By Michael Faulkner –
December 13, 2009
It is now more than eight
years since the invasion of Afghanistan. Next March will mark the seventh
anniversary of the invasion of Iraq. British forces have now been withdrawn
from Iraq but more are to be sent to Afghanistan. Both wars have been deeply
unpopular. The consequences of both are very much with us and are likely to
dominate the political agenda for years to come. Inquiries are taking place not
only into Britain’s decision to attack Iraq in 2003 but also into the conduct
of the war and the complicity of British intelligence officers in the torture
of terror suspects, including British citizens. Allegations of maltreatment and
torture of Iraqi civilians by British soldiers are also being investigated.
The Chilcot inquiry into
the Iraq war which opened in London on the 24th November will not be
competent to judge whether the invasion was legal under international law. The
six member panel does not include one judge or lawyer. One of its members, the
historian Sir Martin Gilbert, who is Churchill’s official biographer, supported
the war and compared Bush and Blair to Churchill and Roosevelt in World War
Two. Another academic, Sir Lawrence Freedman, is responsible for writing parts
of Blair’s 1999 speech favoring ‘liberal’ military intervention. The overwhelming majority of
international lawyers consider that the invasion of Iraq was illegal. In that
case, those who planned and executed it should be held accountable. If the
Chilcot inquiry sidesteps this issue, as it almost certainly will, it is
difficult to see how those responsible for the war can be called to account. It
is possible of course that hitherto unknown facts could be brought to light
that may make it possible to bring legal proceedings against the perpetrators.
It is early days yet, but the prospects don’t look promising.
The government was very
reluctant to agree to this inquiry. Brown wanted it to be held in private and
a public inquiry was conceded only
under considerable pressure. Even so, information can, and no doubt will, be
withheld, “in the national interest.” There is much vested interest in
producing yet another whitewash. The Iraq war was not just “Bush’s and Blair’s
war”. The British parliament voted for the invasion. The great majority of
Labour and Conservative MPs supported it, as did most of the Press.
Concerning allegations
that British intelligence officers have been complicit in the torture of
suspects, the government’s behavior has been shameful. The foreign secretary,
David Miliband, has fought desperately to prevent the release of evidence
pointing to collaboration with the CIA in the torture of detainees. The high
court has thrown out Miliband’s argument that the revelations would harm
Britain’s relations with the U.S., but the government is determined to fight
the issue right through to the supreme court. Similarly, the report by Human
Rights Watch (Cruel Britannia: British Complicity in the Torture and
Ill-treatment of Terror Suspects), published on 24th November, provides
clear evidence that British intelligence officers collaborated closely with the
torturers of the Pakistani intelligence service (ISI) encouraging them to “use
all means possible” to extract the information they needed. The ISI officers
didn’t need much encouragement. Faced with specific charges, government
spokesmen refuse to address them, falling back on the threadbare defense
favored by Bush, Cheney, Rice and Blair: “We do not torture.”
For years it has been
known that British soldiers in Basra have tortured and murdered Iraqis.
Treatment of Iraqi detainees by British forces resembles in some respects the
practices associated with the US detention centre at Abu Ghraib. New
allegations are being investigated by the Ministry of Defense. What will come of
these investigations? Probably not very much, but if, as seems to be the case,
the evidence is irrefutable, there may be some prosecutions. However, they will not be allowed to
disturb the official view that such cases are very rare and only involve a tiny
minority of servicemen who have probably snapped under conditions of extreme
provocation. During the past year in particular, as British military casualties
in Afghanistan have continued to mount, there has been a concerted media
campaign to rally support for “our boys” who are daily risking their lives “for
us”. Those who die, we are told, have given their lives in a noble enterprise:
to keep the streets of our cities safe from terrorist attacks. They are heroes
and we should honor and respect them. So pervasive is this romantic military
myth that to challenge it is regarded as deeply disrespectful and unpatriotic.
We may question the wisdom of the wars they are called upon to fight, but we
must never question the motives or the heroism of the soldiers themselves.
