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"'It's Madness" - Bastra, the Brits, Iraq

Via NY Transfer News Collective  *  All the News that Doesn't Fit
 
[A very ironic article with some choice views on the British Empire,
Blair, Catholicism, etc. -NYTr]


Global Research, December 22, 2007
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=7671

'It's Madness'.

By Felicity Arbuthnot

If the scale of the unimaginable  tragedy the British have wrought in
Basra was not of the historical enormity which it is and for which the
UK will never be forgotten and likely, never forgiven, world wide (only
second to the Americans, of whose accountability for unspeakable
atrocities, words temporarily fail) with Prime Minister Gordon Brown
again trying to dress up defeat as victory, as the British 'left' the
city last week,  it would be laughable. The British actually slunk off
from their illegally inhabited palace in central Basra in September, to
cower in a base well outside the town, spent, redundant and now with
the loss of one hundred and seventy four tragically wasted lives, for
UK government lies.

Ironically, Iraqi women were photographed throwing sweets at the Iraq
forces on December 16th's Sunday 'handover' of the Iraqi city to
Iraqis. The sweets and flowers promised by  the CIA backed, convicted
embezzler, Ahmed Chalabi and the Iraq National Accord's Iyad Allawi to
the invaders, transpired, absolutely predictably, to be rocket
propelled and hand grenades, improvised explosive devices and ambush by
varied imaginative booby traps and weaponry.

Gordon Brown, of course, again announced a troop draw down on 8th
October this year, after they had (also predictably) lost Basra and
already left. There is something about 'October surprises' that herald
disasters.

An early spectacular British defeat was the Charge of the Light Brigade
on 25th October 1854, an ill conceived maneuver at Balaclava in Russia
during the Crimean war, with the losses leading the Russians to
speculate that the troops must have been drunk to have contemplated
such a move. It was a black day for Commanders and politicians too, the
'Basra' of the Eastern front, an adventure of which French Marshall
Pierre Bosquet commented: 'C'est de la folie' ('it's madness'.)

In context, should anyone doubt the absolute disregard of
parliamentary 'democracies' for the lives of their own citizens, yet
alone other humanities, expendable for oil, gas pipelines, minerals,
metals, gemstones,  one only has to consider yet another October stunt.
On the weekend of  October 18-19, 1980, a former and future CIA head,
met with Iranian officials in Paris. In an act of treason (US private
citizens negotiating with a foreign government without official
authorization) with calculated, cold, callous ruthlessness,  the pair
cut a deal with Ayatollah Khomeini's clerics, to ensure that the fifty
two American hostages held in Tehran, stayed hostage until after the
upcoming election between President Jimmy Carter and Republican
challenger Ronald Reagan. The Americans in question were George Herbert
Walker Bush, the former CIA Director and William Casey, the future one.

    'The Republicans were terrified of an October Surprise--a move by
the Carter government to free the hostages before the vote. So  Bush
(who became) Reagan's vice-presidential candidate--and Casey were
dispatched to Paris to offer the Iranians a covert deal to keep the
Americans in chains until Reagan was safely in office. The proposed
payoff? A newly-elected Reagan-Bush administration would supply
Khomeini's military with a secret supply of American weapons.' ( See:
'Speak Memory', Chris Floyd, Counterpunch, 9th September 2002.)

Another cynically manipulated October occurrence was Iraq's 2002
referendum, where Saddam, predictably, garnered little short of 100% of
the votes, in his favor. The American and British administrations
notched it up as another reason for regime change, these people needed
liberation from questionable vote manipulation. No one should know
better about alleged vote fixing than the Bush administration, from
dimpled chads, to excluded likely Democrat voters, to accusations of
eminently adjustable vote counting machines. In post-invasion Iraq they
turned it in to a murderous art form, with death threats, ration
coupons confiscation and no potentially murderous or otherwise,
manipulation barred, to get their puppet 'government' voted in.

