| [p.8] "Like the war in Afghanistan, Iraq is not entirely an internal conflict, and British weakness and failure in the south has both encouraged Shi’ite extremism and partially opened the door to Iran." [p. 16] "The struggle for each major shrine city has become messy and local in the south, and the British defeat in the four provinces in the southeast -- particularly Basra -- has created the equivalent of rival Shi'ite mafias whose religious pretensions in no way means they are not the equivalent of the kind of rival gangs that dominated many American cities during prohibition. Young street thugs wander much of the area, stealing and bullying in the name of God." |
The Redcoat People can still defend themselves verbally , at least:
| [T]he dismal assessment of the security situation in the British-controlled zone was angrily refuted by British officials and military experts. "This bears no resemblance to what we know to be the case," a senior source at the Ministry of Defence said last night. "If Mr Cordesman had actually been to Basra during his visit, he would have seen that the British forces have a lot more control than he suggests. We have never suggested that everything was perfectly peaceful, but this is terribly unfair on the hard work that our armed forces are doing every day." General Sir Tony Walker, a former deputy chief of defence staff, said Cordesman had ignored the progress the British forces had made towards coalition goals in the south. "This man himself has said that the main goal should be to increase the presence of Iraqi forces on their own streets, securing their own borders, and that's exactly what we have done," he said. "We have improved local services and infrastructure, and we have sustained our fair share of casualties in doing so." |
Fas est et ab hoste doceri! The redoat high command have even picked up the fine colonial art of buck-passin':
| [Walker] added: "The Americans wanted to disband the existing security forces and we [1] went along with that. We have suffered terribly since then, because that single move was the most destabilising act in the whole post-war operation." |
Meanwhile, Stupid Party invasionites seem to be having a collective nervous breakdown this morning, both (1) at Baron Rupert's Sunday Times and (2) at the yet-to-be-murdochised Sunday Telegraph :
| (1) British forces in Iraq have done what they can in a deteriorating situation. When first deployed to Basra they tried to win hearts and minds, to display soft power, to be evenhanded and to defend peaceable Iraqi people. As violence has increased they have fought the bad guys hard and have died with courage. It is a mission of which they can be proud. They can do no more now. If, while London and Washington finesse the “optics” of British withdrawal, our soldiers go on dying, it will be a disgrace. Brown cannot afford it. (2) Whitehall sources admit that there is a firm consensus among British military chiefs that maintaining a presence in Iraq after the control of Basra passes to the Iraqis in November is "pointless". But while British generals firmly deny that they have been defeated in southern Iraq, there is also an increasing acceptance that the mission is facing "strategic failure" and that the war is a "lost cause". One senior officer, who has served on operations in Iraq, said: "In terms of intervention operations, the military can never deliver success if the policy is wrong - and in terms of Iraq the policy of intervention was wholly wrong from start to finish." |
For some reason that this Paddy cannot make out, nobody would gather from the less bigoted London press that anything special is going on. Apparently the current level of Brit colonial mischievement is two months old, however, so perhaps the BBC and the Guardian and the Independent have already printed factual stories like this one:
| At the British base in Basra airport, the klaxon means only one thing: incoming rockets. For long seconds the soldiers hug the ground, waiting for the explosion, hoping it won’t be them. “[There’s] no overhead protection,” said one officer in an e-mail. “So if you are unlucky, then nothing is going to save you.” The blast hits and the soldiers dash for concrete bunkers, or anywhere offering more protection than the flimsy tents that are their home. More rockets may be on their way. The base has become a shooting gallery for Iraqi insurgents. British forces are housed in tents, many near the airport tower which is visible from well beyond the heavily defended airport perimeter. Insurgents using 107mm or 120mm rockets, fired from old drainpipes or other makeshift launchpads, simply aim at the tower and hope to cause mayhem in the camp. In the first three years of the base, only 45 attacks using IDFs - indirect fire mortars or rockets - hit the airport. But in the past two months more than 300 have struck. For the 5,000 British personnel on the base it’s a daily dice with death. “With up to 30 attacks some days, people are relying on luck to save them,” said the officer in his e-mail. “Aircraft are having to be evacuated on a regular basis and it’s only a matter of time before one is hit. Helicopters parked on the pan were hit recently.” It’s even more dangerous beyond the perimeter. Convoys have to resupply the only other British outpost left in southern Iraq - the Basra Palace, which lies a few miles south in the city. Some 700 British troops are still holed up there and need food, fuel, ammunition and other equipment. As the convoys run the gauntlet of the city streets, they come under assault on all sides. “Last time we did it the convoy encountered 25 IEDs [improvised explosive devices],” said Lieutenant-Colonel Patrick Sanders of 4 Rifles. “The Jam [the soldiers’ name for the Mahdi Army insurgents] see the trucks form up, they know the routes in, they know the routes out. It’s a f****** nightmare.” |
That dispatch comes from a slave of Murdoch named Michael Smith. One can understand from it why Neocomrade A. Cordesmann preferred not to inspect his "weakness and failure" and "defeat" personally. But since the invasionite thinks in PowerPoint rather than English, what he'd require is less expletive and more quantitative. Let's see . . . how about this?