As Bernard Shaw once
said, there are some truths that are “too true to be good”. It is not good for
the Ministry of Defense, and the defenders of the military establishment and
the wars they wage, if the wrong kinds of questions are asked about the nature
of their activities and the character of the personnel who staff the ranks of
the armed forces. But such questions are worth asking. What kinds of people are
needed in the armed forces? What kind of people choose to become soldiers?
There is no easy answer to these questions and in offering some thoughts on the
subject it is important to stress that these are personal and therefore largely
subjective observations.
As a reluctant national
service conscript more than fifty years ago during the time of the 1956 Suez
crisis, I had first-hand experience of the process of indoctrination through
which raw recruits are put in order to transform them from more-or-less
independently minded individuals into automata prepared to obey orders without
question. As representatives of a post-imperial power, recently relegated to
second or third rate status, those who controlled the British state still
needed armed forces imbued with a sense of inherent superiority over the
“lesser breeds” that populated what later came to be called the “Third World”,
many of whom had until recently been subjects of Her majesty. In the build-up
to the invasion of Suez, virtually the whole of the British press indulged in
the most obscene racist abuse of Gamul Abdul Nasser, the Egyptian leader who
had had the audacity to nationalize the Suez Canal. At that time Archbishop
Makarios of Cyprus, whose people were waging a liberation struggle against
British military occupation, was treated in much the same way. Those few of us
who expressed support for Makarios when he was arrested by the British
authorities had to face violent hostility from other servicemen, many of whom
would soon be sent to Cyprus in preparation for the Suez invasion. We were all
encouraged not to think, not to ask awkward questions. We were expected to
accept uncritically whatever we were told about any mission to which were
assigned. It was our duty to do so.
The training of recruits
was a process of extreme bullying involving the most violent and insulting
verbal abuse by NCOs, many of whom appeared to delight in humiliating the
unformed novices. Once the basic training had ended and the raw recruits had
learned how to march and parade with perfect precision and to master a variety
of weapons, they would, it was assumed, be ready for deployment, if necessary
to participate in armed conflict. That was during the final years of national
service in which the conscripts were drawn form a wide range of backgrounds. It
was not as easy to mould conscripts, many of whom resented being required, if
necessary, to fight for their country before they had the right to vote. But
generally the indoctrination had the desired effect. The armed forces also
reflected the class system. The officers were invariably drawn from the ranks of
the better educated middle class recruits. They were encouraged to treat the
non-commissioned ranks as their social inferiors. The whole ritualized system
of commands, dominance, saluting and subservience reflected in exaggerated form
the stratification of the social class structure. The NCOs often betrayed their
resentment of the commissioned officers but relished their power over the lower
ranks. That’s how it was then and it is almost certainly much the same now.
It is fairly evident that
the majority of those who volunteer to serve in the non-commissioned ranks of
the armed forces do so because they have very few prospects of worthwhile
careers elsewhere. In Britain the great majority of those young people –
usually men – are white. Many of them are under-educated, from unskilled
working class backgrounds having been through an education system that has left
them with no apprenticeships and few prospects. Often from a chaotic
adolescence they enter a rigidly hierarchical, strictly disciplined system which
channels their hitherto uncontrolled energies into activities that give them
access to firearms. They have been trained not to think but to obey. Many of
them are likely to have racist attitudes and will very likely be encouraged by
their peers and “superior” officers to treat the people over whom they suddenly
have power, as their inferiors. The persistence of abusive racist terminology
– “Ragheads”, “Pakis” – betrays the mentality that is prevalent
amongst servicemen in Iraq and Afghanistan. Fifty years ago the Egyptians were
“Gypos”.
This is a mentality
produced by more than one hundred years of British imperialism. Britain is no
longer an imperial power, but the mentality has outlived the empire. Wars waged
by imperialist powers and by post-imperial powers suffering from delusions of
grandeur, encourage a racist attitude on the part of those who wage war against
those they seek to subdue. Wars are always brutal and to one extent or another
they dehumanize those who prosecute them. It does not mean that all British
soldiers fighting in Iraq or Afghanistan are capable of committing torture and
atrocities. Neither does it mean that those who do such things can be regarded
as a tiny, unrepresentative, depraved minority. Many share the racist attitudes
that lead some to become torturers. They are all “our boys”. 