So what October surprises have the British left for the people of
Basra? The ancient, battered, but still heart-wrenchingly beautiful
(B.C., - Before 'Crusade') 'Venice of the Middle East'? They have left
rubble where homes and historic buildings nurtured and were nurtured ,
by successive generations. They have left broken doors, windows and
walls, kicked down or blown in on raids on families sleeping in their
beds. They have left broken hearts and lives.

The have left fundamentalist  militias they either brought in with
them, or against whom they failed to control the borders (and then
blamed the Iraqis.) They have confined women to their homes at best and
to death, often by beheading, for even wearing makeup, at worst.
Britain's finest have returned secular women to the equivalent of the
burkha they were so keen to free them of in Afghanistan (nonsense of
course, it was about strategic interests and a gas pipeline.) 

They have taken a town, where the worst harassment a woman walking
alone, through streets, by the canals, or the beauty of the Shatt Al
Arab would suffer, was small, bare foot boys, selling dates, citrus
fruits, sweets, who stuck like glue until they had beguilingly somehow
persuaded you to buy the whole lot (then they would be back with more.)
The embargo's children, providing for their families, instead of aiming
to be top of the class. Britain and America's victims. 

'I came to rid Basra of its enemies, and I now formally hand Basra back
to its friends,' Britain's Major General Graham Binns said, before
signing documents giving Iraqi forces operational control of the
province, which holds most of Iraqs proven petroleum reserves. Before
Britain's invasion , Basra had few 'enemies', just the sort of policing
issues found in any city. He has handed it, in fact, also to police and
security forces riddled with Basra's enemies. The British being unable
to speak the language, culturally clueless, know not from where their
recruits have come -or if they are even Iraqis at all. They have
'handed back' their rubble and mass graves, in a city bleeding from
lack of essential services, its children seeping away from malnutrition
and lethal diseases resultant from the killer water supply the British
army has left them with.

Seldom has: 'We gave them a wasteland and called it peace', been more
appropriate.

No better example of British depthless floundering , was fellow
speaker, Muwaffaq Al Rubaie, Iraq's 'government security advisor'. 'The
security of Basra is one of our main responsibilities. I address,
directly, the governor, the general commander of the security forces in
Basra, the provincial council and the people of Basra. Will you agree
with militias? Will you engage in corruption? Will you go easy on
terrorism?' Asked Rubaie. Thus under the nose of and with General
Binns, was speaking the man many respected Iraqi and Middle East
experts allege is actually Karim Shaboori, an Iranian, who came in with
the invaders and changed his name and acquired himself an Iraqi
passport to which he has, allegedly, no entitlement. If correct, stones
and glasshouses, again come to mind.

So unphased by the lynching of Iraq's legitimate President and the
horrifying scenes around his body,  Rubaie/Shaboori responded: 'This is
the tradition of the Iraqis - when they do something they dance around
the body and they express their feelings' - a ' tradition' no Iraqi
seems to be aware of. Does General Binns know that Iraqis joke that the
dominant language in the 'Iraqi Ministries' in the Green Zone is Farsi
(and indeed say many Iraqis, in their Embassies abroad , along with
Kurdish, not Arabic.)

The British stole even the myths and legends from Basra. They took the
city known to children world wide, as from where Sinbad left for his
magical journeys and named a killing spree on the population (dressed
in press briefings as a 'security crackdown') as: 'Operation Sinbad'.
They are now illegally inhabiting the airport, of which the city was so
proud, when they had rebuilt it, opening again in 2000. Hope returned.
The British and Americans of course, bombed it, but damage was repaired
within days, to be bombed, repaired again ... Having subsequently
destroyed homes, history, lives, 'our boys' are now again doubles
'restructuring' the airport. 

What else has Britain's illegal invasion and occupation contributed to?
A snapshot : 2.4 million internally displaced; 2.2 million fled (UNHCR)
1.1 million  dead  (Just Foreign Policy) 3 million wounded  ('a
conservative estimate') 4 million in need of emergency aid  (ICRC) 5
million orphans (Iraqi 'government' figures.) As the tireless Dahr
Jamail writes: 'Iraqs population at the time of the US invasion in
March 2003 was roughly 27 million and today it is approximately 23
million. Elementary arithmetic indicates that currently over half the
population of Iraq are either refugees, in need of emergency aid,
wounded, or dead.' Is this genocide, a holocaust, deliberate
de-population, or will the usual suspects just mess around with
semantics? 'What we have done in Iraq, are tears in the fabric of
history', comments Hussein Al Alak of the  (UK) Iraq Solidarity
Campaign.

