The Guardian: There are very few causes worth dying for. Iraq is not one of them

[Kadie]

There are very few causes worth dying for. Iraq is not one of them

The British are past masters of the speedy exit, as events in India 60 years ago show

Ian Jack
Saturday July 14, 2007
The Guardian


Like being shot by a sniper on the western front at 10.59am on November 11, 1918, to die now as a British soldier in Iraq is its own special category of tragedy. What has he died for? Is Iraq a safer and more secure place? Is the rest of the world, including Britain, likewise? Is the Middle East more democratic, more optimistic of its future? But adjust these lofty aims: is the price of oil lower? The answer is not just that these things have stayed much the same; it is in all cases the incendiary opposite. Worse than all this futility, worse even than the bogus prospectus for the invasion that took him there in the first place, the dead soldier will know in the last days of his life that only a small number of his fellow citizens want him and his comrades to be there, and that his government, with what on the hottest Basra day must seem like glacial slowness, is trying to get him out.

Privates Scott Kennedy and Jamie Kerr, both of the Black Watch, died with a third soldier when a roadside bomb exploded near Basra on June 28. They were both 20 and came from West Fife. The prime minister, another Fifer, said, "My thoughts and prayers are with all the families of all the fallen soldiers, who died bravely serving their country."

That is one way of seeing it. Shortly before he died, suffused with homesickness and nerves, Jamie Kerr emailed his chatroom friends, "You ask why I am writing this , well ... canny get any sleep and a want to go hame."

Why couldn't he be brought home? The British army no longer runs Basra, if it ever did. Troop numbers have almost halved from the 9,000 who were there in 2004 and the British effort now seems mainly dedicated to the protection of the British barracks and the airport: Rorke's Drift with air support. The only reason they remain, so far as one can tell, is to preserve an illusion of Brown-Bush solidarity on policy in Iraq, to spare diplomatic breaches and embarrassment, to "manage things well" - subtlely, ambiguously, without scaring the horses - until an American president can blame things beyond his control for his adventure's abject failure. There are very few causes to die for and this would not be one of them. The letters Gordon Brown sends to the bereaved must be hell to write.

Britain didn't always tiptoe towards the inevitable destination of military withdrawal in this life-wasting way, at least if the lives were British. In August, 1947, 60 years ago next month, it withdrew from a much larger and older project, British India, with a speed and directness that alarmed many Indians and with a purpose that stemmed in small part from America's then anti-colonial pressure on a country that was broke and badly in America's debt. India is far from a perfect analogy with Iraq, but in 1947 it offered some remarkably similar problems. Its politics had become lethally communalised - not Shia v Sunni, but Muslim v Hindu and Sikh. London attempted to preserve a one-nation India, but failed; by early 1947 there was still no form of Indian government to which power could be transferred. British troops in India, not counting British officers in the Indian Army, had dwindled from a prewar figure of 60,000 to no more than 12,000 two years after the second world war ended, and all of them were very anxious to come home. When Attlee's Labour government took office in 1945, withdrawal from India was no longer a matter of if, but when.

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,,2126203,00.html