What a great day! The English army has lowered its flag and pulled out of Ireland after a 38-year occupation of the northern six counties. Wonderful news that democrats (small d) and anti-imperialists everywhere should celebrate. In many ways, 38 years understates it. England first invaded Ireland in the 12th Century, under an army led by Strongbow. Raleigh and then Cromwell brutally suppressed the country in the 16th and 17th centuries, around the time England was colonizing the Americas. The little six-county statelet in the north of Ireland is all that remains of those imperial ambitions. Sooner or later the statelet will disappear too. But I digress.
The English army has apparently developed some lessons from the Irish occupation that it is applying in Afghanistan and Iraq and, it believes, could be helpful to the US as it blunders around the Middle East. The lessons are clearly relevant.
More below the fold, along with a link to a discussion of the lessons from the Manchester Guardian.
The lessons include:
- It’s never as easy as it looks. After 38 years, the English army is leaving Ireland with its tail between its legs. (OK. I made that up. The military commanders don’t say that; it’s my take on what happened today.)
Operation Banner began in August 1969. Over the following 38 years, the army, and their political masters, learnt lessons, often painful ones, which military commanders say are highly relevant to current counterinsurgency operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.
One reason, they say, why the US military machine has fared so badly there is because it did not share the experience of Northern Ireland. American generals, including David Petraeus, now the top US military commander in Baghdad, say they learned a lot from their British counterparts when they drew up their new Counterinsurgency Field Manual published last month.
- It’s not a good idea to shoot up the natives the way the English did during Bloody Sunday in 1972. Watching the neighbors being shot makes the survivors so cranky and irritable they wind up fighting the occupation. You'd have thought the English would have learned this earlier, during the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre (Amritsar Massacre) in India in 1919. A sadist named Dyer shot up an unarmed crowd, killing nearly 400 by official estimates (and many times that number by unofficial counts). The uncommitted flocked to people like Ghandi calling for Indian independence. But here we find the English repeating the same mistake in Ireland in 1972, and lo and behold, Americans doing the same thing in Iraq in 2007. "Shock and awe" is an old imperialist standby; only the weapons change. Most of the time it doesn't work; it turns into "shocked and pissed off."
[On] Bloody Sunday, January 30 1972 ... paratroopers opened fire on civil rights marchers, killing 13 unarmed, mainly young men (another man died later from his injuries). After that, the IRA had no problems attracting recruits. British soldiers now say they are concerned that killing Afghan civilians merely drives people into the hands of the Taliban.
- There can be no military solution to counterinsurgency campaigns. Talk of a military "victory" is stupid, without political, economic, and social progress. I thought it interesting that although the American press this week played up the common front Bush was developing with Gordon Brown, the new English PM, Brown, in fact, refused to play along with Bush's rhetoric. He talked about a long struggle with terrorists, not a war on terrorism and insisted that political, economic and social progress was key to military success.
Political, economic, and social progress, not military occupation, is the answer, it adds. "Unless the causes of unrest are addressed, insurgency or serious unrest will continue," the army concludes.
- Internment without trial in places like the Maze Prison is counterproductive since it generates sympathy among the natives for those denied their rights. "The Maze" in Long Kesh, about 10 miles outside Belfast, was a notorious place in recent Irish history, the site of many hunger strikes. (Where have we heard this recently?) The Maze and Guantanamo are essentially the same place and they originated in similar authoritarian, dark, brutal and sadistic minds.
It drives home the point that army commanders were always against internment without trial. It refers explicitly to the Blair government's failure to extend the limit on arrest without charge to 90 days. It adds: "Release of those interned would have been inevitable at some stage and the ... opportunities afforded to sympathisers, and libertarians in a democracy, would have been huge (as the US authorities are finding over the Guantánamo detainees)."
- Even when it’s over, it’s not really over. The "normalisation" of Northern Ireland, calls for leaving 5,000 British troops in "peacetime garrisons" (odd concept) in 10 locations.
In what the government calls the "normalisation" of Northern Ireland, 5,000 British troops will be stationed in a peacetime garrison based in 10 locations and training for operations abroad like the rest of the army. The new garrison will consist of units of 19 Light Brigade, RAF personnel, and a new territorial unit - 38 (Irish) Brigade. In September, MI5 will take on overall responsibility for security from the police special branch.
Ignorant people who don't understand history may be surprised at the buzz saw the US encountered in the Middle East after it launched an unprovoked attack on Iraq, but no one who followed the collapse of colonial rule after World War II would have raised an eyebrow. In India, Africa, Southeast Asia, Europe itself and Northern Africa, the rule has been absolute: when the locals decide to throw you out, sooner or later they succeed. That is true even if the locals begin with nothing more than bicycles and revolvers and a couple of rusty rifles (the Viet Minh in 1945 and the Irish Republican Brotherhood in 1916). Come to think of it, this universal rule was first demonstrated on American soil when American colonists tossed out their English colonizer.
The thing I was never able to get my head around was the arrogance and ignorance of our American leadership. It clearly thought it could do in Iraq (at a remove of some 5,000 miles)in a matter of months, what the English (with the greatest military force in the world at time) could not pull off over centuries in Ireland, with only 60 miles of sea separating the English government from the colony it wanted to control.
We could have learned these lessons the easy way by reading about them in history books, by studying what happened in Ireland, in Algeria, and Vietnam. Unhappily, our knowledge now is hard-won and the final lesson is yet to be fully driven home -- sooner or later, like the English leaving Ireland, we too will be forced out of Iraq.
The complete story is available at:
The English Army experience in Ireland