I know on planet progressive this is all about imperialist aggression (yawn), but please try and remember that six people have died.

Will, if you read the reports you will see that there are reports of eight to ten people killed or are the deaths of Iraqi's (yawn) irrelevant?

In fact 8 people died, or don't Iraqi's count...Will? As ever, British "shoot" people but people "murder" British soldiers. Echoes of British military operations in Ireland.

I suppose referring to dead soldiers as "poodles" is acceptable.

How would you feel if I posted a title like Iraqi Village Savages Kill Brave Peacekeepers.

Then I suppose you would argue that the "corporate media" (yawn again) do that all the time.

Facts are sacred, comment is, especially on Indymedia, rather cheap.

Excuse some of the language, feel the context and understand the nature of the writer

 http://www.prisonplanet.com/analysis_chittum.html

Quack! Quack! Quack! Bang! Bang! Bang! It's as Easy as Ordering PizzaTom Chittum June 20 2003I do not have the scholarly resume of some other Prison Planet columnists. However, I have acquired what you might call a certain technological expertise which leads me to
to believe that we will be defeated in Iraq, and a lot sooner than what you might think. Unfortunately, because my acquired technological expertise is of what you might call a practical nature, it is not generally recognized as genuine military science. That's a shame because if I were allowed to write a field manuel for the army I could give our young fellows in Iraq many a tip on looting, arson, theft, murder, drugs, alcohol and similar matters that would prove useful in their character-building experience in our Glorious Imperial Legions. But to return to the point, I intend to use this expertise to explain one interesting facet of what is going down in Iraq. The war in Iraq is being fought by two very different military systems - a professional army versus a militia type army. I've fought in both, and I'll try to use my experiences to explain why we will be defeated. In early 1992 I was a grunt in the Croatian Army. My unit was stationed on the front line in the middle of nowhere. Months had passed since I had heard anything of the outside world or our glorious, multicultural America. As you will see I was slightly out of touch. The Serbs were about a mile away across No Man's Land. They lobbed mortar shells at us intermittently, mostly at night when they were dead drunk. We were usually drunk too, or were if the evening supply truck had brought us any beer. One morning I was on a work detail building a bunker when my Croatian platoon leader, Lt. Igor, walked up and said in his Count Dracula accent, "Chittum, the BBC is saying the niggers are burning down the Los Angeles." "Good for them," I replied. "I always knew they had more sense than the KKK gave them credit for. Tell me, did the limeys bother to ask them why?" Igor flipped his cigarette butt, shrugged his shoulders and said, "they say it is because the police are beating up some guy named Romey Zing." "Never heard of him," I replied. "Do you think there'll be any beer on the supply truck tonight?" The Croatian Army I served in was pretty much a militia-style army as opposed to our professional-style Glorious Imperial Legions. It looked more like a band of Mexican banditos than an army. Uniforms were worn any which way and were usually mixed with civilian clothes. The barracks always looked like Animal House after a toga party. The floors were littered with empty brandy bottles, cigarette butts and sometimes even lose grenades. The enlisted men never but never saluted the officers. As an experiment, I saluted an officer once. He paused, looked at me as if I were a simpleton, and then he asked me what I wanted. The Croatian Army would fail each and every inspection the United States Army has ever printed in all of its field manuals. By Pentagon standards every Croatian soldier should have been court-martialed and marched straight to the stockade. The Croatian soldiers did, however, pass one military test - they were willing to fight against overwhelming odds, and fight to the death, plain and simple. In contrast, our Glorious Imperial Legions in Iraq will get a bad case of Vietnamitis and fold. The Iraqi Resistance will first drive them back to their firebases, and then take them under siege. The last Skull and Bones carpetbagger leaving Baghdad will do so hanging onto the skids of a bullet-riddled helicopter.I was an infantryman in the American Army in the Vietnam war, and I was an infantryman in the Croatian Army during the war in the Balkans. The differences between our professional military system and the Croatian militia army were stunning, and an examination of these differences will explain why our professional army ground to a halt in Vietnam, and why the rag-tag Croatian militia army was able to defeat a more numerous and far better armed opponent. Let's start with the officers. When the war broke out in Croatia, Croatian men spontaneously formed themselves into fighting bands. These bands always came to be led by natural leaders, men whose courage and intelligence elicited the respect and loyalty