As a Shiite Muslim who was interrogated by Iraq's secret police and lost her job because she would not join the regime's Baath Party, Fawzia al-Attia should feel safer now that Saddam Hussein is no longer in power. She does not.
Death threats and Baghdad's daily bombings have made al-Attia more afraid than she was during Saddam's reign of terror, she says."Before, I couldn't say anything in my own home," said al-Attia. "But at least I was safe. I was only afraid of Saddam. It is not like now. Now, you open the door to your home and you could get killed."
American troops are preparing to pull out of Iraqi completely by the end of December, more than eight years after the invasion that ousted Saddam and promised a better life for Iraqis. As the country enters a post-U.S. era, many Iraqis who had welcomed the 2003 invasion feel they remain in even more danger than before Saddam's fall.
Security is a key indicator of Iraq's future — it drives business investment, government policy decisions and the psyche of the war-torn nation.In interviews across Baghdad, Iraqis cited the random daily bombings and shootings that continue to kill people here. At least under Saddam, they say, they knew they could avoid being targeted by violence by simply staying quiet.
Al-Attia doesn't make the comparison lightly. She remembers the fear when, under Saddam's rule, she was called to a police station for questioning. Her husband followed her because he didn't know if he'd ever see her again.
Now that same uncertainty looms in the background every day. Because of sectarian violence, she and her family moved from a Shiite neighborhood to the heavily fortified Green Zone. A sociology professor at Baghdad University, she can't drive herself to work, relying instead on bodyguards to take her.
"Under Saddam, there was fear, but in a different way," she said.Sectarian violence, which drove Iraq to the brink of civil war just a few years ago, was almost nonexistent under Saddam.
In May 2003, two months after the invasion, there were fewer than a handful of daily attacks on Iraqis, national security forces and foreign troops. That number spiked in May 2007, with an average of 180 attacks a day, according to the U.S. military data released by congressional investigators at the General Accounting Office. Between 2005 and 2008, an average of 60 Iraqis was killed daily.
Since then, violence has dropped dramatically, but attacks continue.
Several people a day die, and a bombing in a residential area or on a street of shops that causes no casualties still spreads fear among everyone who hears about it. This past July, U.S. forces in Iraq reported an average of 20 daily bombings, rocket attacks and shootings — including some that were thwarted before they were carried out.
Sunni insurgent groups, which sprung up when Saddam was ousted and Iraq's majority Shiites took power, continue to strike at anyone who tries to restore normalcy to Iraq — security forces, the government, Americans or even fellow Sunnis, like the 29 who were killed in a Baghdad mosque by a suicide bomber during Ramadan prayers this past month.
"I'm not going to short-sheet the current security situation; I think it's not what the Iraqis want or deserve," said U.S. Army Maj. Gen. Jeffrey S. Buchanan, the American military's top spokesman in Baghdad.Asked to compare today's security in Iraq to what it was under Saddam, Buchanan called it "very, very different."
"I don't think we know as much of what was going on in the past, just because much of it was quiet," he said. "In the dead of the night, people would come and take you away, and you never heard from them again."
Certainly no one has forgotten the horrors under Saddam.
Estimates of how many Iraqis were executed or otherwise "disappeared" during Saddam's 24-year regime range from 300,000 to 800,000. Reviews of bodies found in mass graves from that era point to what Gerard Alexander, an expert at the American Enterprise Institute think tank in Washington, has called a "conservative estimate" that an average 16,000 Iraqis a year were killed.
Saddam persecuted prominent Shiite clerics and their followers and launched what Human Rights Watch calls a campaign of genocide against Kurds. People from all backgrounds rarely, if ever, dared to criticize the government, even to relatives or neighbors, for fear they'd be taken away by Saddam's secret police and beaten, imprisoned, killed, or simply disappear.
"When I was in Baghdad, I would always feel that today would be the day that I would be killed. But I was lucky," said Biekhal Alkhalifa, a 31-year-old Kurd who commuted between engineering classes in Baghdad and her hometown of Kirkuk when Saddam was president.
"I am sure there are a lot of Arab people who now say, 'We wish Saddam was still in power,'" she said. "But for the Kurds, it is 100 percent of us who are happy that he is gone."The U.S. military surge that poured more than 160,000 troops into Iraq in 2007 quelled much of the sectarian violence.
But a July report by the U.S. watchdog that oversees construction in Iraq concluded that the nation is more dangerous now than it was last year due to bombings, assassinations and a resurgence in violence by Iranian-backed Shiite militias. Iraq Body Count, an independent British monitoring group, estimates at least 102,043 Iraqi civilians have been killed since the war began.
Iraq has gone into what Sean Kane, a former United Nations diplomat now with the U.S. Institute of Peace, calls a "sideways drift" — progress has plateaued and Iraqis have a hard time predicting what may come next.
The violence looms over the American military's planned exit, fueling fears about instability and burgeoning influence from neighboring Iran. As a result, Baghdad and Washington are reconsidering whether the U.S. troops should leave by Dec. 31, as required under a 2008 security agreement.
