2 Rifles has suffered more casualties over the 4½ months of its tour than any British unit serving in Helmand. Twenty soldiers have been killed from the mixed unit of riflemen and fusiliers, including six in the past week. The number of wounded, a figure that cannot be disclosed for security reasons, ranks alongside that suffered by British infantry units during fighting in Europe in the Second World War.
When I read this I wondered, not for the first time, how much longer the British Government can keep 'managing' the 'outcomes' of this war. Can mutiny be far away?
Meanwhile, glad to see that other masterstroke of neo-con foreign policy, Iraq, is toddling along nicely towards stable, liberal democracy. They'll have MTV, no-wage burger franchises, a moronic film industry and valet parking in no time.
6 comments:
Yes, and telephones and internet access, and perhaps a useful sanitation service, maybe drinking water too..not to mention elections, a feeling of security and hope for the future...
...further to the above, this is worth a look...
http://www.brookings.edu/saban/~/media/Files/Centers/Saban/Iraq%20Index/index.pdf
Thanks for that, Ayrdale. As far as I am concerned, the bottom line on the Iraq war was that British entry into it was based on a huge deception of the British public by the Labour government and its client media. It cuts no ice to hear humanitarian platitudes after the event, for they were not the aims of the war as far as Bush and his coterie were concerned. Blair sent British soldiers to die for his own vanity. None of it was about sanitation or internet access. We have to ask 'why there?', 'why then?' and not any other tin-pot shit hole ruled by a five-bob Hitler.
As a betting man I am willing to take a long ante-post bet on Iraq backsliding into internecine religious strife and a political and civil system that is as corrupt as a corpse. The soundtrack will be car bombs.
"For him that is joined to the living there is hope..."
You may well be right, but I hope not and I don't think so. I don't pretend to know a great deal about Iraqi history, but there is a suggestion of greatness in their past, and a decline to where they were immediately pre and post-invasion isn't inevitable.
I take your point. Naturally I wish the country well and hope there's something resembling a happy ending. But my view remains that it and Afghanistan were misadventures. Everything about it was bad news - the cockamamy neo-con idea that you could settle an old score, earn money AND turn the place into a suburb of Miami; the systematic deception in Britain; the ministerial niggardliness that caused troop losses; the idea that you could 'spin a war' and that management consultants could make a war go any way they wanted it to. If we didn't live in a time of mass ignorance and amorality Iraq and Afghanistan would have been very sobering events for the political classes of America and our countries.
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