenty of warnings. Even if there hadn’t been any warnings, anybody with half a brain should’ve realised that looting would followed the fall of Saddam’s regime, as surely as night follows day and planned for it.
  • “
    Why aren’t you condemming the looters? It’s not the coalition’s fault they started plundering!
    “
    The British encouraged looting
    in Bashra    . Neither they nor the Americans did anything to stop the looting before it was far too
    late, even though they were begged to do so. Under the terms of the Geneva Convention, as Robert Fisk
    points out, the coalition has the explicit responsibility to maintain order and prevent pillage. In other words, it is the coalition’s fault this happened. There’s no need to condemn the looters themselves, because all sane persons already agree that looting is bad. (Instapundit, on the other hand…)
  • “Why aren’t you condemming Saddam?” Etc.
    Perhaps because Bagdhad is under control of coalition force and the Ba’ath regime has been overthrown?
  • “A bit of plundering is harmless, it shows that Saddam no longer is in charge.“

    Actually, no. Plundering just means other bastards with guns are stealing the wealth of Iraq.

If you are looking for what archeological finds were lost in this war, an attempt at a comprehensive
survey is available here. It doesn’t
make for pleasant reading.

More on the pillage of Iraq

War on Iraq
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Another troubling aspect of the plundering still going on in Iraq is that lots of vital official documents either will be or have been destroyed in the looting. Which means it becomes that much more difficult to find out the truth about Iraq’s NBC programmes. It also means it becomes harder to root out diehard Ba’athists, but since the party police in Bagdhad is being rehired anyway, this hardly seems like a consideration for Washington…

It’s hard to believe that the plundering wasn’t deliberately encouraged, even more so than the British already admitted to. After all, the more difficult it becomes to piece out the truth about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, the easier it is to accuse Syria of having them…

The warmachine needs to be fed; it would be a shame to have all those troops there and not use them. More and more it seems like the greatest paranoid fears of any sensible person (as well as the fondest wish of the warbloggers) are coming true: Iraq as the stepping stone to further military adventures in the Middle East, ending in total US domination. After Iraq, Syria, after Syria, Iran?

Looting and pillaging

War on Iraq
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Via John Quiggin comes the news that British soldiers were actually encouraging looters:

The British view is that the sight of local youths dismantling the offices and barracks of a regime they used to fear shows they have confidence that Saddam Hussain’s henchmen will not be returning to these towns in southern Iraq.

One senior British officer said: “We believe this sends a powerful message that the old guard is truly finished.”

Armoured units from the Desert Rats stood by and watched earlier this week as scores of excited Iraqis picked clean every floor and every room of the Baath Party headquarters building in Basra after it had been raided by British troops.

Villas owned by the elite, army compounds, air bases and naval ports and even some of the regime’s former torture chambers and jails have been ransacked in the past week.

The results of which are now on view in Baghdad:

Iraqi mobs looted priceless antiquities from Baghdad’s premier cultural history museum on Friday –turning archaeologists’ worst nightmares into stark reality.

A dozen looters roamed undisturbed among broken and overturned statues that littered the ground floor of the sprawling National Museum of Iraq, according to Agence France-Presse. Two men were seen hauling away an ancient door frame. Empty wooden crates were scattered across the floor.

The museum housed more than 100,000 artifacts spanning 8,000 years, including irreplaceable sculptures, inscribed tablets and carved reliefs from a half-dozen cultures, including the Sumerian, Assyrian and Babylonian empires. Upstairs, portions of the museum seemed to have been spared from Friday’s assault, and there was hope that the museum’s 30 senior archaeologists had moved the most important collections to safety before the war.

In the comments to the post Quiggin wrote about this, several people excused the British actions. Because they had only called for the looting of Baath party headquarters and similar remnants of Saddam’s regime, they were supposedly blameless for the more widespread looting that actually occurred. This is wrong in several ways.

Looting, even “symbolic” looting, just is not a good idea. It’s clear what the UK and US tried to do by allowing the toppling of Saddam’s statues, the plundering of Ba’ath offices and army barracks:
recreating what happened in Eastern Europe in 1989 –but Iraq 2003 is nothing like East Germany 1989.
In East Germany, people freed themselves, a spontaneous revolt from below, there wasn’t the chaos of
invasion and the civil authorities were still present and able to keep order. In contrast, Iraq as a functioning state doesn’t exist anymore, there is nobody but the occupying forces to keep order and since they didn’t, things got more out of hand then they bargained for.

But apart from that, even allowing “symbolic” looting was stupid. Plundering the ill gotten gains of the
Ba’ath party faithful doesn’t help the country as a whole; it just means a redistribution of wealth
towards a new group of bastards with guns. What any responsible “liberators” would’ve done is make
sure that Ba’ath party resources would be available to actually help the country, e.g. to help pay for its rebuilding.

Instead, for the sake of symbolism hospitals, universities and musea have been stripped bare of anything valuable, while American and British soldiers looked on. Hey, at least the oil wells have been secured!

On war and protest

War on Iraq
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The first thing we should all remember is that this war was never inevitable, that this is a manufactured crisis, started by a small self proclaimed elite for reasons far different from those we’re told this war is fought for.

This really is the key to understanding the mess we’re in. The people responsible for this know full well that Iraq was not a threat to the US, that there is no link between Saddam and Al Quada, that Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction were largely non-existent by now.

