Robin Cook: Our troops are part of the problem

[muriel_volestrangler]

He used to be our Foreign Secretary, and I'm hoping he will be again.

Heavy-handed occupation is not a solution to the Iraqi insurgency

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Heavy-handed US occupation is not the solution to the insurgency but a large part of the problem. US army rules of engagement appear to give much greater weight to killing insurgents than to protecting civilian lives. It is alarming testimony to its trigger-happy approach that statistics compiled by the Iraqi health ministry confirm that twice as many civilians have been killed by US military action as by terrorist bombs. The predictable result is that the US occupation breeds new recruits for the insurgency at a faster rate than it kills existing members of it.

Nor is it only the fatalities of US forces that foster resentment. Homes in every neighbourhood have been trashed by US forces in futile searches for insurgents. Every extended family knows of at least one person who has disappeared into the new gulag of detainees. A year after President Bush promised to demolish Abu Ghraib it is being expanded, rather than closed, to accommodate an even larger number than were held there by Saddam.

It is an inexorable law of foreign occupations that the greater the repression, the stronger the resistance. The reduction in US forces may be planned for the wrong reason, but should be welcomed as a step in the right direction. It does though present the coalition governments with a rhetorical problem.
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Apparently, when Donald Rumsfeld warned that the insurgency could take a decade to contain he did not mean the US troops would stay that long to defeat it but that they would expect the Iraqi forces to do the job for them. In short, completing the job now is not bringing peace to Iraq but equipping the Iraqis to fight their own civil war, possibly for another 10 years. The Iraqi government itself appears to have a shrewd grasp of its need to find other allies, hence its surprising agreement last week to a mutual defence pact with Iran.
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1528954,00.html