Saddam's last wide-ranging campaigns of death against Shiites and Kurds ended in 1991. As a result, in the perception of many Iraqis, the years before the 2003 U.S.-led invasion seemed peaceful — even as Saddam continued terrorizing people in smaller numbers without attracting much nationwide attention.
"Even though Saddam was a tyrant, we Iraqis used to live a good life," said Huda Aqeel Jaffa, 35, a Sunni housewife with three children and a husband who receives death threats because, as a construction contractor, he is seen as working with Americans. "Life was simple, and we could go everywhere we wanted. Now, there is no security. There is no stability. There is no humanity. We are afraid of everything."
Copyright © 2011 The Associated Press.
Long before U.S. officials declared al-Qaeda to be on the ropes, taking hits to the body and the head, they were making similar declarations about a more discrete enemy: the group’s affiliate in Iraq. In 2008, with American forces making substantial gains in the war, the CIA’s director at the time, Michael V. Hayden, pointed to a “near-strategic defeat” for al-Qaeda in Iraq.
More than three years on, there’s little doubt that the U.S.-led effort to counter al-Qaeda in Iraq has vastly weakened the group. Its members now number no more than 1,000 and it lacks the ability to challenge the slowly strengthening Iraqi state.
At the same time, as a string of recent attacks show, there’s also little doubt that al-Qaeda in Iraq, or AQI, remains active. And that, a counterterrorism expert argues in a new analysis, means it is still dangerous, both in Iraq, where about 300 people died every month in terrorist attacks last year, and possibly even in the West.“We need to be paying closer attention,” Brian Fishman, of the New America Foundation, said in an interview. “The nature of AQI has changed.”
Fishman writes in a new paper that a tendency to celebrate the end of AQI is allowing U.S. policymakers to ignore the threat it poses. Smaller and less ambitious, it is also more resilient. And while the Iraqi security forces are still shaky, there are areas around Mosul in the north of Iraq, Anbar in the west and even in Baghdad that might reasonably be described as safe havens for the group’s members.
“They don’t need that much space,” said Fishman. “They don’t need training camps like they had in Afghanistan pre-9/11, where they went around on monkey bars. It wasn’t the monkey bar training that allowed them to take down planes on 9/11, it was the ability to sit and think of ways of hijacking an airplane. And today you need even less space.”
Fishman’s worry is that AQI, no longer preoccupied with trying to create an Islamic state in Iraq, will heed calls from al-Qaeda leaders to expand operations and attempt to strike the West. Some, like Abu Yahya al-Libi and Atiyah Abd al-Rahman – reportedly recently killed in Pakistan – have explicitly called for more such attacks.
AQI is organized and has the ability to stage coordinated strikes. Meantime, while the numbers of operators in Iraq is small, the Yemen-based al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) has shown that a small number of people working in a weak state can make ambitious plans. The many Western connections to Iraq – the embassies, companies and NGOs – might also make the process of planning an attack in the West easier than in isolated Yemen.
In his analysis, Fishman suggests that “a weakly governed Iraq may offer a better platform for al-Qaeda attacks against the West than AQAP’s increasingly chaotic home in Yemen.”“If they developed the desire to operate outside Iraq’s borders, it seems like they’d be able to do so,” he says.
Fishman says, as in Iraq, the counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan could very well fail to eliminate the terrorist threat even if the broader insurgency is defeated. Elements of the Taliban could reconcile with the Afghan government, and the Afghan state could function on its own. But “if we have an environment in Afghanistan that relies on the state to defend itself against the Taliban and control major cities, that doesn’t necessarily mean it has the ability to control its territory to the degree where terrorist organizations cannot operate,” Fishman says.
What do the limits of counterinsurgency mean for long-term U.S. foreign policy? Reluctantly, Fishman concludes that Washington is probably best off maintaining some American presence in both Afghanistan and Iraq to support local security forces and to monitor regional threats. But, he says, there are trade-offs involved. The presence of American troops in either country – not to mention Pakistan, Somalia or Yemen – is used as a recruiting tool by extremists.
“Whether we acknowledge it directly or not, we have tacitly made the choice that we have reduced the risk of the large attack but increased the risk of the small-scale one,” he says.“That’s frankly probably the right policy for us,” he added, “but we have to honest with ourselves about the trade-off.”
By Alice Fordham, the Washington Post
Nearly half of the women who've been deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan have been mothers. This week's parenting conversation explores issues of preparing kids for parents' deployments, how kids adjust to these changes, and how military mothers face different challenges than military fathers. Guest host Jacki Lyden hears from Sergeant Major Odetta Johnson of the U.S. Army Reserves; Margaret Pooley, whose son just returned from Afghanistan; and Laura Browder, author of When Janey Comes Marching Home.
