Wickham's musings from Chalke

The Sunday Times reports that the US is accused of running torture flights to other countries with Iraqi insurgents for “torture by proxy”.

Countries with poor human rights records to which the Americans have delivered prisoners include Egypt, Syria, Jordan and Uzbekistan according to confidential logs obtained by the Sunday Times.

It is suggested that prisoners for serious interrogation go to Jordan, those for torture go to Syria and those to disappear go to Egypt.

Even if this is not true, the mere suggestion makes me lose confidence in the American tactics in Iraq. They are always rough, as they were in Vietnam. The only way they know to deal with a situation is to go in with massive firepower and obliterate everyone and everything, including civilians.

The Falluja offensive against insurgents has resulted in possibly more than a thousand deaths compared with only eighteen Americans. It isn’t only the human toll that disturbs me. The city is severely damaged. The troops hardly ever enter a building by the door in case it is booby-trapped; they blast through a wall. The Iraqis are poor. How will a family be able to get a new door lock, let alone a new house? Reconstruction will cost billions of dollars financed probably by the World Bank, the UN or the United States. Taxpayers all over the world will be paying for it.

Like many others I was uneasy about the war in the first place but went along with it because Saddam Hussein’s regime was torturing to death about twenty-five people a week and Saddam’s successor was likely to be Uday who was a psychopath, even having his own football team tortured.

The Americans have smashed the people and the infrastructure and conditions are now far worse than when Saddam was there. It is suggested that many of the leaders of the insurgency have escaped to other cities where they will continue the fight. US actions will only encourage more men to join the insurgency.

There is still bad feeling between Muslims and Christians eight hundred years after the crusades and I believe America has ensured that this will continue for another millennium.

There are other ways of getting rid of a regime. A common one is to persuade one of the generals who controls a large number of troops to mount a coup. This often ensures that the army, civil service, electricity supplies and so on remain intact and the previous dictator and his family are exiled. It’s a pity this was not possible on this occasion.

Have the Americans and British really considered what would happen if they pulled out immediately? The insurgents would be surprised and there would be a pause in fighting. A window would be created for the new government to be established. Even a civil war wouldn’t create the carnage now seen in Iraq.

It’s just been announced that Colin Powell, who I think was the most senior military commander in the first Gulf war (not the general who ran the war but the senior staff general above him) has resigned from George W Bush’s cabinet. Although a military man he was considered a moderate and hadn’t managed to get his views accepted much. He was in favour of another UN resolution before the latest Iraq war but the hawks like Rumsfeld won the day. He also failed to get a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians. This emphasises my view that America is being much too heavy-handed and brutal in it’s foreign policy and the way it conducts it’s wars.