| The security situation has now deteriorated to such an extent that the beleaguered British force based in the city, which was once heralded as a model for a post-invasion Iraq, seems barely able to protect itself. British troops are now being killed at a proportionally greater rate than their American allies in Baghdad, and barely a day passes without depressing news of yet another casualty. Last week the British death toll rose by four to 168. In the past eight months, 41 have been killed. Such is the level of violence directed at British troops that they now expect to be attacked within 20 minutes of leaving their base in Basra - little wonder that reconstruction has ground to a halt. [2] |
==
Neocomrade A. Cordesmann is bound to be prominent in the upcomin' campaign for Responsible Nonwithdrawal by the CFR/ISG class of policy gentry, and his "trip report" is of considerable interest quite apart from libels and slanders against the Land of Hope and Glory. In fact, the two sentences singled out by me and by the apoplectic redcoat leadership are the only ones in twenty-odd print-packed pages that so much as mention the word "British." (There is, I rear, a certain marginality about all poodledom simply as such.)
In any case, I might have missed this whole major monument of paleface planmongerin' except for the redcoat connection. [3]
Here is the colonial aggressionist's conclusion, for now, since I have yet to actually wade through the whole of "The Tenuous Case for Strategic Patience in Iraq,"
| There is a clear need for sustained Iraq political action and success over the next six to 12 months, and Iraqis need to understand that American strategic patience must be earned by early action in all the areas described above. Without such action, the central government is going to lose its own people, as well as the Congress and American people. Moreover, cosmetic progress and/or legislation that are not followed by real action will not work. |
Two quickies: (1) the honourable and learned neocomrade seems to stress "central government." Has he noticed that Dr. Gen. Petraeus of West Point and Princeton has wandered off at some opportunistic angle from that course?
(2) I believe I detect a faint whiff of buck-passin' in that paragraph. If best comes to best, it may be that Club Aggression's final verdict on kiddy-krusadin' in the former Iraq that Congress and the American people (give or take poor M. al-Málikí or any other indig neorégime) let their betters down.
It will do no harm to hope so, at least, although it would be rash to expect to get what one hopes for. BGKB.
____
[1] I believe that little word is my very favourite pronoun, the first person plural that includes neither the speaker nor the person(s) addressed. Its actual referent is almost certainly the late Mr. Anthony Blair. (The next "we," however, plainly means other ranks redcoats and nobody else.)
As to invasionite Walker's substantive theory, how does it happen that Sultan Jerry disbanded the former régime's army and cops and secret state police in 2003, four years, or almost that, before the Brit collapse? His Sirship could do with some practice in buck-passin', it looks like, although he has the theory of it well under control.
[2] That snippet is admittedly from a Torygraph analysis piece by Sean Rayment and Philip Sherwell, who found one anonymous Major Leaker who seems to think the rest of the invasionite pack even stupider than himself:
| One senior source said: "Whether or not we go back in if it all goes horribly wrong is the strategic question to which neither the US nor the British government has an answer It seems to be lost on the British and American governments that Iraq holds the world's second-largest oil reserves. There is also the nightmare scenario of Iraq becoming an Islamic fundamental state, willing to give succour to groups like al-Qaeda." |
As I said, a nervous breakdown paradigm appears to be applicable. Lord Source can safely be reassured that both Whitehall and Crawford are at least dimly aware of the petroleum angle. Two aspirins and a glass of wine should cure that little problem overnight. NSS, however, Nightmare Scenario Syndrome, is less easy to prescribe for. Naturally Lord Source ought to try to learn a little something about the former Iraq and about the militant extremist GOP so as to become less terrorized of his nightmares, yet if his lordship hasn't done so in the last five years, there is no reason to expect him to start now. Notice, however, that this patient nightmarizes exclusively about M. Bin Ládin and Dr. Zawáhirí and does not even mention the evil Qommies.
As well as an encouraging sign for the individual victim of GOP agitprop, this seems to be typical of Brit aggression fandom more generally. None of today's failure-of-nerve crowd seem a tenth as worried about the mad mullahs as Neocomrade A. Cordesmann is. Perhaps the explanation of this is that the poodle folk of Airstrip One fail to see the symbolic or ideological side of the Kiddie Krusade as clearly as the Crawfordite cowpokers see it. Since they aren't going to be Number One themselves anyway, putting down the insufferable pretensions of Iran seems less urgent to them than worrying about fiends who have actually scratched their skins a little. But God know best.
[3] Perhaps that "tenuous" in the title discourages Wingnut City and Rio Limbaugh from ballyhooin' Neocomrade Cordesmann's "trip report" after the Pollack-O'Hanlon fashion? Perhaps, but more likely they simply haven't heard of it at all. Even if they do learn of it, they might not be very interested, since they can't twistify it for Boy-'n'-Party purposes into "Why, even the New York Times admits . . . ."
NB: the document is labelled "Working Draft: Updated: August 6, 2007," which implies that it has been around in some form for more than a week, and also that the neocomrade is not quite satisfied with it yet. (It would be much more Cordessmanniacal with, say, thirty pages of inscrutable charts and tables appended.)
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