British Wheel of Anglo-American Axis Coming Off

On April 30, in sweltering heat, after six years, Britain formally handed over control of the Iraqi port city of Basra to US Army command. Since 2003, 179 British soldiers have been killed in action in Iraq, in addition to many thousands of Basra Iraqis. Britain's Iraq operations have cost the UK around 7 billion pounds (US$10.4 billion). This is surely small beer when compared to the 50 billion pounds that the British government will have to tap to bail out its profligate banking system in London after 2008's sub-prime crisis or the estimated 700 billion pounds the government now says it will have to borrow over the next five years to rescue the British economy. By all accounts the island nation is going down fast.

UK could be the first bankruptcy among G-8. But the India complex for things British is amazing –an unprepossessing race look at their horsey British Royal family-.Paying 1.55 million for Kevin Pietersen and Andrew Flintoff or even a wise Tata paying huge amounts to buy Jaguar and Rover when world economy was showing signs of decline. The clever Mittal Baniya did not acquire any new big steel combine since 2006.

In Iraq it's still a high cost by any standards for a nation still attempting to punch above its weight in international affairs. As British troops leave, opposition political leaders such as Conservative David Cameron and the Liberal Democrats are calling repeatedly for a full public inquiry to determine the true circumstances of why the war was fought in the first place.

In 2003, PM Tony Blair told the British people that Saddam's "weapons of mass destruction" could reach British targets in as little as 45 minutes. With no such weapons ever found, the entire prospectus for the war appears flawed, the basis of faulty, perhaps massaged, intelligence. This has given rise to the understandable suspicion - by many in Westminster and across Britain as a whole - that an illegitimate war was launched by Blair in 2003 largely to support president George W Bush and his neo-conservative circle who had already decided on regime change in Iraq and wanted facts to fit the decision, come what may. Govt controlled BBC

Do you remember March 16 when swaggering U.S. President George W. Bush, Tony Blair and Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar (later joined by Portuguese Prime Minister Jose Manuel Durao Barroso) in an emergency summit on Iraq on Spain’s Azores Islands discussed a new U.N. draft resolution on Iraq (meeting in a big city would have brought out big protests). There was a fierce resistance from most Security Council members, even from France and Germany.

The Azores event was bizarre. The three heads of state traveled 2,300 miles (Bush) or 1,000 miles each (Blair and Aznar), to sit round a table for barely an hour. They then appeared before the assembled international media to announce a new ultimatum directed, not so much at Saddam Hussein, but at France, Russia, Germany and the other states which have opposed a Security Council resolution authorizing military action against Iraq.

Bush gave the Security Council members 24 hours to rubber-stamp the US-British resolution, after which he will terminate all further diplomatic discussions and authorize the Pentagon to proceed with bombing and a full-scale land invasion. At one point, the US president’s face contorted as he denounced France for its expected veto, and he seemed prepared to order military action against Paris as well as Baghdad.

This was not a summit to “go the last mile� in seeking a diplomatic solution, as the White House claimed—failing to explain, in that event, why the chief US diplomat, Secretary of State Colin Powell, stayed behind in Washington. Rather, it was an effort to make absolutely certain that no diplomatic obstacles would succeed in diverting the Bush administration from its long-desired goal of war.

After the summit in the Azores illegal US led invasion was launched against a hapless Iraqi people within a matter of days. That after the starvation and impoverishment of the Iraqi people—the consequences of 12 years of US and UN-backed economic sanctions leading to death of half a million childen. The invasion and brutal occupation has caused death of over a million Iraqis, a million widows, 5 million orphans and 4 million refugees in an operation in western colonial narrative was called ‘Operation Iraqi freedom.’ Bush has slunked back to his Texan ranch ,Aznar was defeated in elections, Barraso shifted to EU , Blair was obliged to resign but shamelessly struts around as peace facilitator in Middle East.

