Wow.
There’s loads of confusion about this story, but it seems to be common ground that British forces used tanks to break down the walls of an Iraqi prison where two soldiers, arrested for firing on Iraqi police, were being held. It’s increasingly evident that the coalition forces have become one of the array of armed militias in Iraq, all pursuing their own overlapping agendas and all claiming not to be answerable to anyone else.
Update This story is, not surprisingly, front page news in Britain and Australia, but the NYT barely covers it. It never made the front page of the website and, on the International page, it appears as a subheading to a story about the murder of an NYT reporter, also in Basra.
The latest statements from the UK government say that the soldiers had been handed over by police to a Shia militia group, presumably one of the Sadrist factions. The provincial governor, who has condemned the British action strongly, is also a Sadrist, it appears, though most of the reports I’ve seen suggest that the police are predominantly associated with the Badr brigade (armed wing of SCIRI, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, who are currently regarded as ‘good guys’, being part of the national government). There’s more on this in the comments thread.
John Quiggin 
Freedom is messy….we have laid the groundwork for democracy…in 5 years it will all be better…
What further excuses?
The Foreign Office – that the soldiers were released after negotiations and no force was used. A spokesperson added that three soldiers were injured during the operation. They negotiate rough, I suppose.
You seem pretty confident of your take on it. But, in the end the end, there is a difference and it matters. Despite all of the stupidity, corruption, etc. evident in their ranks, were Union troops in our civil war just another militia?
No offense in saying this (especially because I really do enjoy your thought provoking economics essays), but is it possible you are sort of out of your element here? I could be wrong, but I seem to recall for instance that at Crooked Timber you have more or less predicted repeatedly, and more or less incorrectly, that US troops would face a bloodbath Stalingrad-like scene in the course of urban fighting in this war (eg in the Fallujah assault).
Sorry, that was US-centric of me: when I refer to a civil war, I meant the American Civil war of 1861-65.
Report that the two British soldiers arrested by the Iraqis were driving around in a car packed with explosives:
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2005-09/19/content_3514065.htm
Peter L, I was incorrect in predicting a Stalingrad-style siege in the initial assault on Baghdad, and admitted this. But I think the attacks on Fallujah, Tal Afar and so on fit my predictions pretty well – large numbers of civilian casualties and most of the population driven out of their homes. Overall, I’d say my predictions (and those of other pessimists) have been far closer to the mark than those of the optimists.
Peter Lance,
The Union forces in the (American) Civil War were in a chain of command up to Abraham Lincoln, who stated and steadfastly adhered to a publicly proclaimed war aim — preservation of the Union.
The Bush Clique, on the other hand, can never be accused of explicitness or clarity in their war aims, nor can they be said to be steadfast in their adherence to a set of benchmarks for success. I cite in evidence their backstairs relinquishment of sovereignty and the way they were railroaded into accepting the January elections.
There are insufficient Coalition forces in Iraq to achieve anything that could be asserted as success-at-arms. Thus, the Coalition forces in Iraq are there for the domestic political purposes of the regimes who committed to Iraq. Withdrawal would necessitate acknowledgement of failure. Yet, none of the Invading powers is willing or capable of committing sufficient troops to enable success-at-arms.
This state of affairs is a betrayal of the troops stuck in Iraq. Dumb compliance with an incompetent and dishonest chain of command. and/or survival, and/or private profit like that revealed by the Indpendent Newspaper of a giant billion dollar arms scam run by US troops, and/or privateering like that revealed in this recent British Basra incident, remain the only rationales for Coalition troops.
And this truth is likely to dawn on more and more of them. Watch for a collapse in troop morale.
JQ deserves praise for one prediction: from memory, he was one of the very few people, on the left or the right, to claim that Iraq had no WMDs. Most people like me, who opposed the war, though Saddam had them and was a threat, but that the costs of toppling him (in terms of human lives) would be higher than the costs of attmepting to contain him (especially given who the actors were). We were right about that, but wrong about the WMDs. JQ’s hit rate is pretty good: my guess is that there are few who can claim as good.
