[Vision2020] How the Brits see it! From the Observer

[thansen@moscow.com]

But then we haven't been there that long, either.  Give Donny Rumsfeld another 
four years.  I think that we can surpass Saddam's record before President 
Quayle is inaugurated in January 2009.

Tom Hansen

> All,
> 
> It is interesting to get a perspective from our friends from across the
> pond. How about the statement ....."fewer people were being tortured by
> the Americans than under Saddam." 
> 
> Dick Schmidt
> 
> 
> We stand in the dock with America 
> 
> Henry Porter says it is not just individual soldiers who are at fault -
> the politicians are to blame too 
> 
> Sunday May 9, 2004
> The Observer 
> 
> As he looked up at the members of the Senate Armed Services Committee -
> a veritable Mount Rushmore of experience and forbidding cragginess - and
> as Senators Warner, Kennedy, McCain, Byrd and Levin took turns to
> examine Donald Rumsfeld, the US Defence Secretary, you felt something of
> the old republic's basic decency beginning to reassert itself: a glimmer
> of light in what has been a historically disastrous week for America,
> the values of the West and British international standing. 
> For Bush, who was pressed by his staffers into an apology only on
> Thursday - a week after the torture story broke - and for his
> none-too-impressive National Security Advisor, Condoleezza Rice,
> Rumsfeld's humiliation offered some respite. Crouching against the
> dugout wall, mopping their brows and ruefully thanking their temporary
> good fortune were members of the inner core of Tony Blair's government.
> They live to squirm another day, though sadly that will not be in front
> of the US Senate in a towering rage. 
> 
> It is right that the shock delivered by the photographs from Abu Ghraib
> prison should have been mostly felt on the other side of the Atlantic.
> The perpetrators of these acts were American and the product of the
> peculiar alarm and righteousness affecting US society at the moment. 
> 
> But we must share responsibility for the unravelling situation in Iraq.
> Militarily we are America's junior partner, but in terms of the moral
> burden we are its equal. We provided the only significant support for
> the war and were in a position to insist on certain safeguards and
> standards of conduct. So we can be sure that the fire will be trained on
> Britain soon, particularly if, as seems likely, it is established that
> some of our troops have been abusing Iraqi prisoners of war. 
> 
> The evidence from Abu Ghraib has provoked cold fury on both sides of the
> debate about the war. Those who supported the war on the grounds that it
> would bring relief and democracy to the Iraqis are appalled that they
> have been so betrayed. And the millions who were opposed to the invasion
> feel their pessimism has been more than vindicated by the brutality on
> show in the papers last week. 
> 
> We no longer have to argue the toss about weapons of mass destruction or
> whether it was possible to install a democracy in Iraq because the only
> live issue is whether Iraq is being run humanely and efficiently. On the
> evidence of Major-General Taguba's report into Abu Ghraib we can all
> agree that it is not. More important, it must be plain to us all that
> there never was a coherent plan for the physical and institutional
> restructuring of Iraq, at least none that has been evident in the last
> year, and any hope of mustering some sense in the situation has been
> overwhelmed by the Pentagon's arrogance, incompetence, careless
> brutality and inability to learn from its mistakes. 
> 
> That's why Donald Rumsfeld must resign and why the neo-conservatives
> should be kept away from any further role in the planning of Iraq's
> future. 
> 
> Less obviously, it is also the reason that Tony Blair is in such
> trouble. In the run-up to the invasion, the Prime Minister was probably
> the only person outside America able to insist that a plan covering
> everything from the water supply to the handling of Shia extremists and
> the running of the prison system was pinned up on the wall along with
> the bombing schedules. 
> 
> This he conspicuously failed to do. He neglected his duty to the peace
> and failed to monitor and mould our involvement with the US government
> and its forces. British interests - our voice, our standing in the
> world, our ability to approach the conference table with a clear
> conscience - have been severely damaged by association, and will suffer
> even more if the allegations made by the Daily Mirror turn out to be
> true. 
> 
> In America, the way this story has built over the past 10 days will have
> lasting effects on morale and the country's willingness to engage with
> the world to the world's benefit. The shock is probably salutary. Since
> 9/11 the US has been generating some very unpleasant energies. This can
> be seen in such disparate developments as Disney's attempt to block
> Michael Moore's film Fahrenheit 9/11 (because it was critical of Bush's