The people responsible for this war certainly don’t care for the Great Liberal Dream of Liberating Iraq. Read your history. Every involvement of the US and the UK with Iraq has been to the detriment of the people of Iraq. There’s no democracy in Iraq because every time it looked like breaking out, either the UK or the US made sure to put it down. The UK did so by starting the tradition of gassing the Iraqi people in the early 1920tiers, while in 1963 the US thought it was really neat to help an obscure political party into power, a small obscure party called Ba’ath. To make sure it stayed in power, the CIA helpfully supplied the names of thousands of communists, socialists and supporters of the previous president Kassem –actually the only Iraqi leader to have come into power without outside help. Incidently, this coup also started Saddam Hussein on his road to power. Way to go.

But if its our mess, shouldn’t we clean it up now, by overthrowing Saddam and making Iraq a democracy? Shouldn’t we support Bush and co in their efforts now to do so, even if this war started under false pretences?

If you believe this, answer me this: why should we trust them to do this? What makes you think Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and even Blair care about the Iraqi people? These are the same people who had no problem supporting Saddam when it was convenient, who had no problem letting their armies kill thousands of Iraqi civilians during the first Gulf War, no problem with installing murderous sanctions against them, letting them continue long past the point where it was clear they were only hurting the Iraqi population, not Saddam, who had no problem with Saddam “gassing his own people”, or even with selling him the same weapons of mass destruction they’re now agonising about.

There’s a lack of historical perspective, a boundless naivity in believing anything good can come from this war I’ve seen in far too many people, both those in favour and those opposed to this war, to which this post is a response. Because of the history the UK and the US have with Iraq, because of the personal history of the principals involved, nothing good will come of this. That’s why even now, especially now you should protest against this war, demand an immediate ceasefire and withdrawal of the troops from Iraq. That way we can still limit the damage that’s being done, the loss of lives.

Don’t let anybody tell you that protests are now useless, because the war has started and we failed to prevent it. That’s as silly as saying that because we failed to prevent the passage of the USA PATRIOT laws, we should now stop protesting it. Of course we don’t.

We need to stay visible, to let the government[s] know this war is still opposed, that we reject what they’re doing, to show others that they’re not alone, there is in fact a large number of people who did not get swept up in the war fever.

We need to make it as difficult, as costly as possible for Bush and Blair to continue this war, we need to fight them every step of the way, or we will be waging war against Iran, North Korea, Syria, Libya, China and France next.

Some thoughts

Antiwar, War on Iraq
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I came back yesterday from a week spent in the UK with S—, which partially explains why I haven’t been blogging… Just too busy doing other stuff –and then Bush’s War finally started, so we became busier still with anti-war protests. Not to mention that I’ve just became depressed with the whole situation and wasn’t really in the mood to blog about it or anything else. See also my rant over at Prog Gold This post is sort of intended to be a catch-all catch-up on the war and all that surrounds us. Don’t expect too much coherence.

So yeah, we spent most of the week helping prepare various anti-war protests in Plymouth, as well as take part in them. For those of you who don’t know Plymouth, it’s a medium sized city (pop: approx. 250,000) in the South West of England and a navvy town of old. There’s a huge navy base and several of the ships and units participating in the war are Plymouth based, e.g. HMS Ocean and 3 Commando. As you may suspect, support for the war is fairly high in Plymouth, though certainly not universal. If anything, people are more apathic than anything else. (Something which seems to be true of Plymouth in general anyway. It’s a very inward looking and provincial town, mainly because it’s so isolated from the rest of Britain. It’s six hours away from London, two hours even from Bristol.)

Since we were both on leave and hence available, it fell to us to do all the really glamourous work needed, like photocopying a zillion different leaflets advertising the national demo last Saturday, calling for union members to strike against the war, etc, etc as well as be warm bodies for the lunchtime protests held in the city centre. A sort of working holiday, so to speak…

lunchtime protest in Plymouth

The lunchtime protests were fun, and the second, on Thursday, drew some 200 people, as well as plenty of media attention, including a spot on the local ITV news as well as various radio stations. I even got to speak to one of them.

There were also evening protests starting from Tuesday, taking place at the Charles Cross roundabout. During World War II Plymouth was heavily blitzed, even worse than London. After the war, the city council finished what the Germans started, the result being one those soulless 1960ties brutalist city centres. The only remainder of the German bombardments are the ruins of Charles Church, which is now in the middle of Charles Cross, turned into a sort of monument. An appropriate place to protest against war, in other words.

evening protest in Plymouth

Doing all this, even if largely futile at least gives a sense of accomplishment. In between, when watching the ever worsening news on BBC or ITV or reading the newspaper was just depressing and angering me. What sickened me the most was not the news of massive bombardments going on in Bagdhad, it was that the reporter bringing it sounded so proud about it…

What also infuriated me was the “support our boys; stop protesting” drivel in every other editorial. It’s such a blatant ploy to stifle dissent. As if getting them killed is so supportive! Especially now criticism is important, as anybody with half a brain knows and if that undermines the moral of “our brave boys” in Iraq, why should we care when we believe they’re fighting an unjust war anyway? The best thing to support the troops is to bring them back home, not to keep them as target practise for bored Americans. (Cheap shot, I know.)

Then there was the stupidity of blaming France for causing this war, which is like blaming me for getting the Cheeky Girls to number one because I didn’t buy their record. there’s only one man to blame for this war and that is Bush, with Blair as his enabler.

Oh, and how about that Clare Short eh? Worst. U-turn. Ever.

Also getting on my tits: all the pious hopes for a “speedy end” to this war. Sure, I don’t particularly want to see a quagmire either, but I don’t think the semblance of a speedy victory (semblance, because I don’t think a speedy victory is actually possible would be a good thing. It would only encourage Bush into more disastrous adventures. So I am conflicted, neither wanting to see more death and destruction, but also wanting to see Bush getting a bloody nose.

In any case I feel sorry for any coalition troops being killed or wounded, but I feel more sorry for any Iraqi civilians or conscripts getting killed; the latter had no choice in this war.