As Signaller in the 7th Armoured Brigade, Darren Kewley invaded Basra in March 2003 believing the Iraq war was justified. He saw children playing on the dusty streets, shoeless, scavenging for rubbish in the shadow of Saddam Hussein’s opulent palace. But upon his return in 2004, the naive 18 year old had turned into a critic of the intent of the western coalition governments.
“I thought we really could change things for the better,” said Darren, now 26, living in Aigburth, Liverpool, and working in IT and Communications. Darren has been following the Iraq Inquiry closely and the statement made by former director of communications at 10 Downing Street, Alistair Campbell, that Britain should be proud of changing Iraq “from what it was to what it is becoming” is, in Darren’s view, absurd.
“At first I didn’t give a great deal of thought to the moral and political debate, I found the chance to do my job, albeit under equipped, in an operational environment exciting,” he said. “Many of the senior officers had served in the first Gulf War and there were stories of the terrible things that happened first time round, so the entire principles for going to war seemed black and white to me.”
After a gruelling two months training in the Kuwaiti desert, the young soldier’s initial contact was with Iraqi soldiers surrendering to the coalition. “Many seemed like there was no fight in them and they were serving out of fear of Saddam rather than for pride,” he said.
Signaller Kewley’s first tour in Iraq was a mixture of “fear, boredom, excitement and a lot of boredom” but the way the war was being waged left him unsettled. “Looting broke out in the city and law and order began to break down. There seemed to be no plans for the aftermath and the Americans seemed to have a different viewpoint.”
That viewpoint has been documented vigorously in recent years by Naomi Klein, Noam Chomsky and Michael Moore, to name a few. And it is the viewpoint of a United States who uses power and force over morality and justice in their coups in countries that do not swing to the American beat, economically or democratically, bullying and promising allies’ rewards for support.
“The Americans treated the Iraqi civilians with suspicion and the way they drove around brashly flying flags from every vehicle. Our British commanders told us we were forbidden from flying flags because we wanted to be seen as liberators, not invaders,” said Darren.
After his first tour ended in late 2003, the British command seemed to have been “sidelined” by the Americans and a post-war plan was not on the horizon. What was clear was that more violence would ensue following the massacre of six members of the Royal Military Police in Maysan Province.
Signaller Kewley returned from his base in Germany to Iraq in 2004 to a country in turmoil. “Our camp was mortared on several occasions and some of our soldiers and friends were killed,” he said, “the locals were no way as friendly as last time, but I could not blame them: there was no power, security and no real infra-structure.”
Disillusioned with his role in the Iraq War, Darren left Iraq and the British Army began to scale back from the conflict in southern Iraq. Darren said: “The British Government claimed it was due to the success of the Iraqi Army gaining control, but I feel we pulled back and allowed the Iranian backed militia to gain control.”
As the Chilcott Inquiry continued, Darren Kewley watched Tony Blair and other key figures in his government account for their actions leading up to the war in Iraq. “It became apparent that we were all pawns in Bush and Blair’s adventure and to be proud of changing Iraq is absurd, and quite frankly, a little bit deluded,” he said.
The defence touted by US and British governments is that Saddam Hussein was an evil dictator capable of blowing up the entire western hemisphere in 15 minutes with weapons so dangerous, they still haven’t been found. But in The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein explodes the myth of liberty and justice through democracy by giving damning evidence of the United States sole aim of global domination through capitalism.
‘In Iraq,’ writes Klein, ‘first came the war, designed according to the authors of the shock and awe military doctrine, to “control an adversary’s will, perceptions and understanding and literally make an adversary impotent to react”. Next came “mass privatisation, complete free trade, a 15 per cent flat tax...and when the Iraqi’s resisted they were rounded up and taken to jail where bodies and minds were met with more shocks, these ones distinctly less metaphorical.’
The adventure is not solely Bush and Blair’s, the US and the UK have been on this jaunt many times before: from President Johnson’s secret deals with the Khmer Rouge, to Reagan and Thatcher’s love-in with General Pinochet, to Bush Snr and Rumsfeld selling arms to Saddam. Dictators are good for business until they get in the way of big business.
