Don’t blame the squaddies
Andrew Gilligan says the British soldiers who beat up the Iraqi rioters have become surrogates for our deep moral worry about Iraq Watching the News of the World’s video of those Light Infantry soldiers attacking four young Iraqi rioters, it is hard not to feel distaste. Watching the reaction afterwards brings irresistibly to mind Wilde’s view on the death of Little Nell: you would have to have a heart of stone not to laugh.
This ‘horror ... that will shock the world’, this ‘lasting stain on the morals of the army’, this ‘appalling footage ... [that has] at a stroke trashed the reputation of our forces around the globe’, to quote from some of the press coverage, is, according to the MoD, ‘extremely serious’ and has been made the ‘top priority’ investigation for the Royal Military Police. A higher priority, therefore, than the several investigations into British soldiers actually killing people.
What was done by the Americans at Abu Ghraib, new pictures of which were released this week, was extremely serious. What was done to Baha Mousa, allegedly beaten to death in cold blood while in British army custody, was extremely serious. What happened to these four youths, beaten up in the middle of a fierce riot after throwing stones and perhaps explosives at the British, was unpleasant and excessive, but it wasn’t the Rape of Nanking. Some of the victims walked away; there is no evidence that any were permanently injured.
The main thing that was ‘shocking’ and ‘aberrant’ about this incident was that it was filmed. The main senses offended were ours, in particular our self-delusion that British troops never beat anyone up, and our belief that wars and occupations can somehow be composed of nice people behaving nicely to one another.
The cry has gone up, as it always does, that the masses of southern Iraq will see the images on al-Jazeera and rise up against the oppressor Brits. The local council has indeed broken off relations, although this has rather more to do with Britain’s attempts to curb their police force’s own abuse of human rights than with any brutality of ours. There has indeed been a demonstration outside the British consulate in Basra — of a hundred people.
But there hasn’t been any kind of serious upsurge of violence against the British in the days since, and there won’t be, unless the local politicians, or the Iranians, choose to orchestrate one. There wasn’t one after the last lot of British abuse pictures, showing the Camp Breadbasket incidents, which were much worse, because the Iraqis in those pictures were being humiliated. Those pictures lasted only a day or so on the Arab TV networks. These images, too, are getting less play on al-Jazeera than they are on British TV. The fact is that the people of southern Iraq know what occupation is like. They don’t need TV pictures to show them. Some of their sons and husbands have been on the receiving end of Her Majesty’s toecaps for the past three years.
This is not to suggest that the British army is habitually brutal. It is not; far from it. But this is what sometimes happens in hot blood when you pitch kids from Durham and Birmingham and London and the West Country into an impossible situation not of their own making. And here is something else: in a purely tactical sense, it often works. Beating up rioters deters rioting. It looked to me like there was an element of planning, possibly from above, in what those soldiers did. It might have been a rational response to the rocks in the hard place.
The pretence implicit in so much of the coverage, and in the MoD’s reaction to it, was that the beatings would disturb some sort of strategic equilibrium, would place the army’s ‘good relations’ with the local population at risk. But the battle for Iraqi hearts and minds ended 18 months ago, if not before, in a Coalition defeat. Across most of southern Iraq, the British, who now wisely spend much of their time in barracks, are of little relevance.
Our presence remains necessary, not for any real tactical or military purpose but for the simple strategic reason of providing political support to our closest ally. We should not have gone there in the first place, but having gone we must stay. However stupid and misguided the regime in Washington may be, the alliance with the US transcends the Bush administration, as does the need for a continued American presence in Iraq. A British withdrawal, or a drastic troop reduction out of proportion with those being made by the US, would increase the pressure on the Americans to pull out.
In the American area of operations, there remains a real struggle for supremacy, though there are also some intriguing signs that it may at last be moving from military and terrorist to political battlefields. A US withdrawal from the still-contested centre might be disastrous for the elected government of Iraq, and would certainly be disastrous for American credibility. Despite Bush, it is still possible to believe that that would be a bad thing. As far as the British are concerned, however, the real battle is being waged not in Iraq, but in Britain.
You can see that in the way that every piece of army news from Basra and Amara, the beatings being only the latest, has been invested with far more significance than it merits in its own right. The death of the 100th British soldier, Corporal Gordon Pritchard, last month was a tragedy for his family. The last letter written by another soldier to die, Private Leon Spicer, read out by his mother on the radio, brought tears to many people’s eyes, including mine.
But the death of 100 soldiers was not, in its own right, nearly as important a news event as it was made to seem. For a start, the true figure was 76 — the others were killed in road accidents or training. Seventysix dead in just under three years is remarkably, almost miraculously, few, and a level of casualties that the army can quite easily live with. The number killed in combat over the past year has been 12, far lower than even the quietest years in Northern Ireland — a struggle which seldom attracted this degree of anguish.
The fact is that these soldiers, the dead ones and the brutal ones, have become surrogates for our deep moral worry about Iraq, our ambivalance about what it is doing to us and to our army. The bad guys aren’t really the poor squaddies who carried out the beatings. The bad guys are the people who put them there: from the senior officers who failed to ensure that they were adequately equipped and trained, right up to Field Marshal Blair and his imperial general staff — and not forgetting the editorial teams of the more warmongering newspapers, such as the News of the World, since you ask.
In the next act in this drama of moral displacement, we will see another collection of teenagers from council estates hauled trembling before courts martial in Colchester: the lightening rods, the sin-eaters, offered in expiation for the crimes of our leaders.
The British army has carried many burdens in these last few Blair years. But this is perhaps the heaviest it must bear.
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