Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: Iraq: This is now an unwinnable conflict (The Independent)

Ora di ritirate strategiche... Maktub!
Am.
 Iraq: This is now an unwinnable conflict
 As he completes another tour of duty in the chaos of Iraq, 
award-winning reporter Patrick Cockburn charts how Bush and Blair's 
'winnable war' turned into a mess that is inspiring a worldwide 
insurgency
 Published: 24 July 2005
 The Duke of Wellington, warning hawkish politicians in Britain against 
ill-considered military intervention abroad, once said: "Great nations 
do not have small wars." He meant that supposedly limited conflicts can 
inflict terrible damage on powerful states. Having seen what a small war 
in Spain had done to Napoleon, he knew what he was talking about.
 The war in Iraq is now joining the Boer War in 1899 and the Suez crisis 
in 1956 as ill-considered ventures that have done Britain more harm than 
good. It has demonstrably strengthened al-Qa'ida by providing it with a 
large pool of activists and sympathisers across the Muslim world it did 
not possess before the invasion of 2003. The war, which started out as a 
demonstration of US strength as the world's only superpower, has turned 
into a demonstration of weakness. Its 135,000-strong army does not 
control much of Iraq.
The suicide bombing campaign in Iraq is unique. Never before have so 
many fanatical young Muslims been willing to kill themselves, trying to 
destroy those whom they see as their enemies. On a single day in Baghdad 
this month 12 bombers blew themselves up. There have been more than 500 
suicide attacks in Iraq over the last year.
It is this campaign which has now spread to Britain and Egypt. The Iraq 
war has radicalised a significant part of the Muslim world. Most of the 
bombers in Iraq are non-Iraqi, but the network of sympathisers and 
supporters who provide safe houses, money, explosives, detonators, 
vehicles and intelligence is home-grown.
The shrill denials by Tony Blair and Jack Straw that hostility to the 
invasion of Iraq motivated the bombers are demonstrably untrue. The 
findings of an investigation, to be published soon, into 300 young 
Saudis, caught and interrogated by Saudi intelligence on their way to 
Iraq to fight or blow themselves up, shows that very few had any 
previous contact with al-Qa'ida or any other terrorist organisation 
previous to 2003. It was the invasion of Iraq which prompted their 
decision to die.
Some 36 Saudis who did blow themselves up in Iraq did so for similar 
reasons, according to the same study, commissioned by the Saudi 
government and carried out by a US-trained Saudi researcher, Nawaf 
Obaid, who was given permission to speak to Saudi intelligence officers. 
A separate Israeli study of 154 foreign fighters in Iraq, carried out by 
the Global Research in International Affairs Centre in Israel, also 
concluded that almost all had been radicalised by Iraq alone.
Before Iraq, those who undertook suicide bombings were a small, hunted 
group; since the invasion they have become a potent force, their 
ideology and tactics adopted by militant Islamic groups around the 
world. Their numbers may still not be very large but they are numerous 
enough to create mayhem in Iraq and anywhere else they strike, be it in 
London or Sharm el Sheikh.
The bombers have paralysed Baghdad. I have spent half my time living in 
Iraq since the invasion. The country has never been so dangerous as 
today. Some targets have been hit again and again. The army recruiting 
centre at al-Muthana old municipal airport in the middle of Baghdad has 
been attacked no fewer than eight times, the last occasion on Wednesday 
when eight people were killed.
The detonations of the suicide bombs make my windows shake in their 
frames in my room in the al-Hamra hotel. Sometimes, thinking the glass 
is going to shatter, I take shelter behind a thick wall. The hotel is 
heavily guarded. At one time the man who looked for bombs under cars 
entering the compound with a mirror on the end of a stick carried a 
pistol in his right hand. He reckoned that if he did discover a suicide 
bomber he had a split second in which to shoot him in the head before 
the driver detonated his bomb.
The bombers, or rather the defences against them, have altered the 
appearance of Baghdad. US army and Iraqi government positions in Baghdad 
are surrounded by ramparts of enormous cement blocks which snake through 
the city. Manufactured in different sizes, each of which is named after 
a different American state such as Arkansas and Wisconsin, these 
concrete megaliths are strangling the city by closing off so many 
streets.
For all the newspaper and television coverage of Iraq, the foreign media 
still fail to convey the lethal and anarchic quality of day-to-day 
living. The last time I drove into west Baghdad from the airport in 
early July we were suddenly stopped by the sound of volleys of shots. 
This turned out to be the police commandos, a 12,000-strong paramilitary 
force which is meant to be the cutting edge of the government offensive 
against the insurgents. On this occasion they had loaded coffins wrapped 
in Iraqi flags, containing the bodies of two of their officers murdered 
that morning, on to the backs of their pick-ups and were weaving through 
the traffic, firing over our heads. Drivers slammed on their brakes 
since people detained by the commandos, often for no known reason, are 
often found later in rubbish dumps, having been tortured and executed.
The government, whose members seldom emerge from the Green Zone, make 
bizarre efforts to pretend that there are signs of a return to 
normality. Last week a pro-government newspaper had an article on the 
reconstruction of Baghdad. Above the article was a picture of a crane at 
a building site. But there are no cranes at work in Baghdad so the paper 
had been compelled to use a photograph of a crane which has been rusting 
for more than two years, abandoned at the site of a giant mosque that 
Saddam Hussein was constructing when he was overthrown.
The same quality of make-believe mars British and American policy in 
Iraq. The current motto of both governments is to "stay the course in 
Iraq". This may be useful propaganda at home but Iraqi government 
officials counter that London and Washington have no "course" in Iraq, 
only a policy of endless zig-zags.
For future historians Iraq will probably replace Vietnam as the stock 
example of the truth of Wellington's dictum about small wars escalating 
into big ones. Ironically, the US and Britain pretended in 2003 that 
Saddam ruled a powerful state capable of menacing his neighbours. 
Secretly they believed this was untrue and expected an easy victory.
Now in 2005 they find to their horror that there are people in Iraq more 
truly dangerous than Saddam, and they are mired in an un-winnable 
conflict.

 Ora di ritirate strategiche... Maktub!
Ora di puttanate strategiche :)  E le trovi tutte tu :)
-Stefano

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