Does anyone remember this? It was a speech by british commander to his troops as they moved into Iraq at the beginning, sharply contrasted at the time with the US commanders gung-ho ‘kill em all’ attitude:
We go to liberate, not to conquer.
We will not fly our flags in their country
We are entering Iraq to free a people and the only flag which will be flown in that ancient land is their own.
Show respect for them.There are some who are alive at this moment who will not be alive shortly.
Those who do not wish to go on that journey, we will not send.
As for the others, I expect you to rock their world.
Wipe them out if that is what they choose.
But if you are ferocious in battle remember to be magnanimous in victory.Iraq is steeped in history.
It is the site of the Garden of Eden, of the Great Flood and the birthplace of Abraham.
Tread lightly there.
You will see things that no man could pay to see
— and you will have to go a long way to find a more decent, generous and upright people than the Iraqis.
You will be embarrassed by their hospitality even though they have nothing.Don’t treat them as refugees for they are in their own country.
Their children will be poor, in years to come they will know that the light of liberation in their lives was brought by you.If there are casualties of war then remember that when they woke up and got dressed in the morning they did not plan to die this day.
Allow them dignity in death.
Bury them properly and mark their graves.It is my foremost intention to bring every single one of you out alive.
But there may be people among us who will not see the end of this campaign.
We will put them in their sleeping bags and send them back.
There will be no time for sorrow.The enemy should be in no doubt that we are his nemesis and that we are bringing about his rightful destruction.
There are many regional commanders who have stains on their souls and they are stoking the fires of hell for Saddam.
He and his forces will be destroyed by this coalition for what they have done.
As they die they will know their deeds have brought them to this place. Show them no pity.It is a big step to take another human life.
It is not to be done lightly.
I know of men who have taken life needlessly in other conflicts.
I can assure you they live with the mark of Cain upon them.If someone surrenders to you then remember they have that right in international law and ensure that one day they go home to their family.
The ones who wish to fight, well, we aim to please.If you harm the regiment or its history by over-enthusiasm in killing or in cowardice, know it is your family who will suffer.
You will be shunned unless your conduct is of the highest — for your deeds will follow you down through history.
We will bring shame on neither our uniform or our nation.(On Saddam’s chemical and biological weapons.)
It is not a question of if, it’s a question of when.
We know he has already devolved the decision to lower commanders, and that means he has already taken the decision himself.
If we survive the first strike we will survive the attack.As for ourselves, let’s bring everyone home and leave Iraq a better place for us having been there.
Our business now is north.
Copyright Tim Collins, 2003
Time has passed, experience has taken its toll and lies have been uncovered. Colnel Tim Collins has left the army and this is what he says now:
When I led my men of the 1st Battalion the Royal Irish Regiment across the border into Iraq we believed we were going to do some good. Goodwill and optimism abounded; it was to be a liberation, I had told my men, not a conquest.
In Iraq I sought to surround myself with advisers – Iraqis – who could help me understand what needed to be done. One of the first things they taught me was that the Baath party had been a fact of life for 35 years. Like the Nazi party, they said, it needed to be decapitated, harnessed and dismantled, each function replaced with the new regime. Many of these advisers were Baathists, yet were eager to co-operate, fired with the enthusiasm of the liberation. How must it look to them now?
What I had not realized was that there was no real plan at the higher levels to replace anything, indeed a simplistic and unimaginative overreliance in some senior quarters on the power of destruction and crude military might. We were to beat the Iraqis. That simple. Everything would come together after that.
The Iraqi army was defeated – it walked away from most fights – but was then dismissed without pay to join the ranks of the looters smashing the little infrastructure left, and to rail against their treatment. The Baath party was left undisturbed. The careful records it kept were destroyed with precision munitions by the coalition; the evidence erased, they were left with a free rein to agitate and organize the insurrection. A vacuum was created in which the coalition floundered, the Iraqis suffered and terrorists thrived.