Robert Fisk and Patrick Cockburn of the Independent newspaper have been reporting for a long time now that ordinary Iraqis believe the Coalition to be behind many of the bombing outrages. The ABC reports spontaneous rioting and attacks on British military vehicles by angry crowds in Basra. http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200509/s1463925.htm
It also appears the British soldiers dressed in Iraqi mufti initiated a firefight with the local constabulary. Given the popular belief that the invaders are behind the terrorism, it seems to have been at the very least careless to drive around in civvies armed to the teeth in a vehicle full of explosives. Are the British military as thick as this suggests? What is really going on here?
Katz, You should read a bit about the Civil War. Your sense of the clarity of the issues in comparison with the present situation (and no, I am not some un-apologetic Bush supporter) is the result of 140 or so years of dust and smoke settling. People made near parallels to each of your arguments at the time of the war..
JohnQuiggin-As Yogi Berra might have said (and probably did) when you get me, you got me…and I admit it. I searched your old posts. The line that I think sparked my memory of your predictions about Fallujah was “if the assault on Fallujah turns out as bloody as appears likely” (on November 3, 2004). You are correct: that does not speak specifically to US casualties. Apologies on that one.
Peter, thanks for that.
By the way, I also admit that our low casualties are partly luck. Via a common good friend I recently met someone who was in fairly recent urban combat in Iraq (a member of the USMC). His frank assessment as an actual soldier:
If the Sunni insurgents had any real basic combat infantry skills, we would be bathing in blood. What saves us is that they basically can’t keep it together in even the smallest unit action. They don’t shoot accurately, because they get no chance to practice. They make one stupid move after another at the tactical level, because most of them never got any real training. Most of the individual insurgents we kill in fights made some move that they beat out of you in USMC training. Their target selection is generally terrible: they tend to blow their cover on stupid targets. They don’t have any real ability to dynamically respond as a unit. Most of the time when they try to keep some semblance of a unit, we wipe them out after a pretty basic and predictable flanking maneuver to which they failed to respond. etc. etc. And they know all this. If the fighting with Al Sadr or in places like Fallujah didn’t teach them, hundreds and hundreds of vicious little fights that never made the news taught them. This is why they rely so heavily on IEDs, but those can’t inflict casualties on us at the level they really want (ie the Vietnam war pace of casualties). So, plan B: choose a target as tactically inept as you are. In other words, other Iraqi civilians. Try to start a civil war. And the weird thing is that in the end it may turn out that that plan B wasn’t such a bad plan A from their standpoint.
Can you imagine what kind of a fight we would have gotten if they didn’t have these problems?
Sorry, how I wrote that was misleading. The sentences “So, plan B: choose a target as tactically inept as you are. In other words, other Iraqi civilians. Try to start a civil war. And the weird thing is that in the end it may turn out that that plan B wasn’t such a bad plan A from their standpoint.” were mine. I missed a carriage return.
Hal9000 Says: September 20th, 2005 at 11:58 am Robert Fisk and Patrick Cockburn of the Independent newspaper have been reporting for a long time now that ordinary Iraqis believe the Coalition to be behind many of the bombing outrages.
Maybe Messrs Fisk and Cockburn are polling the same people who argued and continue to argue that 9/11, Bali, jakarta, London, Madrid, etc etc were not undertaken by Al Qaeda (and other assorted crooks and thugs).
What seems to be missing in this discussion is that prior to going into Iraq senior British military officers asked for clarification from the Blair government that the war was legal. They don’t want make appearances at war crimes tribunals.
Having gone in to a war of aggression at the behest of the USA, these guys (and the ones that Peter Lance mentions) have no choice. If they live long enough to go home and think about it for long enough, many will realise that the war on Iraq and the plunder of Iraq’s assets, as well as the brutal occupation and loss of life, has all been unnecessary and illegal.
