Democracy In The Wars

Paul Routledge, 7 May 2004

MANY years ago, while serving as a foreign correspondent for The Times in south-east Asia, I met an American in a pub in Singapore.

Nothing unusual about that, except that he turned out to be a teacher of English on a US aircraft carrier docked in the harbour.

Why, I asked him, did the US Navy need an English teacher? Because, he admitted, a large proportion of new recruits were "functionally illiterate". They couldn't read or write - not like what we can.

Setting aside the scary factor of matelots not knowing how to follow the instructions to fire missiles, this was a terrifying indictment of education in the world's greatest superpower.

I am reminded of this incident in the current furore over military brutality in Iraq, which does not surprise me in the least. What does surprise me is that it has become public.

But in the age of the digital camera, nothing stays secret for very long, and given the boastful nature of soldiers, disclosure of the maltreatment of Iraqi detainees has an awful inevitability about it.

Tony Blair loves the military, chiefly because they do as he tells them, which the rest of us do not. He turns a blind eye to squaddie brutality, wrapping himself in the Union Jack of posturing patriotism. His attitude is sickening.

Remember World War Two? The real war fought against a Nazi Germany, whose Fascist dictatorship tried to invade our country and murdered hundreds of thousands of our citizens - the Daily Mirror was proud to be the soldiers' paper.

In that great national crisis, soldiers, seamen and airmen were mostly amateurs: volunteers or conscripts. They fought for their country, their homes and their families, not for money. And, my God, how they fought. An abiding image of those far-off days is a British soldier lighting a fag for a German prisoner he has just captured somewhere in the Western desert. A common humanity informed their lives.

Not any more. The images today are of US soldiers posing, smirking beside the naked bodies of Iraqis who have been pulled in for questioning.

Yesterday's disclosures plumbed new depths: a Yankee woman soldier dragging a naked Iraqi man by a dog lead in the notorious Abu Ghraib jail in Baghdad where Saddam Hussein's torturers used to operate.

All this in the supposed name of democracy. We should be ashamed of ourselves, especially those British soldiers who have succumbed to the American virus of vanity brutality.

The unpalatable truth is this. Today's army is quite different to the one that fought for and won our freedom in 1939-45. Young men (and, increasingly, women) sign up for cash, foreign travel and all the booze they can keep down.

Even the Army's own advertisements emphasise the violent side of service life. No wonder squaddies find it hard to adapt to life back in civvy street when they finish their term.

And what is it all for? There is no Empire to police. There is no Cold War. Nobody wants to invade us, except to find work. So the brass hats in Whitehall and their servile political "masters" in Downing Street have to find pretexts for conflict in the most unlikely places: Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq.

I know that many veterans of World War Two read this column, because some of you write to me, often in despair about Blair's wars.

There are many good things about this Labour government, but by far the worst is the Prime Minister's obsession with going to war.

Iraq has poisoned him and his administration. We must not allow it to infect us.

SOURCE: The Mirror