Basra's dead have been hard to enumerate (but then the British,
historically, were always better at keeping the lid on atrocities for a
while. Not 'Perfidious Albion' for nothing.) However, Iraq 'government'
figures, in a rare glimpse, revealed  in May 2006, that the previous
month, under British Army watch, one person had died violently every
hour. The killing after April 2006, certainly did not miraculously
stop. How many have the British disappeared, how many are still in
British custody, how many have died in British custody - and how many,
in the 'hardback', have been handed over to those who will drill their
heads and chuck them in to the garbage? Figures are, to say the least,
elusive.

There have been a number of kidnappings (including ones the West
noticed, like Margaret Hassan and Ken Bigley. Iraqi ones, shamefully,
rarely are, in their uncountable numbers) where the request has been to
release Iraqi women prisoners (usually held by the occupiers as a
bargaining chip for men in the family - totally illegally.) The word
was that, as the US denied they held any women , they had in fact
transferred them to British custody in Basra. Still, as yet, impossible
to prove or disprove. When I heard the story denied by Anthony Charles
Lyndon Blair QC., however, I thought again of MP George Galloway, who
recounted, as a little boy in Glasgow, running home to tell his Father
excitedly: 'Dad, Dad, my teacher says "the sun will never set on the
British Empire". '

'Aye, son', said his father: 'That's because God would never trust the
British in the dark'.

Meanwhile, Ann Clywd MP (who for years has been dubbed 'Mrs. Talabani'
by many) Blair's formerly silent 'human rights' advisor on Iraq, said
this week that she was 'right to support the war' to rid the country of
brutality. Is she psychologically challenged., or just delusional.?
However, as founder of the CIA funded INDICT (launched in the House of
Parliament) and a close friend of  the embezzler Ahmed Chalabi, who
fed  fairy tales of non-existent weapons of mass destruction  to the
British government, the words culpability and duplicity come to mind
regarding Ms Clywd. 

As  George Orwell (real name : Eric Arthur Blair) spins in his grave,
the other Blair is reinvented as 'Middle East Peace Envoy' and
reiterates he has no regrets. He knows 'it was the right thing to do,'
and 'I'd do the same thing again'. The terminal patients that are Gaza
and Iraq,  the threats to the rest of the region, the misery and
torment heaped on the region's humanity, have taken second place to his
finding time to appear in a Christmas video with Barney, George Bush's
dog, once described as the only sane being in the White House. It
shouldn't happen to a dog. And sorry for the pun, but is - as many have
speculated for a long while - Blair truly 'barking'? 

The joys of Eid Al Adha escaped Basra and Gaza. The Chaldean Bishop of
Basra has 'cancelled' Christmas, as has happened throughout Iraq (with
the Eids) for many years now. How can we celebrate amid such death,
destruction, deprivation, misery, fear and poverty? he asked.

In a BBC Panorama programme, aired on 17th December, the night before
Eid Al Ahda, presenter Jane Corbyn asked a woman in Basra, who had
returned to Iraq after thirty years, after the fall of Saddam Hussein :
'What have the British left you?'

'Nothing', she replied: 'Just misery.'

And in a December surprise, three days before Christmas and little over
a week to the anniversary of  the lynching of  Iraq's legitimate
President, Anthony Charles Lynton Blair, QC., has announced his
conversion to Catholicism. He was received into the Church by the
Catholic Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Cormac Murphy O-Connor.
Having  morally bankrupted the Palace of Westminster, he has now done
the same to its Cathedral. Hope they have enough cleaning staff to wipe
the blood from his hands off the church furniture after his visits. As
former Ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray  remarked: 'Perhaps the
Catholic church has a dearth of mass murderers in their congregation.'
It is all 'madness'. 

(c) 2007 By Felicity Arbuthnot

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