There is a special place for the consciences of combatants who work in ‘Special Forces’ because they know their work is illegal and they know that if they are caught their existance is usually denied. On this occasion the British Army has decided that they are above the law (or maybe there is no law). Perhaps they have not thought about it, but they are a short step away from the kind of warfare being waged in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Forty years ago British and Australian ‘Special Forces’ as well as military engineers were contributing to the CIA’s Secret War in Laos. Documents relating to this remained secret for many years. But then, we are supposed to believe, we live in a democracy. We live in a society where foreign policy and militarist adventurism are conducted in our name but without our informed consent. This incident in Basra is the inevitable outcome. Its a disgrace.
Peter Lance,
Thank you for your suggestion that I read a bit about the Civil War. I believe that my current knowledge will suffice for the present discussion.
1. Let’s look at the clarity of Lincoln’s war aims: in his inaugural address 4 March 1861, Lincoln stated “No state upon its own mere motion can lawfully get out of the Union.” Lincoln’s Proclamation of 15 April 1861 commanded that the States raise 75,000 militia to suppress “combinations too powerful to be suppressed by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings”.
Thus, Lincoln identified the Confederacy as an illegal “insurrection”, a position which he maintained steadfastly even as the Civil War became the bloodiest military conflict of the nineteenth century.
Compare that with the shilly-shallying of the Bush clique over war aims in Iraq.
2. Let’s look at Lincoln’s methods. Granted, manpower mobilisation was haphazard. But such a war was unprecedented. By 1865, the 20 million or so Northerners sustained an army of 1,000,000 men in the field.
Lincoln raised taxes to pay for the war.
Moreover, by 1962 Lincoln recognised that victory required the emancipation of the slaves, a proposal he explicitly rejected in his inaugural address. Everything, including racialism, was sacrificed to the “military necessity” required for preserving the Union.
It is true that Lincoln was privately opposed to the radicals’ insistence that rebels’ property be confiscated. Nevertheless, he signed the legislation in the interests of unity.
The Bush clique has done none of these things. Their prosecution of the Iraq War has been characterised by “too little, too late”, arrogance, and denial.
Lincoln confronted a national emergency that required the utmost effort. The Bush clique embroiled itself in an unnecessary war. Yet, the Bush Clique enjoyed enormous popularity when it unleashed “shock and awe” over Baghdad. The US had at its disposal the military and civil means to make a much better fist of postwar reconstruction, yet chose not to use them.
If Iraq were really the “central front” in the most important conflict of our era, why didn’t Bush commit adequate assets to ensure victory?
More pointedly, if Iraq were really the “central front” in this climacteric, why didn’t Bush adjust his methods when the wheels started falling off?
Willy: That is not exactly true. In the US at least Special Forces are regarded as formal US troops (regardless of their elite status) and their existence is generally not denied if captured. This is the pattern from WWII right through to people like Michael Durant (MH-60 pilot, 160th SOAR) in Somalia or the Navy Seals that were recently MIAs in Afghanistan. The government may be less than forthcoming about their mission and in the event that they are KIA their families may never learn the exact circumstances of their deaths, but those are separate issues. I think you are confusing the Special Forces, which are a branch of the armed services, with people like CIA operatives. With them issues like denial may come into play.
Though I have a lot of cynical feelings about this war, I would be careful making assumptions about how these guys will look back on it. That’s their story, not yours.
PL,
While it was hardly reproted this way in the supposedly anti-war mainstream media, the second battle for Fallujah was comparable in many ways to the recapture of Tet from the Viet cong during the vietnam war.
In both cases, American casualties were over 100, the fighting lasted about 10 days and enemy casualties were in the thousands.
You’re probably right about the lack of training of the insurgents but another factor keeping US casaulties down is much better emergency medical treatment – which saves lives but is adding to the tragically high number of amputees and other American vets with crippling injuries (much higher than in previous wars.)
All: what I find most worryign about this isn’t the specific details, it’s that it seems to fit into a pattern of increasing violence and public disorder in Basra and the south.
