| Still On Track In Basra By Des Browne and David Miliband (Des Browne is defense secretary and David Miliband is foreign secretary of the United Kingdom.) Recent weeks have brought a lot of misplaced criticism of the United Kingdom's role in southern Iraq. It is time to set the record straight. The question some people have asked is: Have British forces failed in Basra? The answer is no. |
What's that, sir? Can't you take NO for an answer? Why should it matter just exactly what sort of Success and Victory laurels the official brows of Airstrip One? Yet if you insist,
| Following the overthrow of Saddam Hussein's regime, the international community recognized, through a series of U.N. Security Council resolutions, the need to help the Iraqi people forge a better future for themselves. [1] The people of all coalition countries know the sacrifices involved on the part of our brave armed forces. The United States, Britain and other countries that made up the U.N.-mandated multinational force in Iraq undertook to help provide security while a representative national government was elected, under a new, democratic constitution. We pledged to help Iraqis develop a functioning state, with armed forces, police and other institutions capable of delivering security for the people. We also promised that, when we had done that, we would promptly hand over full responsibility for security to the legitimate, elected Iraqi authorities. Much has been written in recent weeks about conditions in the south, and in particular the significant challenges Basra still faces. These challenges are real, wide-ranging and deep-seated. U.K. troops have continued to provide overall security and maintain the capability to strike against the militias. We continue to play a key role in southern Iraq, contributing to securing supply routes to Baghdad, training and mentoring Iraqi security forces, and building the capacity of the Iraqi border force. In particular, we have trained an Iraqi army division (more than 13,000 men) that is increasingly capable and has this year made an important contribution to the drive to improve security. The U.K.-led provincial reconstruction team in Basra has helped build the capacity of the provincial council to govern effectively.[2] We have helped repair critical infrastructure and generate employment, including the regeneration of the historically palm-based agricultural industry.[3] Commanders on the ground expect that Basra province will in months, not years, be judged to have met the conditions for transfer to full Iraqi security control. As with each of the seven Iraqi provinces already transferred -- four in areas of Iraq previously controlled by U.S.-led forces, three in the south in the U.K.-led area of operations -- the final decision will be taken by the Iraqi government, in consultation with the U.S. commander of the multinational force, based on the conditions on the ground. Decades of misrule, deliberate neglect and violent oppression under Saddam Hussein have left a legacy of political, social and economic problems that will take many years of patient effort to overcome. There is no anti-government insurgency, and very little evidence of an al-Qaeda presence in southern Iraq, whose population is over 90 percent Shiite. But there is intense political competition between longstanding rival Shiite movements, too often spilling over into violence. To recognize that such challenges remain is not to accept that our mission in southern Iraq is failing. Our goal was to bring Iraqi forces and institutions to a level where they could take on responsibility for their communities. It could not create in four years in Iraq the democracy, governance and security that it took Great Britain and the United States centuries to establish. That is a long-term task for the whole international community. In those southern provinces already transferred to Iraqi control, the political and security authorities have responded robustly to recent intimidation and violence. They have grown in stature and confidence in a way that was impossible while we retained control. We believe we remain on track to complete the return of full sovereignty to the Iraqi people as planned.[4] The United Kingdom is sticking to the mission we took on four years ago. But our commitment to Iraq will not end when our troop movements and the transfer of security control in Basra are complete. The international community will need to maintain its support of Iraq for a long time to come, even if the form of that support will evolve over time. Prime Minister Gordon Brown has said we will fulfill our obligations to the Iraqi people and to the international community. But while outsiders can support, advise and encourage, only Iraqi leaders can make the political decisions and compromises essential to the future of their country. Courageous Iraqi leadership is critical, and it is now needed urgently to shore up the hard-won achievements of the past four years. The gains secured with enormous sacrifice by U.S., British and other coalition allies, and, most of all, by the people of Iraq, will be at risk if such leadership is not forthcoming. We urge Iraq's political leaders to take the necessary steps. |
The redcoat weasels don't quite say it, but the sentence emboldened is no doubt what they fancy their homeland's Success and Victory to consist in: "Iraqi forces and institutions" have now been brought "to a level where they could take on responsibility for their communities." Poor M. al-Málikí could do all the rest at this point, and of course it is not their department whether he actually does pull it off or not. To insist on anything more than "could" would infringe on the Full Sovereignty of Peaceful Freedumbia, would it not? Why, of course it would! [5]
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It's perhaps a waste of breath to criticize such a scribble in the abstract or from Princess Posterity's point of view, yet considered as agitprop, its target audience is anything but clear. The Big Management Party stumbebums down at the ranch are not goin'ta like it, surely, and neither are run-of-the-mill liberal customers of the Washington Post. If the point was to recommend that nifty "could" ploy to their Yank co-conspirators against Peace and Stability and Rulalaw, M&B are headed straight for nowhere.
Yet so are they equally if the point was to lure some of us donkeys in America towards the Responsible Nonwithdrawal™ product. Responsibly or not, they certainly do seem to mean a real, not a virtual, withdrawal of all their redcoats. At this point the garden path towards Responsible Nonwithdrawal™ plainly leads through making the former Iraq out worse than it seems, not better. Why, even Little Brother himself has finally noticed as much! M&B are totally out of whack with the current Boy-'n'-Party line: they oughtabe spinin' us gaudy Tom Cruise tales of genocide just around the corner, not handing out aspirin like "There is no anti-government insurgency, and very little evidence of an al-Qaeda presence in southern Iraq" when 'tis a brain tumour the patient suffers from.
