The pity of war
James Delingpole
You were probably expecting me to review Ross Kemp in Afghanistan (Sky One, Monday) this week but I’m a bit off Afghanistan programmes at the moment. Not to the point where I won’t watch them all the time to the exclusion of almost all else. Just to the point where, at the end, I feel ever so slightly, ‘Was that it?’ Don’t get me wrong. I have the most enormous respect for the brave folk who make these programmes — still more for the men doing the fighting. But I’ve yet to see the documentary which properly conveys to people who’ve never done it — e.g., me — what it’s like to be involved in a serious firefight.
On his tour of Helmand with the Royal Anglian Regiment, Kemp experienced a gun battle of pant-wetting intensity. Seven rocket-propelled grenades flew inches above his head. He thought he was going to die. In the hands of a print journalist or novelist, this would be gold dust. On TV — to judge by the preview clip I saw on the internet — it’s a lot of wasted risk. Your cameraman quite rightly hits the deck. So does your presenter. You get six minutes’ wobbly close-ups of Afghan dust, with background whizzes and bangs which must mean an awful lot if you’re there — but perhaps less if you’re the viewer.
The best war footage seems to come more by luck than accident. My current favourite is the one on YouTube where someone is filming from a Humvee driving fast in convoy down a highway in Iraq. Suddenly the roadside just ahead erupts in a huge bubble, almost as if it’s made of liquid. The driver swerves instinctively and the crew swear with relief. They’ve just survived an enormous bomb buried beneath the tarmac.
But I’m off Iraq, too, a bit, I’m afraid. What spoiled it for me was True Stories: No End in Sight (More 4, Tuesday), Charles Ferguson’s slick, beautifully scored, monumentally depressing exposé, with superb whistleblowing testimony from many of the key players, about why and how post-war Iraq went so horribly wrong.
If you’ve read books like Imperial Life in the Emerald City or Rory Stewart’s Occupational Hazards you’ll probably have a rough idea already. But I’ve never seen a TV documentary which has put the case for the prosecution against Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Bremer and their crew quite so comprehensively and damningly.
The shambles in post-war Iraq, it demonstrated, was a problem almost wholly of their making. Against all the best advice given them by those experts on the ground who knew and understood the region, Rummy and co. made a series of fantastically stupid and counterproductive decisions which led directly to the quagmire we’re only just crawling out of today.
Worst of these were compulsory deBaathification and the disbandment of the army. At a stroke, the US administration put all the people who could have held the country together — academics, administrators, engineers and the military — out of a job. Not just that, but it made an awful lot of people who knew how to use guns and explosives and where to get hold of them very, very angry and resentful.
One of the witnesses was a US army colonel almost in tears of frustration, as he described how an Iraqi general had placed himself and 150,000 men at his disposal, to help police the chaos that would inevitably ensue if the country wasn’t swiftly put under martial law. Instead, millions of Iraqi breadwinners were denied the means to support their families. And with the US adminstration’s tacit approval, Iraq’s criminal gangs were allowed to roam free, looting everything from office buildings to the National Museum and the National Library. At a stroke, the archives and records relating to one of the world’s oldest civilisations were destroyed.
If your country was being run by an occupying power of such breathtaking ineptitude wouldn’t you want to kill their troops? I would. Which is a terrible thing to have to confess, for it suddenly puts me on the level with so many of the West-hating dhimmis and surrender monkeys one ought properly to despise, from Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, George Galloway and Robert Fisk to anyone who ever wore one of those silly badges saying ‘Not in my name’.
This is why there can be no corner of hell hot enough, nor bottom-penetrating spike sharp or poisonous enough, for tosser Rumsfeld and his evil crew. The damage they have done to Iraq is bad enough; worse still are all the lives and limbs, on both sides, that they have so needlessly squandered. But surely the worst thing of all is the damage they have wrought to the noble idea that peace and Western-style democracy can and should be shared by everyone in the world.
Thanks to their idiocy, they have made credible, nay mainstream, the views of all those unreconstructed Marxists, Jihadists and leftliberal bien-pensants who have no interest in liberating the oppressed or making the world a freer, happier, fairer place. All these people want is, daily, to have their worst, most cynical suspicions confirmed. And, thanks to Rummy and co., they have been.
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