Katz,
A. Lincoln did fudge a lot of things about the war. He didn’t recognize that emancipation was necessary by 1862: that was obvious from the outset to anyone who casually examined the South’s economy and suspected the war might be a prolonged affair (I suspect Lincoln was ahead of the the curve on both counts) and its pretty clear from his writings that this is indeed what he wanted for a long time before. In the course of the war he fudged it while awaiting a great victory, which is what Antietam was (unless of course you were a casualty).
B. Your confidence in the military execution is easier to come by now, after the screams from the field hospitals at Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, etc. etc. have died down. You know very well that there was widespread criticism of the execution of the war at the time.
C. In any case. my point was less about Lincoln (with the passage of time, I think you and I are more or less in agreement about the correctness of his actions) or Bush but about ourselves reacting to Bush in the present circumstances and those who reacted to Lincoln in his time. Most of the angry judgements of the Peter’s and Katz’s of Lincoln’s time have not withstood the judgment of history.
D. My statement about reading more about the Civil War in retrospect looks snottier than intended. I meant it in a very off handed, flippant sense at the time: I did not mean to seriously suggest you had no grasp of that war.
JQ – you have sunk to a new low saying “It’s increasingly evident that the coalition forces have become one of the array of armed militias in Iraq”.
What a load of unadulterated crap. Where is your evidence?
The rather sketchy details indicate that it is lilely that a covert recon team got sprung. Given the security situation in Iraq, if I was commanding a unit and two of my diggers got banged up I would be straight down there to get them out of that Police station by whatever means necessary.
I can’t vouch for the other unilateralist countries there, but the Australian US and UK forces are in no way militias.
I demand an apology form you, JQ, to the serving soldiers in Iraq.
“I demand an apology form you, JQ, to the serving soldiers in Iraq.”
Reminds me of the time in WW1, a Tasmanian newspaper thundered, “We warn the Kaiser”
Ian: No question you are correct that better battlefiled medicine has also played a big role.
I think the Hue analogy (I’ve seen it made in other places) is a bit overdone. First, in terms of US casualties don’t these comparisons usually involve actually statistically stacking *two* battles of Fallujah against one of Hue. Further, a far better job was done sealing off escape routes in the second battle of Fallujah than in the first of Fallujah or Hue. So the total number of enemy person-days (for lack of a less awkward term) of resistance may in the end have very well been higher in the 2nd Fallujah battle than either of the other two. And I think it is clear how a trapped enemy fights. By this standard our casualties in Fallujah 2 were pretty low. Finally, civilian losses in either fight were bad but in Hue they were atrocious (mainly a by product of the surprise nature of the attack).
Small point: the main thrust of the resistance at Hue was probably NVA, not VC (I admit that an exact counting of the VC is really tough).
People, lets keep it civil.
Katz – I recommend to you the excellent three book series on the civil war by Shelby Foote.
Abe Lincoln was under as much criticism as Bush is now. And he made many poor decisions – McClelan probably being his worst.
Bush has one war aim – to win the war on terror. He has been completely consistent since 11th Sep 2001, reiterating this in his most recent address to the nation about the war in Iraq.
PL,
It is undeniable that Lincoln was subjected to enormous criticism throughout the Civil War. Wars are expensive, wasteful, inefficient, morally questionable. My point is that Lincoln refused to resile from his initial objectives, even if methods had to change in order to achieve those objectives.
Here is another passage from Lincoln’s inaugural address:
“[I shall fight a civil war the way I may wish to] unless my rightful masters, the american people, shall withhold the requisite means, or in some authoritative way, shall withhold the requisite means…] Can you imagine Bush saying anything remotely like this?
In other words, even though Lincoln recognised himself to be constrained by political realities, the most potent of which in a democracy is public opinion, he kept sight of his main objective.
Bush either never had a real objective, or has lost sight of it, long before the American people even began to wake up to how thoroughly they had been conned.
Katz, John and Ian:
I have enjoyed our exchange, but I am out now. Its clear that Razor and Willy are determined to make sure that their respective ends of the political spectrum are not outflanked in this battle for low ground.
Razor, you’re on a warning. I”ve deleted a bunch of comments from you, and several replies. Any further abusive comments and you’ll be barred.