Can there be a domestic Sassenach market not only for the tripe and baloney as such, but for the tripe and baloney as published in Greater Texas, Mr. Bones? Are the weasels setting themselves (and Mr. Brown) up to pretend to Airstrip One that they really did try to make George XLIII see the light and go for the "could" ploy? Could they actually be so weak in their Crawfordology as not so see the antecedent hopelessness of making such a sale as that? If Tony Blair couldn't influence the Rove Empire People at the margin, how should wimps like Milibrand and Browne seriously expect to turn them around completely?
But God knows best what they expect.
____
[1] Even minus Mr. Blair, they're still doing business at the same old sub-Orwellian stand, notice, whereas our own Boy-'n'-Party perps have long since forgotten their first six or eight accounts of why their hormones made them do it.
It's easy to be cynical, Mr. Bones, and suggest that a specious pretence of caring about Rulalaw is more useful to fourteen-pound poodles than to eight-hundred-pound gorillas. We, however, are not really entitled to rely on that line of attack, having adopted the maxim that everybody in politics should be assumed to be sincere until evidence to the contrary becomes overwhelming. Still, after we stipulate that the redcoat gentry devoutly believe all their own (or their Tony's) tripe and baloney, the quality of the product believed in is not thereby improved in the slightest.
Indeed, should one stipulate, conterfactually, that Mr. Blair had an objective right to aggress in March 2003 as well a subjectively sincere disposition to aggress, his epigones would be pushing de gustibus very hard to maintain that the state of Basra in September 2007 constitutes Success and Victory for Hope and Glory simply because it was all perfectly legal.
Yet they really do care about pretending to Rulalaw, the Brit thug classes do, even when they are scribbling in the Daily Torygraph under a headline like "Army chief attacks US over Iraq":
| Sir Mike [Jackson] says he satisfied himself on the legality of invading Iraq by careful study of the relevant UN Security Council resolutions and concluded that action was "legitimate under international law without a 'second' resolution. "Having had some part to play in putting Slobodan Milosevic into a cell in The Hague, I had no wish to be his next-door neighbour." |
(So that's all right, then, and the cap-pulling peasantry need not worry their little heads over it!)
This must be the traditionally famous hypocrisy of perfidious Albion, Mr. Bones, slightly revised and updated to suit modern times. It is a stuggle for Paddy and me to acquire a taste for it, I fear, and not instantly consider the carefree Serbian or militant GOP supralegalist attitude obviously superior.
[2] Looks a bit like capax imperii nisi imperasset to some of us jaundiced.
[3] This one may be a flat-out fib, Mr. Bones, although the invasion-language press has shown close to zero interest in agriculture or landownership in the former Iraq. Still, didn't we read somewhere a couple months ago that invasion-based democracy coincides chronologically with the death of 75% of the date palm trees?
More important is the colonial economics that these two weasels don't mention, that of petroleum. The newspapers of the WASP God Folk do pay some attention to that, oddly enough, so perhaps they wisely decided to say nothing about it rather than fudge shamelessly.
[4] Hasn't "full sovereignty" already been graciously returned to "our" neo-Iraqi subjects half a dozen times already? Without questioning the sincerity of official Brit weaseldom for a moment, one may wish that that they'd think their claptrap through in advance and try to make it internally self-consistent. If they really think of poor M. al-Málikí's quasigovernment in strictly de jure terms, their scribble should have been much shorter. Those date palms have no bearing on "full sovereignty," and for that matter, neither does "intense political competition ... too often spilling over into violence," technically speaking.
True, the logical consequence of the dogma of Preëmptive Retaliation, as officially acquiesced in by Airstrip One, is that nobody but the militant extremist Republicans actually possesses "full sovereignty" anymore. Not even fourteen-pound poodles. If neocomrades D. Miliband and D. Browne are seriously interested in reviving Full Sovereignty, they would do better to work on Mr. Gordon Brown than on poor M. al-Málikí. The United Kingdom is a third-rate power rather than a fifth- or sixth-rater like the Iraq of Saddam, so at least there would some remote prospect of success for such a project.
[5] Naturally that's a bit of a declaptrapification, one arrived at by missing out all the yimmer-yammer about the international community, to whom the weasels of Blair in some sense wish to pass on the Torch of Aggression here at the end of Airstrip One's own preappointed lap around the track. This is not going to happen, and I daresay they know as much, yet verbally they can use the same handy-dandy nonsolution: China and Peru could do collectively all the wunnerful neocolonial things that Crawford and Westminister have so egregiously failed to do unilaterally and with supralegal vigilantism. It certainly won't be the fault of Messrs. Browne and Milibrand if Beijing and Lima and the rest don't pull their weight properly!
(This is only verbally consistent, not substantially consistent, with the main B&M claptrap because if, by some all but impossible fluke, the international community actually did pick up the Torch of Aggression and run with it, poor M. al-Málikí's "full sovereignty" would be as badly impaired as ever, and perhaps even more so.)
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