Random thoughts about war

Some rambling and generally confused thoughts about the last week:


We've been at war for a week now, and already I've seen more information about the conflict on the news than I've ever read or watched about the 1st and 2nd world wars. I don't know how the troops can get on with fighting out there with all those journalists in the way. And is anybody else wondering when Sky News will be asking the military if they can mount cameras on troops' helmets? After all, they've already done their level best to turn this war into a large scale game of "Command and Conquer", so they may as well go the whole hog and try to get some sort of "Medal of Honour" thing going on as well. After all, since the last Gulf War there have been huge advances in game technology, and the news channels have to compete with the Playstation 2 to get the attention of their audience.

In the space of that week, the Dubya-Blair position has gone from "This will be over in a few weeks" to "Don't be surprised if we are fighting for months". Is anyone else getting the impression that the UK and US governments are entirely clueless about what to do now that their war is not running on schedule? Incidentally, does it annoy anyone else to hear pampered politicians, who's idea of a war zone is their wife finding out about them nobbing some fat-titted parliamentary researcher, refer to the troops doing the fighting as "we"? Unless you want to follow Winston Churchill's lead and go out there to fight this war yourself, enough with the 'we' already.

Bearing in mind that Saddam is loathed by millions of his own people, how much of a pigs ear must the coalition have made of this conflict to inspire not the Iraqi conscripts to fight ferociously. We were being told (and, in the face of all the evidence, are still being told by the likes of Rumsfield) that the biggest problems we would face would be how to look after the expected thousands of deserters. Also, if the US led invasion is so 'welcomed' by the people of Iraq, how come thousands of Iraqi's who left their homeland because they feared being killed by Saddam's troops, are returning home to join that same army and fight off the allied forces?

The parading of allied troops on Al-Jazeera was a chilling thing to watch; especially now that it appears Iraqi soldiers publicly executed some of them. However, the words of Dubya et al concerning "the humane treatment of POW's" rang rather hollow to me. If Saddam declared that the captured troops were not POW but 'illegal non-combatants' (because the UN hasn't sanctioned this war and so it could be said to be illegal under international law), and if he held them somewhere that was not Iraqi territory, does that then mean that he can do with them as he pleases? After all, that is exactly what America has done with the Taliban fighters captured in Afghanistan, and 2 of them have been beaten to death in Guantanamo Bay since they were taken there. If American troops are torturing foreign soldiers, can anyone give any good reason why Iraqi soldiers would be compassionate enough not to mistreat their prisoners?

If this war has nothing to do with oil, then why was securing the main Iraqi oilfields one of the first things US troops did? And why did Dubya make a point of stating that Saddam would be charged with war crimes if the oil fields were set ablaze as they were in Kuwait?

Whenever we hear of a friendly fire incident involving US troops firing on UK or other US troops, we roll our eyes skyward and tut at the gung ho inability of their army to keep their trigger fingers under control, and mentally file the information away as confirmation that the Americans could not find their backsides with both hands and a map. Yet when British troops kill other British troops in a friendly fire incident, it is a tragic accident that couldn't be avoided, and that sort of thing must be expected in a modern war.

Jack Straw actually did something worthwhile and raised the point that the Moslem world are quite remarkably annoyed that we're going to war with Iraq for not complying with UN resolutions, yet we leave Israel alone when they are just as guilty of this. If anything good were to come out of this war, it would be the US and UK actually following through on their commitment for Palestinian statehood. That would stop terrorism to a far greater degree than this war, as it would rob the Islamic extremists of one of their main causes for recruiting.

If Saddam does have weapons of mass destruction, then he's going to use them against allied forces. After all, he has nothing to lose at this stage. If we take that logic a step further, does that mean if no WOMD are used then this war could have been avoided had the weapons inspectors been allowed to finish their work? Or will there be another series of barefaced lies from the American and British governments concerning how Saddam was 'definitely a threat to world peace'?

I know I'm anti war and everything, but was I the only one who felt weirdly proud of our troops when the war started? I mean, this isn't exactly the most popular war in the history of the world, but they're there and they're doing their job to the best of their ability. What's more, they're doing it with equipment so substandard that many soldiers have had to buy their own boots, and use their own mobile phones to communicate with other troops. I wish we weren't using well-trained and brave soldiers to give a veneer of legitimacy to the machinations of an unelected oil spiv.