Oil pipelines are blown up, water mains ruptured, every day one or two soldiers are killed, and though you tend not to hear so much about it, every day the Americans kill half a dozen Iraqis sometimes by accident, sometimes deliberately, they don't seem to care which.
Watching from a long distance it's instructive to compare TV news channels' coverage. The US ones, all owned by people who support Bush's administration, are totally gung-ho, uncritical of US armed forces and hopelessly biased against 'A-rabs'. These channels tell us the violence in Iraq is caused by sinister organised forces dedicated to preventing the 'good guys'– the US government – from helping the majority of the Iraqi people who are only desperate for the benefits of Pax Americana. Well, they would say that.
Much more interesting is the selective amnesia of the British channels. Like the rest of the world they realise that a growing number of Iraqis hate the American troops whose behaviour is confirming everything Saddam Hussein's propaganda said about the USA. The British channels make unfavourable comparisons with the behaviour of British troops in their wee bit of Iraq and, this is the funny bit, proclaim that the British troops learnt how to treat the natives from their long years in, yes, Norn Irn. They are now apparently giving lessons to Americans in how to kick doors down, wreck houses and arrest people in the naycest possible way.
Presumably those giving lessons wouldn't include the guys under investigation for torturing Iraqi prisoners and taking photos of the proceedings which they cunningly handed in to the local chemist for developing.
Let's face it, there's no acceptable way of wrecking someone's house, abusing the women and arresting the men in it. The victims never forget and never forgive. The British army lost it here thirty-three years ago and never recovered any support or respect among nationalists. Tens of thousands of destructive 'searches' were inflicted on homes in nationalist districts. Often, despicably, troops searched a dozen houses instead of heading straight for the one an informer had told them contained weapons in the misguided belief that people would imagine soldiers came upon the cache by accident. Didn't matter that they enraged eleven other families. They didn't count.
You can also watch on TV scenes uncannily reminiscent of early British army propaganda here. BBC used to broadcast stuff like a soldier replacing the Yale lock on a front door a search party had smashed, grinning like Benny Hill over his shoulder at the camera. There was no film of the new lock hitting the next 'pig' along the street. So now you can watch US troops letting Iraqis look through their binoculars to prove they're not X-ray. You can just see from the way the Iraqi man hands the binoculars back how he cordially detests the American soldier and how he would help anyone have a crack at him.
Despite the portrayal on TV, many Americans are fully aware of the truth. An article in the Washington Post the other day by a Professor of Public Policy, James L. Larocca, who was a US Navy officer in Vietnam in 1967 sums up the problem. Professor Larocca recalls the reaction of Vietnamese roughed up by US troops as their homes were wrecked. 'The hatred in their eyes would be as pure as any you would ever see. It would last forever. You would never forget it.' As Larocca says, he saw again on the evening news when some kid from Arkansas or Detroit was standing on the neck of an Iraqi, 'the kind of white-hot hatred that will take a thousand years to extinguish'.
Now if the British are truly teaching the Americans how to operate in such circumstances can it be long before they advise the Americans to turn the 6,000 new pipeline guards into a local militia? Wouldn't the members of this militia have to be loyal to the American administration and prepared to carry out the orders of the American proconsul's puppet government? They would begin to take the flak and US troop numbers could be reduced.What would you call this process? Iraqisation perhaps? Just like Vietnamisation and our local version, Ulsterisation. There's only one snag: it has never worked anywhere. The local militia concept is fatally flawed because it always has an obvious political purpose, namely to sustain a regime a substantial proportion of the population rejects. In Iraq, to be set up by Americans is the kiss of death for any organisation, especially a militia, just as anything here associated with the British army is irrevocably tainted for nationalists. That's why the local RIR will go.
