Iraq: it’s the long way home for coalition troops

Coalition forces have been slowly leaving Iraq for a while now. But now it's getting real as British forces have begun their official withdrawal from Iraq. Units stationed in Basra have handed over and are on their way home.
Only the handover was to a US general, not to an Iraqi one. A multi-national division has taken over. So the Brits left, someone else moved in and I am feeling like someone is playing me for a fool, thinking I can’t tell the difference between ‘leaving Iraq’ and ‘passing the parcel’.

Still, by the end of May Britain will withdraw more than 3,500 troops, leaving only 400 in training and HQ positions.

This is good, of course. This is no time to count the dead, assess what has been achieved. And what hasn’t. No time to think unhappy thoughts. But I can’t help it.
179 British dead since 2003. Of course it could have been worse. It was worse for Iraqis. And for every person dead, dozens are left bereft and crushed. Those are the mathematics of war and we ought to always remember. One death is one death too many.

Now obviously I was against going into Iraq in the first place.
But once there you can’t just pack up and go whenever you feel like it. Realities on the ground cannot be ignored and whatever the reasons for going in, Basra is just not safe enough to leave just yet. Partial withdrawal is possible but total coalition withdrawal is not an option. Yet the presence of Western troops is part of what makes the place unsafe, the thing that rebels fight against and suicide bombers launch themselves at.

Now Maj Gen Salmon says that Iraq is in a much better place than it was under Saddam. It’s more stable, he says, and freer. Investment is pouring into the country, the Iraqi security forces are gaining confidence, free and fair elections have now been held. Iraq is a new country. He says.
How much of this is true?
How much of this will still be true when the US forces finally withdraw, when the cat’s away for good and the mice can run riot if they so will?

In Basra, the hand-over won’t change that much as the Brits were a shadow force letting the Iraqi Army and police remain the most visible presence on the streets and the Yanks will do the same. Coalition troops are not that visible. But they are still there and everyone knows it. They provide a security blanket for some, a red rag for others but even when they stay at home, they are very much still there. And part of the reason they are still there is that they are propping up structures that would cave in without them.
I’m not talking semantics here.
British troops in Basra spent time and effort training the Iraqi army. But they lacked the bandwidth to train police officers and as they withdraw, Maj Gen Salmon deplores the lack of resources to build up a credible police force in Basra. So yes, Iraqi police remains visible. And ineffectual. But backed by the big boys with the big guns.

And US troops will be there until the end of 2011.
How entrenched will they be by then?
How essential will they be to any equilibrium that has been created?
A post-war situation is an explosive chemical compound and any ingredient to stability may be more important than even its core players realise. What if the US presence becomes such an ingredient – by design, flaw or default?
Once the equilibrium has been achieved, you make changes at your own peril.
And as change goes, it doesn’t come bigger than withdrawing a foreign army.

But there is always hope that the new systems and structures will be robust enough by then to survive this change and the complete US withdrawal.
Naturally, the coalition forces have been training Iraqis to replace them. Of course they have. They’ve been working on infrastructure and preparing for transition. Ignoring the elephant in the room that is the future legitimacy of any organisation and structure that has been touched by the invasion forces.
Let’s face it, Saddam was a blood-thirsty dictator. But he had been backed by the Americans for years and although they deposed him in the end, the freedom rhetoric seemed an afterthought at best. Nobody will forget the tenuous Al-Qaeda links and tall WMD tales spun by the Bush administration to justify the invasion. And after 6 years of war and occupation, the question to ask is whether what the US forces help build will be tainted by virtue of having been built by the invaders?

I’m speculating here. But it’s happened before.
Meanwhile 2 days ago another suicide bomber struck Mosul – 7 dead and 15 injured.
All of a sudden the Coalition’s optimism sounds hollow.
Yes, Mosul remains a problem child. Yes it’s believed to be the last remaining urban stronghold of al-Qaeda in Iraq.
And yes, as British forces withdraw from Basra, a suicide bomb goes off in Mosul.

All I’m saying is, they haven’t finished what they started and I don’t know what’s worse, withdrawing before it’s done or staying around and doing it themselves, thus creating a normality that relies on their initiative and depends on their presence.

Not ‘same old’ Northern Ireland: nothing will change until we do

Many thought this story was over and the book back on the shelf.
Some didn’t think as much as hope that this would be the case.
But with one police constable and two soldiers dead to dissident republican fire over the last few weeks, the illusion is well and truly shattered.

