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How Iraq war has changed Britain forever



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Published Date: 19 March 2008
By ALLAN MASSIE
THE NATION'S trust in government has been damaged and society is less free than it was, says ALLAN MASSIE.
KHADIM Jabouri, the man who took a sledge-hammer to Saddam Hussein's statue in Firdoos Square, had spent nine years in the dictator's Abu Ghraib prison. Yet he now says "initially everyone was happy to have got rid of the tyrant … but things have jus...



The full article contains 2007 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
Page 1 of 1

  • Last Updated: 18 March 2008 8:43 PM
  • Source: The Scotsman
  • Location: Edinburgh
  • Related Topics: Allan Massie
 
1

nabodican,

Rural Scotland 19/03/2008 06:42:59
Get out now!
2

donald,

glasgow 19/03/2008 08:37:18
Brits Out Now!
3

The Strategist,

19/03/2008 09:23:34
Scotland out of the UK now! We may well be able to recover our reputation.. The UK never will.
4

Alternative (High Octane) Fuel Head,

Edinburgh 19/03/2008 10:41:18
The Iraq invasion was an ill-thought-out knee jerk on the part of ths US and the UK.

Apart from being a pain in the backside, Saddam Hussein was relatively harmless and with him in power, he at least kept a volatile country more or less in check.

It would not have been difficult to imagine what would happen when he was removed. The results of removing a dictator had been plain for all the world to see a few years earlier in the former Yugoslavia. Of course, this never occurred to Bush and Blair, who just had naive visions of an "Iraqi democracy". I mean, were they really to stupid to realise that the reason countries like Iraq have dictatorships is because there is too much in-fighting and resentment for democracies to even begin to work?

I supported the action taken during the Iranian missile crisis in the Straits of Hormuz. I supported the action taken against Iraq during their invasion of Kuwait. Did Bush and Blair not stop to consider the reason why Schwarzkoff didn't just walk into Iraq then? There was a damn good reason for it, as the leaders at the time fully realised.

The reason for their decision is now evident. They didn't want to have to deal with the instability that we now see.

Whilst I fully support our troops in Iraq, I will NEVER support the reason for the initial invasion. Ever.
5

Joe M.,

Edinburgh 19/03/2008 16:46:04
I didn't trust the British Government before the invasion and I still don't now, so no change there.

Scotland has no interests which are threatened in either Iraq or Afghanistan, in fact both military actions have decreased our national security.

We need democratic Scottish control over our own troops and we won't get that without independence.

No wonder our young folk don't want to join the British army despite numerous misleading campaigns about how great it is. The truth is it doesn't represent our culture our our nation and it fights under a flag which represents the domination of England over Scotland and Ireland.

Our kids should not throw their lives away for Britain. If less are willing to do so I'm personally very pleased.
6

Dr. James Wilkie,

Vienna 22/03/2008 22:57:27
One aspect of the Iraq crisis we tend to overlook is that it has created 4.5 million refugees - equivalent to 90% of the population of Scotland having to flee elsewhere. Far from the situation improving, the number of Iraqis seeking asylum doubled over the past year, as the United Nations High Commissioner has just reported:

GENEVA/VIENNA, 18 March 2007 – A 5-year downward trend in asylum applications in industrialised countries was reversed in 2007, largely because of an increase in the number of Iraqi asylum seekers. Some 338,000 new applications for refugee status were submitted last year in 43 industrialised countries, a 10 percent rise compared to 2006, when 306,300 asylum claims were registered, the lowest number of asylum applications in 20 years.

The overall downward trend in asylum applications was offset last year by a large increase in the number of asylum seekers from Iraq. For the second year running, Iraqis topped the list of asylum seekers in the world's industrialised countries. The number of Iraqis applying for asylum almost doubled in one year, from 22,900 in 2006, to 45,200 in 2007.

It is important to bear in mind, however, that Iraqi asylum seekers in industrialised countries represent only 1 percent of the estimated 4.5 million Iraqis uprooted by the conflict. These include over 2.5 million people displaced within Iraq and another 2 million Iraqis in neighbouring countries such as Syria and Jordan, which are not included in the industrialised country statistics.

7

Dr. James Wilkie,

Vienna 22/03/2008 22:58:09
The top five countries of origin of asylum applicants in 2007 were Iraq (45,200), the Russian Federation (18,800), China (17,100), Serbia (15,400) and Pakistan (14,300). Apart from Iraqis, other groups with a significant rise in applications were Pakistanis (up 87 percent), Syrians (up 47 percent) and Somalis (up 43 percent).

The United States was the main country of destination for asylum seekers of all nationalities in 2007, with an estimated 49,200 new asylum claims, Sweden saw a 50 percent increase in the number of new asylum applications, from 24,300 in 2006, to 36,200 last year. This large increase was caused primarily by the arrival of large numbers of Iraqi asylum seekers. In 2007, Sweden received the second largest number of asylum seekers after the United States and accounted for 11 percent of all claims received in the industrialised world, compared with 8 percent in 2006.

After the USA and Sweden, the main receiving countries for asylum seekers in 2007 were France (29,200), Canada (28,300) and the UK (27,900). Greece, Germany, Italy, Austria and Belgium were also among the top 10.


 

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