Iraq, ten years on

Shock and awe - 10 years on

It is ten years since the U.S. led invasion force launched the shock and awe campaign against Iraq in the fight against terror and search for weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) and are things really any better today than they were then?

Just this week another car bomb has gone off killing ten people in Basra, the former temporary home of the British troops and a recent article in the Guardian told of the now infamous sledgehammer man who tried to tear down Saddam's statue, a story of regret. He claimed that once the people of Iraq had but one dictator to deal with but that now they have hundreds. Presumably he was talking of private defence contractors such as XE, formerly Blackwater and other construction companies (Halliburton)  and the rest of the military industrial complex, that have made millions of dollars off of the back of the suffering of the Iraqi people in the name of 'New Democracy', freedom and western safety.

The British mainstream press have also been focussing on the issue of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and the debilitating affect it has had on those troops that have been fortunate enough to make it home from their numerous tours of an illegal war. Mental illness is a very serious issue and one that seems to have not been dealt with overly well by the military. The BBC news bulletins have regularly featured the issue in the build up to the tenth anniversary and a startling admission from a Navy Psychiatrist that once a soldier exhibits signs of mental disorder they are discharged and tend to slip out of the system. A disgrace for the Ministry of Defence to bare in my opinion.

The issue of PTSD does raise a simple question regarding human nature; if it is human nature to wage war and be aggressive as some commentators like to claim then why is it we have so many war veterans suffering with the affects of war on their minds?

The latest push regarding PTSD comes against the background of the increasing use of drones in war, enacted by the Bush administration and then ratified and used exponentially under the Nobel Peace winning administration of Barack Obama. If Malcolm X was unimpressed with Martin Luther King, Jr winning the same award because there was still war, I wonder what he would have made about giving it to a man who thinks that indiscriminately bombing another country from the comfort of your arm chair and an X-box controller is OK?

The coalition bring down the statue

The BBC have also been stating the number of people that have died in the conflict so far.

Between 2003 and 2009, when the war is meant to have ended, 179 British service personnel have died. Depending where you look the civilian death toll varies. The Iraq Body Count website has the figure at somewhere between 111,762 and 122,224 civilian deaths with a further 12,000 to be added subject to a Wikileaks document. On a BBC news broadcast earlier today they mentioned it could be as high as 650,000 but called this an 'upper estimate'. The true number is unknown to us and in the past the figures have wrestled with the term 'enemy combatants' as they have been unable to be sure whether some of the people they have massacred were indeed the supposed enemy or not. Are they not still humans?

This strange world view of polarising people is one that has been difficult to shake myself in the past. The saying is that "one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter." It seems if you throw up a tent on the streets of London to protest against a corrupt system you get labelled a terrorist. Throw up a military base in downtown Baghdad and kill a few hundred thousand people and they call you a liberation force. I wonder what people in the West would do if an aggressor launched a devastating bombing campaign, destroying schools and levelling our infrastructure, before sending in an invading force, setting up check points and pulling our families out of our own homes at gun point?

Thanks to Hollywood I do not have to wonder, they have done it for me.

The latest action movie churned out of the special effects factory line was Red Dawn, a remake of a 1980's Patrick Swayze movie. One thing that stood out about the film, aside from the fact they swapped the Chinese as military force for a North Korean army backed by Russia, was a quote from the main character: "I am gonna fight. It's easier for me, because I've done it before. The rest of you are gonna have a tougher choice. I'm not gonna sell it, it's too ugly for that. These soldiers don't want to be here. For them this is some place, for us it's our home. When you fight in your backyard it makes just a little more sense, and hurts a little less."

They could have been talking about the insurgents in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The only people who have benefited from these wars are the defence contractors and engineering companies who have had to rebuild the infrastructure we destroyed searching for something that was not there. What price will they be willing to pay to justify their next war?