[PEN-L:36301] "Bring our lads home" - Robin Cook

[Chris Burford <cburford@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Bring our lads home

By Robin Cook

Let?s send Rumsfeld and his hawks to war instead

Sunday Mirror March 30 2003


This was meant to be a quick, easy war. Shortly before I resigned a
Cabinet colleague told me not to worry about the political fall-out. The
war would be finished long before polling day for the May local
elections. 

I just hope those who expected a quick victory are proved rights.
I have already had my fill of this bloody and unnecessary war.
I want our troops home and I want them home before more of them are
killed.

It is OK for Bush to say the war will go on for as long as it takes. He
is sitting pretty in the comfort 
of  Camp David protected by scores of security men to keep him
safe.
It is easy to show you are resolute when you are not one of the poor guys
stuck in a sandstorm peering around for snipers. 

This week British forces have shown bravery under attack and
determination in atrocious weather conditions. They are too disciplined
to say it, but they must have asked each other how British forces ended
up exposed by the mistakes of US politicians.

We were told the Iraqi army would be so joyful to be attacked that it
would not fight. A close colleague of US Defence Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld predicted the march to Baghdad would be ?a cakewalk?.

We were told Saddam?s troops would surrender. A few days before the war
Vice-President Dick Cheney predicted that the Republican Guard would lay
down their weapons. 

We were told that the local population would welcome their
invaders as liberators. Paul Wolfowitz, No 2 at the Pentagon, promised
that our tanks would be greeted ?with an explosion of joy and
relief?.

Personally I would like to volunteer Rumsfeld, Cheney and Wolfowitz to be
?embedded? alongside the journalists with the forward units. That would
give them a chance to hear what the troops fighting for every bridge over
the Euphrates think about their promises.

The top US General, William Wallace, has let the cat out of the bag. ?The
enemy we are fighting is different from the one we?d war-gamed.?

War is not some kind of harmless arcade game. Nobody should start a war
on the assumption that the enemy?s army will co-operate. But that is
exactly what President Bush has done. And now his Marines have reached
the outskirts of Baghdad he does not seem to know what to do next.

It was not meant to be like this. By the time we got to Baghdad Saddam
was supposed to have crumpled. 

A few days before I resigned I was assured that Saddam would be
overthrown by his associates to save their own skins. But they would only
do it ?at five minutes past midnight?. It is now long past that time and
Saddam is still there. To compensate yesterday we blew up a statue of
Saddam in Basra. A statue! It is not the statue that terrifies the local
people but the man himself and they know Saddam is still in control of
Baghdad.

Having marched us up this cul-de-sac, Donald Rumsfeld has now come up
with a new tactic. Instead of going into Baghdad we should sit down
outside it until Saddam surrenders. There is no more brutal form of
warfare than a  siege. People go hungry. The water and power to
provide the sinews of a city snap. Children die.

You can catch a glimpse of what would happen in Baghdad under siege by
looking at Basra. Its residents have endured several days of summer heat
without water. 

In desperation they have been drinking water from the river into which
the sewage empties. These conditions are ripe for cholera.

Last week President Bush promised that ?Iraqis will see the great
compassion of the US?. They certainly do not see it now. They don?t see
it in Baghdad. What they see are women and children killed when missiles
fall on market places. They don?t see it in Basra. What they see is the
suffering of their families with no water, precious little food and no
power to cook. There will be a long-term legacy of hatred for the West if
the Iraqi people continue to suffer from the effects of the war we
started. 

Washington got it wrong over the ease with which the war could be won.
Washington could be just as wrong about the difficulty of running Iraq
when the fighting stops. Already there are real differences between
Britain and America over how to run post-war Iraq.

The dispute over the management of the port of Umm Qasr is a good
example. British officers sensibly took the view that the best and the
most popular solution would be to find local Iraqis who knew how to do
it. Instead the US have appointed an American company to take over the
Iraqi asset. And guess what? Stevedore Service of America who got the
contract have a chairman known for his donations to the Republican
Party.

The argument between Blair and Bush over whether the UN will be in charge
of the reconstruction of Iraq is about more than international
legitimacy. It is about whether the Iraqi people can have confidence that
their country is being run for the benefit of themselves or for the
benefit of the US.

Yesterday there was a sad and moving ceremony as the bodies of our brave
soldiers were brought back to Britain. The Ministry of Defence announced
that they were to be buried in Britain out of consideration for their
families We must do all we can to ease the grief of those who have lost a
husband or a son, cut down in their prime. Yet I can?t help asking myself
if there was not a better way? 

[article as printed ends with last line missing]