Keeping the video from Iraq in perspective

By Craig Murray

I feel the need to comment on the video of brutality by British soldiers released at the weekend, purely because so much rubbish has been spouted in the mainstream media on the subject.

I may surprise you by starting with the observation that, on the scale of violence we have visited on Iraq, this was a negligible incident. People on all sides are dying every day. I have heard enough first hand accounts, from British diplomats and military, from journalists and NGO workers, to know that if it had been U.S. troops facing that mob of stone throwing youths, they would simply have opened fire and blown some of them away. The media would report that another eight "insurgents" had died in a "firefight"; it would be lucky to make a footnote. If the troops had been mercenaries -- and these so-called "PMCs" vastly outnumber the British army in Iraq -- it would not have been a video camera but a heavy machine gun shooting from an upper window. In fact, what the soldiers here were doing is exactly what snatch squads did to members of mobs in Northern Ireland for thirty years.

In Iraq, when you’ve killed 100,000 civilians, what is beating up a few youths? Of course, what makes it a media story is that there were actually pictures. As the entire Western media in Iraq has a policy of skulking in places where they can be certain nothing will happen, such film is rare. And nowadays, if there are no pictures, it is not news.

Doubtless, some privates and lance corporals will be court martialled. Actually, I blame them very little. What are they supposed to do to disperse a crowd which, plainly, was trying to inflict actual violence on the troops? If every Iraqi who threw a stone at coalition forces was interned, you would keep millions of prisoners. There are no Iraqi authorities to whom prisoners can be turned over who will deal with them sensibly. The British don’t want prisoners, and the UK military now have a de facto policy of not turning prisoners over to the US authorities because of their inept and violent handling of them.

The British troops are in a completely impossible situation. Their role is to support a corrupt and inefficient Iraqi puppet administration which is incapable of exercising control, and would do little for good if it did have control. The vast majority of the Iraqi population do not want us there. The real good that this video might have done is in driving home to the British public, against the ceaseless propaganda of the mainstream media, that we are not wanted. That stone-throwing crowd were Shias, for God’s sake. The official propaganda says that they are on "our" side.

So our troops are being sniped at, blown up or facing violent mobs. They can do little about it. Their own military leadership are convinced that they should not be there. They are not the ones reaping the benefits of huge income from the new US and UK oil contracts, though they will be giving their lives to protect the carpetbaggers who have descended on Iraq like locusts. Is there any wonder that this boils over in frustration?

The disgraceful actions in that video were not the product of intrinsic evil on the part of the British troops involved. This incident was one of the more minor consequences of the illegal war of aggression and occupation launched by George Bush and Tony Blair. It is Blair and Bush, not the troops, who should be in the dock.
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As Britain's outspoken Ambassador to the Central Asian Republic of Uzbekistan, Craig Murray helped expose vicious human rights abuses by the US-funded regime of Islam Karimov. He is now a prominent critic of Western policy in the region.

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