On the substantive point, your own comments make it clear that you agree that the Coalition forces are acting (and in your view should act) without regard to Iraqi law or the views of Iraqi government, pursuing whatever course of action seems necessary for force protection and other objectives such as the US war on terrorism. Similarly, the Badr brigades and the Kurdish peshmerga, which provide most of the effective armed support for the Iraqi government at present, have their own goals and don’t accept any outside control. In my view, the term “militia” is appropriate as a description of this role.
There’s nothing pejorative about the term “militia” (look at the 2nd Amendment to the US Constitution) though obviously I don’t think that it’s helping the situation in Iraq that the Coalition forces have taken this role. They should either have been placed under the command of the Iraqi government when it took office or withdrawn.
“Bush has one war aim – to win the war on terror. ”
Thanks for the reminder Razor,
Perhaps Bush should have worked himself up to this one by doing a practice run on a Proper Noun (like “Iraq”) or even a Concrete Noun (like “drugs”) before leading the posse out against an Abstract Noun. They’re real slippery critters, them abstract nouns.
Note for contrast’s sake Lincoln’s 1861 proclamation of commencement of hostilities against “combinations too powerful to be suppressed by the ordinary course of judicial proceedingsâ€?,
Lincoln sought to end the conditions under which rebels could “combine” with the object of overthowing the American constitution. Note that Lincoln did not declare war on “rebellion” (another one of those pesky abstract nouns).
This is how proper grown-up statesmen identify their objectives.
Willy Bach you say – “you are condemning them to a brutalising and mind-altering experience that they will carry with them for the rest of their lives”
My response to that is that, in my direct experience, I’ve seen more psychological damage done to blokes by females compared to guys who have been on combat operations.
JQ – fine, put me on a warning. At the same time you should be putting the other guy, I assume it is a male, on a warning too for his abuse, but then, since you don’t appear to understand what it means to be a professional soldier as compare to a militia, I doubt you understand the level of the insults being dished out.
What seems to me significant is the collapse of the security situation in Basra which the British have held up as something of a success story. In the south there is,as Prof.Cole has said repeatedly ,a division between the Shiities loyal to the Govt. in Baghdad,and the growing band of supporters of Sadr. If Basra becomes a battlefield,like Baghdad,et.al,it will be a huge problem for Blair,who has got to face the Labour party Conference in a few weeks time…though doubless he will spin sone fatuous tale in his most theatrical manner.If you have any benign thoughts about the way British imperialism works,you could do well to read some Irish history,which will quickly set you right !
From the information I’ve been receiving on this, it seems there is a whole dimension on this not truly portrayed. This is all a new development in the long running Badr/Sadr feud.
The two men arrested being British Special forces, were arrested by Iraqi police largely loyal to the ‘Al Sadr’ shiite faction. The British troops unwisely ‘resisted arrest’, and so the violence broke out.
This is where it becomes interesting. The Iraqi government in Baghdad (as we know mainly aligned with Sciri, of which Badr is the military wing) actually ordered their release. However the local police forces on the ground refused, and attempted to humiliate the British Troops in Basra by allowing the troops photographed by arab news services.
In response, the British encircled the jail, and local Mahdi supporters came out to attack them. The British retreated, but that night returned and broke into the jail, using their tanks to break down the wall. This seems to be very uncharacteristic of the British in Basra, who seem to have been very reserved and methodical in their approach, with the result that the South has been much quieter than American controlled areas. This operation seems very troubling, it seems for once that British do not have their usual firm hand on the situation. It also shows that large sections of the Iraqi police down in Basra seem to hold no real alliegance to the Iraqi government, are actually under the sway of Moqtada Al Sadr.
Razor – “My response to that is that, in my direct experience, I’ve seen more psychological damage done to blokes by females compared to guys who have been on combat operations.”
Boy you must have had some bad relationships to see dismembered bodies and friends blown away before your eyes. I think the sights, sounds and smells and fear of combat will be with most of our troops for a lifetime. I know my father woke up screaming many years after WWII shouting for old comrades.