of their men. One such Croatian officer was Lt. Igor, mentioned earlier, who had kindly raised my spirits by providing me with a vision of thousands of Beverly Hills oxygen wasters being hacked to pieces by mobs of machete wielding Crips and Bloods. (What the heck, we can always hope!) Anyway, one evening Lt. Igor and I were working on a bottle of Rikia brandy when he asked me what I did in civilian life. I replied that I was a computer programmer. "Great," he replied. "Everyone wants to win this war by playing Rambo. I've got a better idea." The next day Igor took me to Zagreb where he bought a battery operated programmable calculator at his own expense. The next day I found myself back at the front in an abandoned farmhouse seated at a table with Igor, a map and the calculator. My new job consisted of the mathematical transformation of Serb positions on the map into sight setting for our mortars. It was a complicated process involving trigonometric and other exotic calculations. The heartless fiend Igor even cut off my daily Rakia ration until I had finished my calculations each evening. If this incident had happened in the American Army, Lt. Igor would have been court-martialed for fraternizing with an enlisted man (which in the American military is infinitely worse than fraternizing with the enemy.) The programmable calculator would never have been bought, and the Serbs - unchecked by accurate mortar fire - would have overrun our line and bayoneted us all in our trenches and bunkers. The typical reaction of the typical American lieutenant - when confronted with any situation beyond the reasoning power of a snail darter - is to get on the field radio and buck the whole mess up to the next highest level of command. The idiot on the other end of the radio is typically some 20-year captain just drawing his pay. So Captain 20-years bucks the whole mess up to the next highest level of command, and so on until things reach the fudge factory at the Pentagon, where the enemy is an annoying irrelevancy, and selection of some hapless scapegoat for ritual slaughter is the solution to every incoming disaster. In short, our army is basically a sort of post office with machine guns. There is no innovation and no real leadership. In the American Army, the essential is neglected and the trivial exalted. Now let's talk about the enlisted men. In Vietnam, two friends of mine in my platoon shot themselves in the foot to get a ticket out of the meat grinder. They claimed it was accidental, of course - they clumsily shot themselves in the foot while cleaning their M16. Self-inflicted wounds to avoid combat became so numerous that the brass had to institute a policy calling the MPs and handcuffing any and all jokers who "accidentally" shot themselves while cleaning their rifles. This sort of thing simply didn't happen in the Croatian Army. Every man at the front was there because he wanted to be there. And unlike the Americans in Vietnam, the Croatians didn't have to field hordes of MPs to track down deserters. The Croatian Army spent its time fighting the enemy; the American Army spent the better part of its time fighting itself. Now consider our enlisted men in Iraq. There have been essentially no reports of Vietnamitis in our Glorious Imperial Legions in Iraq. There have been no reports of refusals to fight or go on patrols. Not a single one has shot himself in the foot, nor has a single one of them sampled any of the local dope or gotten drunk or raped or deserted or murdered civilians or offed an officer - excepting for one fragging incident at the beginning of the war. They are all apple-cheeked young lads who, when not gallantly fighting, hand out candy to the local children. Right! Like the rest of the Iraq war, this image is theater for tube zombies back home. Pure swill! The wheels are coming off the Glorious Imperial War Machine in Iraq. Our guys are being hunted down for sport by roving bands of Iraqi bushwhackers. Heck, it's fun and easy! All Abdullah and his buddies have to do is set up a half-way respectable ambush and wait for one of our obliging sitting duck patrols to waddle brainlessly into the old killing zone. Quack! Quack! Quack! - Bang! Bang! Bang! It's as easy as ordering out for pizza. What are our glorious imperial generals going to do next - maybe print up patrol schedules and award kewpie dolls to the Iraqi snipers? The American Army in Iraq is evolving into the American Army of Vietnam. The Iraqi Resistance is evolving into the Croatian militia army. The longer it wears on the worse it will get. Economic rout will follow military humiliation, and I'll be on the skids along with 90% of my fellow comrade peasants. Therefore, I have this to say to the members of our Glorious Imperial Legions in Iraq. My guiding light in life has always been my desire that the Cyclops eats me last. Therefore, I urge you to continue waddling around Baghdad like shooting arcade ducks. The longer we can stave off the inevitable defeat by keeping the ragheads amused by blowing your brains out, the better it will be for me. By the way, you guys, welcome to the club from a 'Nam vet. Now stop your freaking whining and go get yourself killed.