Of course there are the cynics who claim that there will never be a perfect peace in Northern Ireland. A bit like the Guardian’s Henry McDonald who claims that Ireland will forever have ‘occasional terrorist outages’ – in one sentence dismissing a decade’s worth of peace efforts, the dissidents’ desperate passion and the heart-wrenching misery each death brings.
Not cool, mr McDonald.

Sapper Mark Quinsey was buried last week. He was 23. Sapper Patrick Azminkar, also killed at Massereene army barracks in Antrim, was 21. Speaking of terrorist outages is disrespectful to say the least. It is also misleading, treating the violence like something incidental yet entrenched, marginal yet inevitable.

And yesterday a 17-year old was charged with the murder of police constable Stephen Carroll. The teenager, suspected of membership of the Continuity IRA, is too young to be named but not too young to possess an AKM assault rifle and shoot a man in the back of the head.
To speak of terrorist outages is to trivialise the deaths and to underestimate what it is that makes a 17-year-old take up arms.

11 years after the Good Friday accord, three years into power-sharing and people still join the militants, despite the IRA ceasefire.
Yet the voices urging us all not to allow the violence to derail the peace process are loud. The voices suggesting this is how things are in Northern Ireland and we shall move on regardless are loud.
But what if they are wrong?

Three people died over the past few weeks.
The IRA fights no more but the Real IRA and Continuity IRA do. We can choose to ignore this or we can choose to acknowledge that not all is well in the State of Denmark.

Martin McGuinness, former IRA bigwig turned peacemaker, denounced those behind the attacks as "traitors" to the people of Ireland. I’m sure they consider him a traitor to their cause too. In every conflict, each side has its own truth. The more sides there are, the more truths there are, the harder the conflict is to resolve.

Mr McGuinness changed his mind regarding his own particular truth. But not everyone in Ireland accepts that unification is no longer on the cards. And the fact that, if put to a referendum, the motion of unification would be defeated in Northern Ireland due to demographic realities on the ground is not enough to change the hearts and turn the heads of those who are prepared to take up arms in the name of a cause – even a lost cause.

I don’t pretend to know what goes on in the heads of people who opt for violence in the defence of an idea. I don’t know how the brain gets to the conclusion that putting oneself in harm’s way and inflicting hurt on others is the way forward on a particular question.
But I know that for as long as these thoughts are being thought and for as long as we do not understand them, whatever solution we offer will leave some people dissatisfied. And if those people are the ones who are willing and able to take up arms to protest their dissatisfaction, then we have a problem that cannot be dismissed through sanitised language, describing murder as ‘terrorist outages’, destruction as ‘violent incidents’ and the, small-scale but undeniable, re-militarisation of northern Ireland’s youth as ‘statistically insignificant’.

And comparisons won’t help either.
Comparing Northern Ireland to the Basque country obfuscates the problem. The history and socio-economic background of the conflicts could not be more different. Same goes for their demands: ETA wants the Basque country to break away, most IRA offshoots want Ireland to unite. That’s a pretty big difference if you ask me.
Where the two resemble each other is in that the people living in the areas affected are far from unanimously behind the idea of independence or unity – and even those who share the vision and understand the sentiments are getting increasingly fed up with the violence.

But the thing about violence is that ignoring it never makes it go away.

The peace process should not be derailed by the violence, is the chorus coming out of both Stormont and Westminster.
And that is right.
But the peace process cannot afford to ignore the violence either.

Their goal may be utopian, their ranks may be depleted but the militants who don’t buy into the power-sharing experiment in Northern Ireland are still around and not sitting tight.

McGuinness can accuse them of betraying their people all he likes – chances are that’s exactly what they think of him as well.
And the problem is that they are ‘the people’ as much as McGuinness is. They are ‘the people’ as much as those embracing the peace process are.
And ‘the people’ remain divided. So the peace process remains shaky. And hard work is still needed. And a perfect peace is still a way away. And the ability to take peace for granted further still.

But the greatest enemy of a perfect peace, that can be taken for granted as ‘the way things are’, is not the violence right now. It’s the people who tell us that violence in Northern Ireland is inevitable. It’s the people who think the way things always were is the way things will always be.
It’s the people who cannot believe in a perfect peace even though they are working towards it.