One cannot help but wonder what it was all about. If it was part of the war on terror then history might notice that the invasion has arguably acted as the best recruiting sergeant for al-Qaeda ever: a sort of large-scale equivalent of the Bloody Sunday shootings in Derry in 1972, which in its day filled the ranks of the IRA. If it was an attempt to influence the price of oil, then the motorists who queued last week would hardly be convinced. If freedom and a chance to live a dignified, stable life free from terror was the motive, then I can think of more than 170 families in Iraq last week who would have settled for what they had under Saddam. UK military casualties reached 95 last week. I nightly pray the total never reaches 100.
The consequences of this adventure may run even deeper. Hurricane Katrina has caused a reappraisal of the motives and aims of this war in the US. The storm came perhaps in the nick of time as hawks in Washington were glancing towards Iran and its newly found self-confidence in global affairs. Meanwhile, China and India are growing and sucking up every drop of oil, every scrap of concrete or steel even as the old-world powers of the UK and US pour blood and treasure into overseas campaigns which seem to have no ending and no goal.
It is time for our leaders to explain what is going on. It was as a battalion commander trying to explain to his men why they would embark on a war that I came to public notice. The irony is that I made certain assumptions that my goodwill and altruistic motivations went to the top. Clearly I was naive. This time it is the role of the leaders of nations to explain where we are going and why. I, for one, demand to know.
from: This is a mess of our own making
This diary is more quote than comment; but I have always remembered his first speech, and wondered how he felt as his leader’s lies became apparent; my admiration for him has grown because he is willing to see how wrong it all was.
cross-posted at eurotrib
Thank you. I wasn’t aware of his original speech, and current views.
What is the link to his original speech?
There are a number of places that have his original speech – apparently, it was delivered ‘off the cuff’ and, if that is so it is amazing. here is the original BBC link to it:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/2866581.stm
I wonder if any in the Bush administration ever read it. It was a beautiful, honorable, idealistic speech.
If anyone had listened to him, we would have avoided Abu Ghraib, etc., etc. … and we might really have had a chance to make some good come from the Iraq war.
I do not believe there was ever “a chance to make some good come from the Iraq war”. It was ill conceived, predicated on false pretenses, without regard to long term planning or consequences, and doomed to failure. Add yet another ret. military commander to a growing list of those who feel betrayed, and rightly so.
That he has stepped forward is, in my mind, not indicative that he has had a change of heart, but that he has recognized the fact that he was manipulated and his “goodwill and altruistic motivations” were misused in the pursuit of a hubristic and imperialistic goal. In other words, he has been lied to and dishonored.
I also find it interesting that Ret Gen. Norman Swartzkopf has chosen to remain silent on this issue. He was not supportive of the war back in January 2003, and to my knowledge, and a cursory Google search, has remained non committal since.
History will not treat this event and those responsible for it kindly.
Peace
This is stunning. Thank you.
I remember reading this mans first post. To follow it to todays statement is great…thanks..
How angry this man must feel about his leaders — and ours.
I can’t read this without a feeling of suffocation, of drowning in a river of increasing turbulence. I expect there are some in our military who feel the same way.
There has to be a point in every person’s life – espcially in the lives of those who have been a part of huge events like war, to reevaluate their history. Some do not relent, even in the face of their mistakes. Some do and must speak loudly about it. It’s unfortunate there are not more of those loud voices. Truth suffers as a result.
Too effing bad that ‘moment’ didn’t come to Colin Powell before he sold his soul to the warmongers.Oh well,never mind ,he has always been a water-carrier,as in My Lai.When in the HELL do you get some integrity? When do you get some self respect? When do you tell the liars that they are liars to their faces and stand UP?
JEEBUS as Shycat would say. 🙂
I was in that war, too. British Army. Like Collins, I have changed my views. Then, I thought we had done a good turn.
We really did think we were going in to end Saddam’s reign, and bring a brighter day to the Iraqis. (No, the politicians don’t tell us soldiers much of anything–we were astonished to learn that we weren’t pushing on to Baghdad.) Of course we did no such thing; looking back, I realise that our only objectives were to protect the Bush Family’s Saudi friends (the American royalty protecting the Saudi royalty) and to put the Emir of Kuwait back on his throne (what is it about the Bushes and monarchs? They love them!).