June 26, 2003

They refused to flee the mob ... duty made them stay behind the doorway to death
By Daniel McGrory in al-Majar and Michael Evans

Not a shot was fired in al-Majar during the Iraq war. Yet in peace the town saw Britain's deadliest encounter with the Iraqis

The police station doorway where one of the British military policemen died. Three others were trapped and murdered inside.

THE bloodstains are streaked across the stone floor, the walls pockmarked with bullet holes. Every window has been shot out. In the lavatory block of this town’s police station, four members of the Royal Military Police made their final stand on Tuesday. One apparently died in the doorway, the other three inside, after a gunfight with a mob of 300 angry townspeople.

Exactly what happened is still unclear but, by all accounts, the British soldiers who died in al-Majar-al-Kabir did so gallantly. They are said to have ordered the Iraqi civilians that they had been training as police officers to flee and to have offered to surrender but were killed anyway.

“I’m so ashamed I left them,” Salam Mohammed, one of the trainees, said yesterday.

The Britons had tried to shield the terrified trainees from the mob, he said, his body shaking. “They told us to save ourselves though they refused to run away. They were murdered in cold blood. There was no way they could escape.”

Ali al-Ateya, an Iraqi radio journalist, claims that he saw the Britons offering to surrender their weapons after two of their colleagues had already been shot dead. Ringleaders snatched the rifles and killed the soldiers.

“They shot the British in the head, several times. The executioners were standing right in front of the Britons,” he said.

An ambulanceman who helped take away the victims’ bodies confirmed that all four had been shot in the head. Two Iraqis also died.

Yesterday the Ministry of Defence was struggling to answer even the most basic questions about the deaths of the six men.

There was complete confusion, British commanders in southern Iraq admitted, and with troops and investigators staying out of the town for fear of exacerbating tensions, there seems little chance of them finding answers quickly.

Local Iraqis said the British “occupiers” had inflamed feelings over the weekend with heavy-handed weapons searches — which the Army denied.

British commanders in southern Iraq said the six soldiers arrived unannounced in the town on Tuesday morning. They were caught up in an angry crowd and shots were fired. Two RMPs were killed, along with possibly four Iraqis. The crowd then advanced on the police station where four other RMPs had taken refuge.

It is unclear if the officers were unable to summon help or why it failed to arrive.

Defence sources now believe that a patrol of British paratroopers was ambushed close to the town just after, not before, the killings. A Chinook helicopter that came to their rescue was also fired on, and eight soldiers injured.

The paratroopers knew nothing of the killings but British commanders assume Iraqi gunmen opened fire because they feared the British were seeking revenge.

It was also unclear whether the attacks were spontaneous, or whipped up by Saddam loyalists. “We know that some Baath Party loyalists and Fedayin have been hiding in this area,” the local police chief, Mohammed Abdel Hassan, said. “But I don’t know if any of them were in the mob.”

The RMP team had come to discuss uniforms for the trainees. They wanted local people to recognise the new police officers, who had been patrolling in civilian clothes.

Mr Mohammed said that when the mob arrived at the station, two of the British soldiers immediately climbed on to the flat roof of the mud-brick station house and tried to reason with the crowd shaking the flimsy iron gates. The mob forced its way into the station precinct which is built around an open courtyard.

He recalled one of the Britons radioing for help and said that, even then, there was no obvious panic by the RMPs although they could see some of the crowd waving rifles.

Mr Mohammed is not sure who fired the first shot, or why. All he knows is that at least four shots rang out.

The Britons shouted for the trainees to run for cover while they inched their way backwards to the lavatory block.They formed a barricade from a metal filing cabinet and an oil drum. One edged around the corner of the room and was shot in the forehead from 10ft away. As he died, the crowd fell silent, giving the Iraqi trainees a chance to run across the open corridor to an office with a window big enough for a man to squeeze through.

“I turned and shouted for the British to come too,” Mr Mohammed said. “I pleaded with them ‘Save yourselves’. One called out that it was their duty to stay. One smiled and wished me luck.”

Nobody can be sure who fired the first fatal shot, or why. But Mr Mohammed said it was clear that the mob knew they had the British at their mercy. He was too ashamed and scared to translate the insults hurled at the RMPs and his fellow police officers for “collaborating with occupiers”.

Not a shot was fired in anger in al-Majar during the war, and its police station was not ransacked. But yesterday, as the British soldiers lay dead at their feet, the mob tore into the offices, tipping documents on to the floor and burning them. The bonfires were still burning 24 hours later.

“We will never erase what happened here,” Mr Hassan said. “This is a place of shame for al-Majar.”