> relationship with powerful Saudi families) and in the hysterical
> treatment of tourists passing through US immigration which has become
> inexplicably rude and vindictive towards those who simply want to see
> the sights in New York, LA and Florida. 
> 
> Americans seem unaware of what they have been losing. Last week, before
> the full impact of Abu Ghraib had been felt, there was a story in the
> New York Times about two of the post-9/11 detainees. Javaid Iqbal, a
> Pakistani who was married and American, and an Egyptian resident named
> Ehab Elmaghraby were both arrested without charges and held in solitary
> confinement in a federal detention centre. 
> 
> I quote from Nina Bernstein's story about their lawsuit: 'The men were
> repeatedly slammed into walls and dragged across the floor while
> shackled and manacled, kicked and punched until they bled, cursed as
> "terrorists" and "Muslim bastards" and subjected to multiple unnecessary
> body-cavity searches, including one during which correction officers
> inserted a flashlight in Mr Elmaghraby's rectum, making him bleed.' 
> 
> Sounds familiar? Yes, but this was Brooklyn not Abu Ghraib, and the
> story, which received very little attention at the beginning of last
> week, should lead Americans to wonder if there is not something rotten
> beginning to take hold at the heart of their state. 
> 
> Some bad habits of mind have been growing in the US, and not just since
> 9/11. My own belief is that the media, with a few exceptions, are too
> respectful of authority and too careful with their audience. Patriotism
> takes precedence; and nothing must be allowed to ruffle the equable life
> of the average American, his esteem for himself and his country. 
> 
> Still, the reaction to the Abu Ghraib photographs has been encouraging
> and it was good to see three or four young people interrupt the Rumsfeld
> hearing with shouts for his resignation. They expressed the voice of
> America every inch as much as the cold anger of Senator John McCain.
> Decency, one hopes, will prevail at the end of the brief night of
> neo-conservatism. 
> 
> We in Britain should also look with an unsparing eye at our motives and
> the ideas that inform our dealings with world. The government was wrong
> about the threat that Iraq posed and, as important, wrong about what
> could be achieved by an almost exclusive Anglo-American invasion. The
> torture pictures have become a powerful symbol of the mistakes we have
> made. 
> 
> It would be interesting to know whether this has completely penetrated
> the consciousness of Blair's government. The group-think at Number 10 is
> focused on democratic riches to be claimed five years down the line, a
> vision which soars over the temporary agonies of Falluja and Abu Ghraib
> and implies that the Prime Minister cannot be properly judged to have
> succeeded or failed until we know one way or the other whether the
> democratic implant has taken. 
> 
> In the current circumstances, this is an astonishingly bold, not to say
> unresponsive, strategy. 
> 
> But it was not just Tony Blair who failed us. Under the leadership of
> Iain Duncan Smith, the Conservative Party mistook the neo-cons in the
> Pentagon as kindred spirits when it should instinctively have known that
> men like Rumsfeld, Cheney and Wolfowitz were peddling heroin rather than
> antibiotics. As the late political philosopher Michael Oakeshott said:
> 'The man of conservative temperament believes that a known good is not
> lightly to be surrendered for an unknown better ... What others
> plausibly identify as timidity, he recognises in himself as rational
> prudence.' 
> 
> Kenneth Clarke understood that and the Liberal Democrat foreign affairs
> spokesman, Menzies Campbell, the most articulate critic of the war on
> the opposition benches, recognised the risks from the word go. 
> 
> The Conservatives' compass was thrown just as badly by the neo-cons as
> Blair's was. Their doubts, however, are beginning to show. Last week
> Boris Johnson wrote a despairing column in the Daily Telegraph in which
> he almost recanted his party's policy, but pulled up at the last with
> the argument that fewer people were being tortured by the Americans than
> under Saddam. That seemed to me to be almost satirical self-sabotage. 
> 
> But does he have a point? Well, there are areas of peace and stability
> in Iraq, generally people are freer than they were under Saddam and,
> despite Abu Ghraib, we all know that the very large majority of British
> and American troops are decent people doing their level best in
> conditions that get worse by the day. 
> 
> At the end of this harrowing week, we should not make the mistake of
> turning our shocked reaction on to the armed services. It is the
> politicians who must carry the can, not Lynndie England or the as yet
> unidentified men from the Queen's Lancashire Regiment. 
> 
> 



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