Tuesday, February 14, 2006

Common sense on the Iraq video

It comes from the saintly Craig Murray. He writes:

I may surprise you by starting with the observation that, on the scale of violence we have visited on Iraq, this was a negligible incident. People on all sides are dying every day. I have heard enough first hand accounts, from British diplomats and military, from journalists and NGO workers, to know that if it had been U.S. troops facing that mob of stone throwing youths, they would simply have opened fire and blown some of them away. The media would report that another eight “insurgents” had died in a “firefight”; it would be lucky to make a footnote.

If the troops had been mercenaries – and these so-called “PMCs” vastly outnumber the British army in Iraq – it would not have been a video camera but a heavy machine gun shooting from an upper window. In fact, what the soldiers here were doing is exactly what snatch squads did to members of mobs in Northern Ireland for thirty years.

And:

The British troops are in a completely impossible situation. Their role is to support a corrupt and inefficient Iraqi puppet administration which is incapable of exercising control, and would do little for good if it did have control. The vast majority of the Iraqi population do not want us there.

The real good that this video might have done is in driving home to the British public, against the ceaseless propaganda of the mainstream media, that we are not wanted. That stone-throwing crowd were Shias, for God’s sake. The official propaganda says that they are on “our” side.

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