torresd

http://www.zmag.org/ZNET.htm
How The British Troops Became A Soft Target

IRAQ

IT COULD not have been more predictable or better planned.
The British were the soft underbelly of the American occupation,
the nice guys who didn't wear helmets and patrolled on
PC Plod bicycles through the souks of Basra.

No one would hurt the Brits,
with their friendly public relations machine and
all that experience from Northern Ireland which -
when you come to think of it -
might have warned them of yesterday's attack.

We, the British, always made a
distinction between us and them -
the "them" being the Americans -
but failed to grasp that in Baghdad,
the Iraqis did not recognise the difference.

All the messages from the embryo resistance -
all the statements from the ex-Baathists and
the Shia clerics -

talked about the "Anglo-American invasion"
or about the "American and British occupiers".

It wasn't difficult to guess how the ambush was designed.

The Americans are taking too many precautions now;
they are surrounded by their tanks and armour,
protecting their marble occupation palace,
shooting down stone throwers with the abandon
of Israeli troops.

So why not go for the Americans' soft-target allies?

Of course, there are the equally
predictable reactions of horror.

It was a "cowardly", "despicable" attack,
which is how we described all those
hundreds of ambushes on British
soldiers in Belfast and Armagh.

In fact, that's just how we described the
attacks on British troops in Aden and
Cyprus and Malaya, in 1920 Ireland,
in Kenya and Palestine.

Because, whether or not Tony Blair realises it,
we are playing once more the game of colonial
occupiers - and now we are paying the price.

It was just the same in 1917.

General Sir Stanley Maude proclaimed that
his British invasion force had come to "liberate"
the people of Iraq - not to conquer them -
but within three years, his troops had been
gunned down every bit as cruelly as the
young British soldiers yesterday.

Hundreds of them still lie in the great
North Gate military cemetery in Baghdad.

By an appalling irony of history,
this first attack on the British -
the greatest against the occupation force
since the invasion of Iraq last March -

occurred only a few miles from the scene of the
British First World War defeat at Kut al-Amara
where an entire British Army, wasted by diseases,
surrendered to the Ottoman Turks and was
death-marched north to Anatolia.

How could they do this to us when we came to liberate them?

That will become an inevitable
theme in the aftermath of this attack.

Guerrilla warfare,
as the British know all too well,
is a brutal form of conflict.

It does not distinguish between
"good" occupiers and "bad" occupiers,
between Americans who shoot down the
innocent and Tommy Atkins in his soft
beret and his knowledge -

doesn't it go back to our own Bloody Sunday in 1972? -
that when you kill the innocent, you will suffer for it.

It also, of course, raises two more questions.

Weren't those British soldiers sent to Iraq
to find the weapons of mass destruction?

And since there don't appear to be any
such weapons, why did they have to die
yesterday?