Country on Fire

Audrey Gillan in today’s Guardian reports on our heroes in Iraq and how they got away from a violent and nasty mob:

British soldiers yesterday gave dramatic accounts of how they escaped from their burning Warrior armoured vehicles after an angry mob attacked them with petrol bombs in downtown Basra, following the explosion of violence on Monday night.

The account goes on in detail to explain how this repulsive bunch of uncivilised sand-niggers maliciously and lawlessly attacked our legitimate peacekeeping force:

The patrol had been negotiating with an angry crowd when it became “pretty hostile, pretty quickly”, according to one soldier. Men then began throwing “rocks and bricks and metal bars, petrol bombs, buckets of petrol, tyres, anything they could get their hands on”.

These uncultured, ungrateful foreign scum, how dare they attack our glorious liberators? I don’t know, so I thought I’d look to see what caused the “explosion of violence” on Monday night.
From Reuter:

British forces have freed two undercover soldiers from jail in Basra after a day of rioting in the Iraqi city that was sparked when the soldiers fired on a police patrol.

Why would our brave soldiers fire on an Iraqi police patrol, when we are there working in collaboration with local forces? Is it possible that the police patrol were mistaken for the “enemy” by our selfless lads?

Police and local officials say the two undercover soldiers were arrested after opening fire on Iraqi police who approached them. They say the men were wearing traditional Arab headscarves and sitting in an unmarked car.

“They were driving a civilian car and were dressed in civilian clothes when shooting took place between them and Iraqi patrols,” an official in Basra said.

Mohammed al-Abadi, an official in the Basra governorate, says the two men looked suspicious to police.

“A policeman approached them and then one of these guys fired at him. Then the police managed to capture them,” Mr Abadi said.

“They refused to say what their mission was. They said they were British soldiers and (suggested) to ask their commander about their mission.”

Why would they fire on approaching policemen? What were they hiding? What would their commander know about the situation? Digging deeper, I wondered what they were protecting, what they were hiding, what was so dangerous or important that it required them to open fire and kill the very policemen they were supposed to be working in collaboration with against the “terrorists”. And I wondered also, why our brave boys were dressed like “terrorists” themselves!
Fattah al-Shaykh, member of the Iraqi National Assembly had this to say:

There have been indiscriminate arrests, the most recent of which was the arrest of Shaykh Ahmad al-Farqusi and two Basra citizens on the pretext that they had carried out terrorist operations to kill US soldiers. This is a baseless claim. This was confirmed to us by [name indistinct] the second secretary at the British Embassy in Baghdad, when we met with him a short while ago. He said that there is evidence on this. We say: You should come up with this evidence or forget about this issue. If you really want to look for truth, then we should resort to the Iraqi justice away from the British provocations against the sons of Basra, particularly what happened today when the sons of Basra caught two non-Iraqis, who seem to be Britons and were in a car of the Cressida type. It was a booby-trapped car laden with ammunition and was meant to explode in the centre of the city of Basra in the popular market. However, the sons of the city of Basra arrested them. They [the two non-Iraqis] then fired at the people there and killed some of them. The two arrested persons are now at the Intelligence Department in Basra, and they were held by the National Guard force, but the British occupation forces are still surrounding this department in an attempt to absolve them of the crime.

Why would our brave forces be dressing like “terrorists” in a Shi’ite city, in a car laden with ammo and explosives and then fire on Iraqi policemen (friendly fire?), duly killing the people they are meant to be working in collaboration with in order to “secure the peace”?

Unless there are far fewer terrorists than anyone ever expected….

Now I know we need to do some strange things in order to fight a war. There are all kinds of very dodgy things going on and some of them can be justified. After all, we all know that under-cover policeman have to cross the line into criminality to catch a bigger fish. Soemtimes an undercover operation is just so strategically vital, that it requires secrecy to the extent that a couple of soldiers dressed as Arabs need to be extracted with overwhelming force, or in this case, half a dozen tanks.

My concern is that since we got into this war thanks to Bushler’s lies and Bliar’s desire to be “blooded” like some ten-year old in his first fox-hunt, that not all our reasons are going to be kosher. Or in this case, halal.

It’s a bummer. Our soldiers are there now, wasting their undoubted skills on a war they should never have been sent to. So maybe we need to foster the violence a little more, to prolong our presence and get Bush’s pals some juicy contracts and justify a permaennt Jihad against the uncivilised Muslim scum of the world? And if that means blowing up the people we’er supposed to be saving, posing as terrorists ourselves, forever eradicating the dividing line between good and evil, right and wrong, so bloody what?