The Goat Song of Tony Blair: Presaging the End of the Iraq Misadventure

"Thus bad begins, and worse remains behind." -- Shakespeare, Hamlet.

Written by Chris Floyd
Friday, 23 February 2007

In light of the British retreat from Iraq -- whose true significance is well-covered by Juan Cole and Patrick Cockburn -- I thought it might be a good time to revisit a piece from August 2006: "Goats and Hussars: A British Harbinger of American Defeat." The story, which originally appeared on Truthout.org, told of the precipitate abandonment of the British base of Abu Naji in the "safe" Iraq south -- a retreat under fire from "friendly" Shiites.

The story was derided by some at the time as a typically overwrought piece of anti-war agit-prop. The general line (much cleaned up here, purged of the usual aspersions on one's parentage, patriotism, sanity, sexuality, etc.) went like this: "This is just a long-planned, tactical restructuring of forces; it does not in any way presage a larger British pullout -- and certainly not an eventual American withdrawal under duress!"

But as Cole and Cockburn make clear, the situation in Britain's occupation zone has been falsely portrayed by the Anglo-American coalition all along -- a deliberate deception eagerly accepted by a lazy corporate media (and abetted by the fact that Bush and Blair have turned Iraq into such a hell on earth that independent journalists can scarcely travel outside the tiny Green Zone enclave in Baghdad). The events of last August were in fact an accurate presaging of the current pullout, right down to the pathetic attempts to spin a military and political defeat into a ringing success for the "Coalition" -- and the genuine triumph of violent Shiite extremists over the Bush-backed "Iraqi government forces" in asserting their dominance over the region. >>>cont

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