The Bush administration is decimated the entire framework of post-World War II international laws and relations , revealing the true face of American imperialism, in a rapacious and criminal invasion to seize Iraq’s oil resources and establish a dominant position for the Anglo-Americans in the Gulf. But like the fable, US and UK have killed the goose which laid Golden (black) egg.

The British hang on to Yankee coattails for crumbs of spoils. In March 2003 when the British attorney general had cast doubts ( advice changed on Blair’s behest ) on the legality of the invasion ,and London was mulling over ,US defense secretary Rumsfeld even said that the Brits need not join , but London did to partake in looting .Of course unlike 1991 there is are not that many spoils when Kuwait and other Arabs , Japan and Germany etc were made to pay for the war , which was launched to protect US/UK oil interests. The Yankee contempt for British Generalship is shown by the caricature of British hero FM Montgomery in the Hollywood film ‘Patton�.

Unless the guilty are punished revenge will sprout in some form or the other, now that UK is almost bankrupt and US is heading pell-mell in that direction.

Below is a piece by London Independent’s respected journalist Robert Fisk on the shameful doings and departure of the British troops around Basra.


A Historic Day For Iraq

But not in the way the British want to believe

By Robert Fisk

May 01, 2009 "The Independent" -- One hundred and seventy-nine dead soldiers. For what? 179,000 dead Iraqis? Or is the real figure closer to a million? We don't know. And we don't care. We never cared about the Iraqis. That's why we don't know the figure. That's why we left Basra yesterday.

I remember going to the famous Basra air base to ask how a poor Iraqi boy, a hotel receptionist called Bahr Moussa, had died. He was kicked to death in British military custody. His father was an Iraqi policeman. I talked to him in the company of a young Muslim woman. The British public relations man at the airport was laughing. "I don't believe this," my Muslim companion said. "He doesn't care." She did. So did I. I had reported from Northern Ireland. I had heard this laughter before. Which is why yesterday's departure should have been called the Day of Bahr Moussa. Yesterday, his country was set free from his murderer. At last.

History is a hard taskmaster. In my library, I have an original copy of General Angus Maude's statement to the people of Baghdad – $2,000, it cost me, at a telephone auction a few days before we invaded Iraq in 2003, but it is worth every cent. "Our military operations have as their object," Maude announced, "the defeat of the enemy... our armies do not come into your cities and lands as conquerors or enemies, but as liberators." And so it goes on. Maude, I should add, expired shortly afterwards because he declined to boil his milk in Baghdad and died of cholera.

There followed a familiar story. The British occupation force was opposed by an Iraqi resistance – "terrorists", of course – and the British destroyed a town called Fallujah and demanded the surrender of a Shiite cleric and British intelligence in Baghdad claimed that "terrorists" were crossing the border from Syria, and Lloyd George – the Blair-Brown of his age – then stood up in the House of Commons and said that there would be "anarchy" in Iraq if British troops left. Oh dear.

Even repeating these words is deeply embarrassing. Here, for example, is a letter written by Nijris ibn Qu'ud to a British intelligence agent in 1920: "You cannot treat us like sheep... it is we Iraqi who are the brains of the Arab nation... You are given a short time to clear out of Mesopotamia. If you don't go you will be driven out."

So let us turn at last to T E Lawrence. Yes, Lawrence of Arabia. In The Sunday Times on 22 August 1920, he wrote of Iraq that the people of England "had been led in Mesopotamia into a trap from which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honour. They have been tricked into it by a steady withholding of information... Things have been far worse than we have been told, our administration more bloody and inefficient than the public knows." Even more presciently, Lawrence had written that the Iraqis had not risked their lives in battle to become British subjects. "Whether they are fit for independence or not remains to be tried. Merit is no justification for freedom."

Alas not. Iraq, begging around Europe now that its oil wealth has run out, is a pitiful figure. But it is a little bit freer than it was. We have destroyed its master and our friend (a certain Saddam) and now, with our own dead clanking around our heels, we are getting out yet again. Till next time...