To put young men through such an experience you need a really really good reason. We didn’t have one.
“My response to that is that, in my direct experience, I’ve seen more psychological damage done to blokes by females compared to guys who have been on combat operations.�
Is this still true if you exclude Bronwyn Bishop?
In regard to the Australian Special Air Service Regiment; their primary role is special recconnaisance operations and I would not be surprised if they are routinely put into situations where denial may be pro-forma from the Government if captured or killed.
For example it is documented that the Navy and Air Force made incursions into Indonesia before the formal independence of East Timor. Our Government simply denied it. It is also documented that at least one SASR squad was “on the ground” observing the situation and reporting to Canberra. If captured, however unlikely, I would not put it past governments of any stripe to issue a pro-forma denial as admitting it could cause a major international incident. Its also claimed that the SASR were well inside Iraq long before the invasion took place.
Also the conventional submarines are used in surveillence, insertion and intelligence operations inside national waters. Hardware is harder to deny than some men but still, I’d like to see the plan for action if there was an unfortunate ‘incident’ inside some foreign harbour. Perhaps they simply bank on their opposite numbers denying the existence of the incident in the first place to leave us guessing and gain some advantage from it.
Martyn,
Sadr has been rebuilding and expanding his power ever since the Americans pushed him out of Najaf and Karbala.
In addition to his effective control of Sadr City in Baghdad, he’s expanded his power in the south (where his family orginated).
He’s also been building connections with the Sunni insurgents and other groups opposed to federalism. (Most Iraqis seem to seem federalism not so much as away of empowering local majorities = shi’ites in the south, Kurds in the north – but as a threat to minorities such as the Turkmen, arabs in Kirkuk; Shia in Baghdad; Sunnis in the south…).
I don’t think Al Sadr’s planning another confrontation with the US in the short term but any major disturbances in Basra (where his forces seem to be battling SCIRI for control) could threaten the entire supply chain the US forces further north depend on.
It’s a big story that has been, largly, neglected in the media, so far.
If British soldiers have dressed up as locals with a car full of explosives and then been arrested by police, we should all know about it.
Just like we should be informed about the actual numbers of civilian deaths in Iraq.
Two recent headlines from ABC:
08:43 AEST UK denies storming Iraqi jail to free soldiers
17:23 AEST UK admits smashing jail wall in rescue bid
I guess it all depends on what your definition of “storming” is.
Mr Quiggin, in the BBC article you link to, it states that the two soldiers were freed from a house nearby, rather then the police station itself. Considering the possibility that they were handed over to a militia, rather then in the custody of Iraqi police, was this not an understandable course of action?
A note from your friendly neighbourhood pedant, JQ – the coalition forces are not militias, as they are professional soldiers. But I agree with the rest of your original sentence.
What I think is interesting is that the arrested soldiers were what the coalition forces regularly condemn – illegal combatants (no uniform, criminal behaviour) and would have been deemed not worthy of protection under the Geneva Conventions if they had been Iraqis/Afghanis/Pakistanis/Saudis/Syrians captured by the US.
My response to that is that, in my direct experience, I’ve seen more psychological damage done to blokes by females compared to guys who have been on combat operations.
Wow.
Ok, I’m back.
T. Rex: I am not that familiar with the Australian military and hence cannot comment with great authority, but I would be very surprised if what you saying is true (ie that the Australian gov’t would deny that the captured guys were theirs and hence fail to assert their right to Geneva Convention protections and eventual release).
I think part of the question here is really about the distinction between covert and clandestine OPS. From a recent US newspaper article:
Paramilitary operations, which are used to arm rebel organizations, destabilize governments, destroy targets or collect intelligence, are conducted by armed units that do not belong to conventional military formations.
Such operations, such as the use of CIA officers and American special forces to help topple Afghanistan’s hard-line Taliban rulers in 2001, are often more physically demanding and require more specialized techniques than regular military operations.
U.S. special forces often mount paramilitary operations, but they are mostly clandestine missions in which concealing the American government’s involvement is not a priority.
