Soldiers are not policemen

IRAQ: What a farce. Almost 3 years we’ve been there now, and it’s still fucked up beyond recognition. A haven for insurgents and extremists, dozens of innocent people being violently killed every day. The place is an absolute mess and there really are no signs of it getting better any time soon. Would have to be thus far, the 21st century’s mother of all fuck ups.

It’s now such common place for someone to blow themselves up in a crowded part of Baghdad for Basra, killing scores of innocent people, that it barely makes the news. We have become so accustomed to seeing this death and misery that one can’t help but become desensitised to it. What has made the news this past week however, has been fresh evidence of abuse of Iraqis by British and US soldiers. New pictures have been released by SBS of prisoner abuse in Abu Ghraib by US soldiers. This kind of treatment of anyone is unacceptable, however I feel that those responsible are not as responsible as has been made out. The soldiers concerned have been tried and some jailed, but soldiers follow orders, and no one is going to convince me that someone high in the chain of command didn’t give the order to make prisoners feel ‘a little uncomfortable.’

A video was on news this week (with sound) that was taken by a British prisoner and showed a troop of British soldiers rounding up some Iraqi civilians who had been rioting in the streets. They dragged a few of them back into their compound and, while the Iraqis were screaming for mercy, beat the shit out of them. The whole thing was recorded with a gleeful running commentary from the cameraman.

Again this has brought outrage from Iraqi citizens and members of the international community about the behaviour of the occupying force. The US and Britain cannot afford for these kind of things to happen, it is highly damaging to their whole plan. The problem that is faced is that The US and Britain invaded Iraq on the basis of moral superiority; that Saddam was a bad man and by attacking his country, they would in fact liberating the Iraqi people from his tyranny. Even the operation was given the beguiling name ‘Operation Iraqi Freedom.’ Although perhaps it was more about freeing Iraq of its oil, and freeing it up to become another pro US outpost in the middle east, but I argued about that 3 years ago. So revelations such as these are highly damaging because they strip the moral superiority away from the coalition. Evidence such as this continues to raise questions as to whether these people were better off with Saddam there anyway. How can an army claim to be mounting an operation to free the Iraqi people from tyranny, and then end up treating them like this?

This has all happened because the coalition are still bogged down in Iraq. The US didn’t plan for any of this, all they knew they were going to do was attack the place. They had no strategy of what to do once they had ousted Saddam, no real plan on how to maintain law and order, return the country to order and get the hell out of there. I bet the administration didn’t reckon they’d still be there 3 years down the track. They probably had figured they’d be well on their way to attacking another country by now. So what happens when you get stuck like this? You ask your military to perform a job they were not trained to do. Let’s face it, they’re soldiers, not policemen.

Without trying to condone the recent actions of the aforementioned soldiers, they are being forced to police the country, when they were sent in to perform a completely different task altogether. A solder is trained to attack and disable, usually by killing its enemy. This is what is in the soldier’s head when he goes to war and this is the mentality he will hold while he serves his tour of duty. You cannot then successfully ask an army to become a police force. A soldier will want to protect his or her life and that of their comrades; while their presence may have a policing effect, any signs of trouble or potential conflict and soldiers will revert to their training. They are not police officers, they are soldiers trained to go to war and kill. This is why we keep seeing incidents of so called mistreatment and it will keep happening while ever Iraq is occupied.
None of this was ever supposed to happen, but I don’t think anyone had any idea what was supposed to happen. The longer the coalition stay there, the more they are damaging their whole campaign, and the more people will see this was a bad idea in the first place. The catch 22 is that they can’t just leave now, that would be even worse, the country would be left in turmoil; a likelihood of civil war and certainly no pro US government. There is real question whether the US and Britain can achieve their objectives and withdraw successfully; perhaps they need to compromise on some of those objectives because they need to hurry up and work out how to get out!