I found the Iraqis to be a likable, decent people who–oddly enough–seemed to bear absolutely no grudge against us. It was the Kuwaitis I despised–spoilt and arrogant beyond belief. I’d have rather left them under Saddam’s boot and saved us the trouble of invading.
Collins’ speech at the outset of Operation Granby (as we Brits call our part in Gulf War I) was not cynical; he really believed it. And it is notable that Collins left the Army under a cloud after accusations had been made against him–such is the treatment accorded to those who question His Highness Anthony Blair.
I resigned my commission at the rank of captain as soon as I could manage it after the war was over. I had seen and done too much, and was determined to never again be a mercenary–which is what the British and American armies have become (remember, Bush got the Kuwaitis and Saudis to pay the expenses for the war).
What most people don’t realise who were not there is the cruel slaughter of the hapless Iraqi soldiers. The American aerial bombardment prior to the ground assault was like the wrath of a vengeful diety. The deserts were strewn with the corpses of Iraqis, and American soldiers gunned down who knows how many surrendering Iraqi troops (shooting a man who is coming out of an entrenchment with his hands over his head is just plain murder, but that’s what was done, and quite a few times). Of course the bodies were hidden–bulldozed into mass graves, the ever-obedient American media kept far away until the extent of the slaughter could be hidden. I don’t know why they bothered; I doubt the American public would have turned a hair at the sight of so many dead Iraqis. Certainly the sight of dead Iraqis doesn’t seem to bother them now.
Sorry, when I referred to “that war” I meant Gulf War I, not Gulf War II. Bit confusing, I know–Collins was also in Gulf War I for those of you who didn’t know.
shadowthief — I didn’t know you were a vet! I remember watching Gulf War I on CNN from a bar called Buddy’s where I worked at the time — people came in, got to drinking at watched the show. The sanitized version of that war was applalling not only in what it left out, but in the reactions it generated from people here in the US. In ’91, shortly before I left to go teach in Japan, a soldier who had been my best friend when I was 6 years old, came to visit me. I hadn’t seen him in years, but it was pretty obvious what that war had done ot him. He was a First Lt. and was assigned as an information officer — he talked a lot about lying, that the American people were lied to, the soldiers were lied to and he was made and unwilling conduit to the lies and murder. He was very sick at heart, he drank a lot of tequilla and told me how the only thing good that came of it is that he knew enough that when he asked for an early discharge, he got it immediately.
I haven’t seen him since, don’t know where he is, but I’m still keeping my eyes open…
Thanks for sharing your experiences — if you are ever so inclined, I’d like to hear more.
What most people don’t realise who were not there is the cruel slaughter of the hapless Iraqi soldiers. The American aerial bombardment prior to the ground assault was like the wrath of a vengeful diety. The deserts were strewn with the corpses of Iraqis, and American soldiers gunned down who knows how many surrendering Iraqi troops (shooting a man who is coming out of an entrenchment with his hands over his head is just plain murder, but that’s what was done, and quite a few times). Of course the bodies were hidden–bulldozed into mass graves, the ever-obedient American media kept far away until the extent of the slaughter could be hidden. I don’t know why they bothered; I doubt the American public would have turned a hair at the sight of so many dead Iraqis. Certainly the sight of dead Iraqis doesn’t seem to bother them now.
I remember that – it has haunted me. There was a picture of a charred corpse in the driving seat of a truck that had the same sort of power as the napalm burnt children of vietnam. I was horrified and outraged at the time that the rag-tag of saddams army, in retreat as they were, should be massacred that way (and from the air, so there was little risk to those bombing and shooting). I remember at the time that someone, a US pilot, I think, referred to it as a ‘turkey shoot’ – it was disgusting.
Ok – found it, here is one of the turkey shoot references
from: http://tinyurl.com/8bhg2
They read the same speech to FEMA before the hurricane relief effort.