All The Traps Of Earth
By Ann Huggett (07/01/03)
“You have won the war but you will lose the peace!” screamed a furious Iraqi into Western news cameras on the day that Baghdad fell in Operation Iraqi Freedom. At the time I heard that I was tempted to just shrug it off as mere sore loser braggadocio. However, something about that creepy threat set my spider senses tingling, the ensuing anarchy created by the sudden vacuum of Saddam Hussein’s downfall notwithstanding.
Just because Iraq is in American and British hands doesn’t mean that we’re in a state of peace yet. Far from it. We’ve segued into a new phase of battle that is short on heroics and long on nasty. Coalition troops are being picked off one by one through guerrilla warfare, snipers, set-ups, car bombs, mob attacks, and kidnapping. Sabotage is rampant. John Batchelor, of the Batchelor and Alexander show on WABC radio, repeatedly points out night after night that it was Iraqi strategists who guided the Somalis in Mogadishu to create the Blackhawk Down scenario. In fact, shortly before our invasion started, scores of Blackhawk Down VCRs were handed out as training manuals to Baathist and Fedayeen fighters.
British forces found this out in horrifying detail last Tuesday when six of their military police were surrounded by thousands in Majjar and murdered outright. The British soldiers were in the area training Iraqi police and conducting house-to-house searches for weapons. Evidently this was too much for the local Muslims and they went ballistic over British Military use of search dogs. Oh, and they got upset because the Brits allegedly pointed their guns at women and children, and held up women’s underwear in one of the houses they entered.
"I yelled at them because they pointed their rifles at a child. I told them 'don't do that' but a soldier hit me with the butt of his rifle in the face," one resident, who refused to give his name, said. "Then the shooting started."
Oh, yes? A British soldier, under orders to “win the hearts and minds of the populace” hit you in the face with the butt of his rifle and you can still mouth off? Pretty good speechifying considering you should be sporting knocked out teeth and a broken jaw if true. How convenient that you didn’t give your name either.
"These British soldiers came with their dogs and pointed weapons at women and children. As Muslims, we can't accept dogs at our homes," Rabee al-Malki told Reuters.
What a load of codswallop. Muslims are notorious for using women and children as human shields. They also think it ultra cute to dress their 2 year olds up as murder bombers complete with tiny prop sticks of TNT for family photos. Ask any Palestinian. Muslims also consider dogs impure but the dogs don’t know and don’t care. They were there with their handlers to do a job searching out banned weapons, not break potty training in someone’s house.
"A British soldier held the underwear of a woman and stretched it. How can we accept this as Muslims and as Shi'ites," resident Faleh Saleem said.
British soldiers are too well trained and too intent on a softly-softly approach to Iraqis to even dare do something that juvenile. There is also no way to find out what really happened because all six men are dead. We just have the word of less-than-honest people intent on making excuses to justify homicide. Local Iraqi leaders today said that they couldn’t name the killers because their identities are unknown. Yeah, right. Iraq is being flooded with Muslim insurgents from Syria and Iran. Any strangers in a village will be noticed immediately. The villagers also know who are the Baathists and Fedayeen among them and every one, who had any hand in the murders, will be bragging long and loud to anyone who will listen.
Due to political correctness, the British had plastic bullets in their guns so that when shooting started it was Muslims with AK-47s and live ammo outnumbering British troops with non-lethal riot guns. The Brits had wanted to present a friendlier image so they weren’t wearing their helmets or their kevlar vests. They also were without radios.
So now they paid their price for trying to establish a bridge between themselves and the Iraqis they were trying to help. Sergeant Simon Alexander Hamilton-Jewell, Corporal Russell Aston, Corporal Paul Graham Long, Corporal Simon Miller, Lance-Corporal Benjamin John McGowan Hyde and Lance-Corporal Thomas Richard Keys all had less than a week left for their tour of duty in Iraq. Three were killed out on the streets through gunfire while the remaining three were chased into police headquarters were they held out against the mob for two hours. The Iraqi police-in-training fled through back windows in the building but the Brits chose to stand their ground. The only reason they gave up was that the mob set fire to the building.
When the last three Brits surrendered, they were murdered in cold blood.
So now the British are half-heartedly back to their helmets and kevlar vests in some areas, shocked that they aren’t loved. I suggest that along with their new appreciation of the danger that still faces them each and every day they are in a foreign, hostile land they drop that “winning the hearts and minds of the people” business. Right now British Military Command is back peddling like crazy, saying that this whole business was a colossal “misunderstanding”. Kindly explain that to the grieving British families of these murdered men! In case no one noticed, political correctness and cultural sensitivity get you nowhere but sent home in body bags. You’re dealing with people who want you dead, who want to go back into the political, cultural, and religious tyranny that they crave.
General Blackjack Pershing knew how to deal with Philippine Muslims in 1911 when he captured six known terrorists but only executed five. The sixth was allowed to escape in order to spread the word that Pershing was throwing pig offal into the graves of Muslim terrorists. The terrorism stopped cold once that story got out. Muslims may not fear death but they are terrified of not getting into Paradise. That means no 72 virgins, no partying with Allah, and no bliss if some little piggy goes with them into the grave, not even if the Muslim buried with pig guts is considered a “martyr” according to the benighted standards of Islam.
You’ll never get their love; the best you can do is get their fear.
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