Jonathan Friedland (Guardian Utd): Too easy to blame Bush

[Jack Rabbit]

From the Guardian Unlimited (UK)
Dated Wednesday May 12

Too easy to blame Bush
Forget the notion that Britain is a benign occupier. We must take responsibility for our army's actions
By Jonathan Freedland

I confess I used it myself. For a while after the invasion of Iraq it became the smug cliche du jour: Britain, according to this little nugget of conventional wisdom, was the "gentle occupier".
With pride we pointed out that 30 years in Northern Ireland had taught the British army the softly, softly approach to ruling potentially hostile territory. Unlike the heavy-footed Yanks, our boys knew how to win the trust of the locals. No inscrutable sunglasses, but eye contact. No Robocop helmets, but soft unthreatening berets. No armoured personnel carriers, but foot patrols - guns discreetly out of view, if carried at all. No wonder, we told ourselves, British-run Basra was quiet while US-ruled Falluja was in flames: that was surely a tribute to what the chief of the defence staff, General Sir Mike Jackson, called our "doctrinal differences" with the US military. Good for us.
For some, the latest revelations of coalition abuse and torture of Iraqi prisoners have done little to shake that basic narrative: Yanks are brutes, Brits are better . . . .
It's time this smug bubble was burst. For the abuse epidemic in Iraq is not an exclusively American disease; it infects us too. We cannot sit back and watch the senate hearings and the Rumsfeld press conferences as if this were only their story: we are up to our necks in it.
That remains true, even if you believe Geoff Hoon over Piers Morgan. What's at issue here is not a single disputed incident. Assess the evidence and what you see is not a blip or a lapse by a few "bad apples" (to deploy another complacent cliche). What emerges is a catalogue of abuse over a long and sustained period.

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