Covert paramilitary operations, on the other hand, are those in which the U.S. government wants to be able to deny any involvement. Covert missions at times violate international law or the laws of war, and American special forces are expected to follow those laws. As a result, such missions largely have been the work of the CIA.
If Australia has an equivalent of the CIA (does it?) those would probably be the guys in the sort of situation you are referring to.
US Special Forces are part of formal military units and recognized as soliders in the formal sense. They have doctines, orders of battle, etc. in all of the essential normal senses that a regular military unit does. One thing I do know is that this at least is also true of SASR. Note that the US does have units comparable to SASR (their write overlaps to a degree with that of Delta Force, Navy Seals, elite Marine Scout/Sniper units, Air Force Combat Controllers, etc.).
My guess is that these covert ops are more extensive than America’s supporters admit, but less so than her critics believe. The world is not crawling with Jason Bournes (to use a Hollywood icon) but they probably do exist.
Juan Cole has a timeline from various sources.
A Kinder, Gentler Imperialism?
A consistent theme in press reports has been that the British occupying forces (or whatever the technical legal term is now) in Southern Iraq are somehow much better attuned to the Iraqi population and generally more successful than the Americans. I g…
Larvatus,
I have heard similar arguments in other venues, but that seems sort of strange. The US military got the parts of the county most likely to offer serious resistance. This is not exactly experimental evidence we’re talking about here.
John – you’re right, this is all over the UK news, it lead the R4 news again tonight. What actually happened is still a bit vague: it wasn’t really tanks smashing down walls it was a warrior APC which is only a mini-tank. The current story does seem to be that we tried to negotiate, and only went and knocked walls down when it turned out that our chaps had been handed over to local militia. And indeed that the Iraq govt ordered their return but the locals wouldn’t.
The thing that really seems to be annoying the Iraqis is that this rather blows the pretence of their sovereignty, which was always rather thin anyway. As soon as its our chaps in trouble, we’ll go knocking their walls down. Which (I would guess) won’t play well with the locals.
It may not be big in the US but its on wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_War#UK_fighting_against_Iraqi_police
a little late but I totally agree with razor re: civil war
Thanks Homer.
Sept. 19 –“ An Iraqi journalist and photographer working for The New York Times in Basra was found dead early Monday after being abducted from his home by a group of armed men wearing masks and claiming to be police officers, relatives and witnesses said…
Mr. Haider had worked for The Times since April 2003 and had recently reported on the growing friction and violence among Basra’s rival Shiite militias, which are widely believed to have infiltrated the police.â€?
Is it known whether the capture of the 2 British servicemen was opportunistic or planned. I think we can probably discount the carrying weapons excuse.
Al Sadr’s involvement would serve to reinforce the belief that Iran is a main mover in this current violence. Aside from the British moving towards seeking sanctions against Iran, the unrest in the south of Iran earlier this month was blamed on again British intelligence officers (disguised apparently as top Shell management) and the British Ambassador was threatened with expulsion. The new President appears to be increasing authoritarianism in Iran and if these attacks are planned going proactive on threatened sanctions.
Prior to his election the Iranians had held regional meetings and spoken of the need to address concerns of non-Persians. Now the governors are to be sacked and replaced with intelligence and security operatives, and there are to be increased crackdowns.
There may be more of this to come in south Iraq.
Razor,
the main reason I watched and then enjoyed the civil war docu by Ken Burns was because of Shelby Foote’s involvement.
Get rid of those trailing commisions !!!!
I didn’t actually see much of the docu but hae read Shelby Foote’s impressive tome. That and Serle’s biography on Monash and Liddel Hart’s histories of WWI and II are a must for anybody interested in getting a grounding in Military History.
Fee for service, mate – fee for service, and screw any product supplier for as much commission/underwriting as possible and fully rebate to clients – they love it!
We don’t generally do commissions, but I am certainly of the opinion that there is a place for them in the market place in order for small clients to be able to be serviced in an economical way. Full disclosure is what is important, rather than how you are remunerated.