The toothless British lion
By Melanie Phillips on Diary
There is only one word to describe Gordon Brown's announcement about troop withdrawals from Iraq, setting the stage for a complete withdrawal of all British troops from Iraq by the end of next year. Shameful.
It's no use hiding behind the mantra that it was always agreed that British troops would depart once the Iraqis were able to maintain order in Basra by themselves. And it's no use saying that the situation in Basra has greatly improved. So it has, as in the rest of Iraq — a fact that is scarcely being reported in Britain, incidentally, where the wholly ignorant, indeed brainwashed on dit is that Iraq is an unmitigated disaster. But untrue as that undoubtedly is, and significant as the improvements are, the whole thing is fragile, to say the least. It is quite likely that the security situation in the south could deteriorate badly once again and the Iraqis would be unable to cope — and then there would be no British soldiers to rescue the situation.
As Con Coughlin writes in today's Telegraph:
"The relative calm that has descended on Basra has been greatly helped by the recent decision by Moqtada al-Sadr, the leader of Iraq's most militant Shia militia, to call a ceasefire. Peace talks between the main Shia factions also appear to have made good progress at persuading the rejectionist groups to support the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.Even so, half of a half-trained, ill-equipped Iraqi division and a corrupt local police force is hardly likely to contain a serious eruption of violence in Basra if this fragile reconciliation process were suddenly to collapse.
This is the reason why there are still four British battle groups ready to deploy at a moment's notice if Iraqi government forces find themselves being overwhelmed, and most estimates suggest it will take at least a year of training before those forces are fully capable of dealing with every security contingency.But in his haste to distance himself from a conflict that is so closely associated with his predecessor, Mr Brown is not prepared to wait that long. He now risks ordering a premature reduction in British troops before the Iraqis are fully capable of filling the security void."
Brown is responding to the unprecedented anti-American hysteria that has gripped Britain across the political spectrum — fuelled by a media campaign against the war in Iraq in which truth and objectivity have been almost wholly absent. As a result, Britain simply does not understand what is at stake in Iraq and what our soldiers there are fighting for. Those who leap upon every bomb atrocity and every military or political setback there to claim that things are bad and getting worse and therefore the whole enterprise is doomed — and that in any event things weren't half as bad before the war started — seem quite oblivious to what war entails.
While a war is raging — amazing to relate — people get killed. If the enemy fights very hard, very large numbers of people unfortunately get killed. The response is not to say: 'Goodness me, this isn't what we thought war was like; it's far too dangerous for us to stay' but to redouble the effort until the enemy is defeated. Otherwise, the enemy will defeat you. During a war, mistakes are routinely made in military strategy. The response is not to denounce your own side for those mistakes — indeed, in a saner age that would have been considered treachery because it would only strengthen the enemy and demoralise your troops — but to learn from them and press on. Otherwise, you might as well wave a white flag.
Britain, which once exported military prowess to the rest of the world, appears to have forgotten these blindingly obvious facts. Instead of realising that the more ferocious the war becomes against those working for a free and stable Iraq, the more that shows how important it is for the jihadis to prevent such an outcome because a free and stable Iraq would blow a hole in their entire project of regional domination and so the more vital it is for us that they are defeated, Britain views every atrocity on a scale of defeatism ranging from 'pointless and avoidable carnage' to 'all our own fault'.
That is because of the madness of a Britain which has rewritten history in the face of all the evidence to say that Saddam was never a danger to anyone outside Iraq, that the British were lied to about the threat he posed and that we shouldn't have got rid of him in the first place — and now tells itself in addition the staggering lie that 'we' are killing thousands of Iraqis, whereas this is in fact a savage regional war in which Iraqis are being killed by other Iraqis assisted by Iran, Syria and others from the Arab and Muslim world in a desperate struggle to strangle a free Iraq at birth in order to control the region and hold the free world to ransom.
This kind of fight can only be won if those fighting to defeat evil give an unambiguous message that they are in it for the long haul. Britain of all countries should know that. It took four years for Britain to work out the right strategy to counter the insurgency in Malaya, and a further eight years after that actually to put it down. Instead, Britain is now preparing to cut and run from Iraq. And now it seems that Gordon Brown is not even going to honour the commitment he apparently made to give sanctuary here to those Iraqi interpreters who risked their lives in helping British troops, making such an offer contingent on various conditions.
The message to America is 'You're on your own' — with untold consequences for the Atlantic alliance. The message to Iraq is: 'We will betray you'. The message to the Islamists is: 'We are yours for the taking'.
Where is our Churchill? |