JACKI LYDEN, host: We wanted to know how military families were coping. Following September 11, 2001, the U.S. military invaded Afghanistan, a move that quickly affected the lives of thousands of service members and their families. Nearly half of the 200,000 women who deployed to Afghanistan and to a separate war in Iraq in the last decade, have been mothers.
We're going to talk to our moms about the impact of those wars on them and their families. Here with us now are Odetta Johnson. She's a master sergeant in the U.S. Army Reserves and served in Iraq from 2005 to 2006. She's currently a major in the Richmond Police Department and the mom of two teenagers. Welcome to the show.
ODETTA JOHNSON: Why thank you.
LYDEN: Margaret Pooley is the mother of a Marine who recently returned from an eight-month deployment to Afghanistan. Hello Margaret.
MARGARET POOLEY: Hello.
LYDEN: And Laura Browder, who has been on this show before, is the author of "When Janey Comes Marching Home," a book that profiles women who've returned from the wars. She's a professor of American studies at the University of Richmond. Welcome to you.
LAURA BROWDER: Thank you, Jacki.
LYDEN: Well, it's great to have all of you here with us. And Major Odetta Johnson, let's begin with you. You first deployed six years ago when I believe you children were what, under 10?
JOHNSON: Ten and eight. Mm-hmm.
LYDEN: Mm-hmm. And how did you prepare your kids for your deployment?
JOHNSON: There's really no real way to prepare them. I had to sit down and talk to them about the fact that sometimes you make commitments in your life that later affect everybody in the family. And, of course, they were looking at me a little strange. And I guess some of the toughest parts was talking about leaving, and I didn't have a choice and this was another situation in their life where they didn't have a choice and some changes were about to occur in our family. It was a little difficult...
LYDEN: So...
JOHNSON: ...because it was a choice I had made years before I even knew I was going to be married or have any children.
LYDEN: The choice to be in the service, you mean.
JOHNSON: To be in the military, to commit my life to serving to the military.
LYDEN: But you had never had to leave them for that length of period of time. How did the kids handle the actual deployment?
JOHNSON: Well, originally because the unit trained at Camp Atterbury in Indiana, we had a little time difference but they were still able to reach me by telephone, we could text and at the end of the day I could still give a call or early in the morning. But they were just starting to get used to the fact that they couldn't reach me immediately.
And then when I deployed to Kuwait and they had to go long periods of time without reaching me, the stress levels were starting to build a little bit and I had been gone from home maybe about four months and they were starting to feel the effects of not having me there. And then when I went into Iraq, it really was difficult because if you get caught in a sandstorm or communications go down it could very well be over a week sometimes before I was able to really reach them.
LYDEN: Margaret Pooley, I understand that you're not in favor of the wars in Afghanistan or Iraq. You've protested against them actively. You've even got lawn signs in the yard that say end the war and yet you have a 20-year-old who joined the military and served. How did you react when your son said that he wanted to enlist?
POOLEY: I thought it was a horrible decision on his part and I tried to get him not to do it but I realized that an 18-year-old is going to do whatever he feels like doing, so I came around to support him.
LYDEN: And did you try to talk him out of it?
POOLEY: We briefly tried to talk him out of it, but he was very adamant about wanting the challenge, wanting to serve his country and he said he would go to college later.
LYDEN: Mm-hmm. So as time went on were you able to reconcile this in any way for yourself?
POOLEY: Yes. I mean I'm still not in favor of the war, of course, but I respect him as an adult individual who is on his own path.
LYDEN: And what did he say, he's now recently back, and how has that been going?
POOLEY: Well, I haven't seen him since he's been back. He had to go through the warrior transition program and we're going to see him real soon.
LYDEN: You must be looking forward to that.
POOLEY: Absolutely. Because we would go long period of time where we couldn't talk to him at all.
LYDEN: Mm-hmm. Laura Browder, you've talked to a lot of women who've gone to war for your book "When Janey Comes Marching Home: Portraits of Women Combat Veterans." How good a job do you think the military is doing at basically alleviating some of the separation stresses that families face?
BROWDER: Well, I think the military is working very hard to do that because now, as you said, there are so many mothers and, of course, so many fathers who have deployed and often deployed repeatedly for long periods of time. I talked to one mother who had had three yearlong back-to-back deployments between 2003 and 2006. She's got four children, including one daughter who's pretty severely autistic, and I know that she and her family really struggled with that.
But, I think, you know, so many families have had to struggle over the last 10 years almost of these two wars.
LYDEN: Mm-hmm.
BROWDER: I think that in fact the civilian world has a much harder time coping with mothers at war than the military does. Mothers who deploy are judged much more harshly than fathers who deploy. You know, we are all so used to seeing those wonderful celebratory pictures in our local newspapers of fathers in uniform coming home to greet their kids and sometimes coming home to meet babies who they've never seen before because they've been gone. And when we see those pictures we tend to think that's really wonderful and patriotic, but we judge mothers who deploy I think much more harshly.
LYDEN: Well, I know that for your book you also did a companion photo show. I - imagine the picture of, and Odetta you might want to respond to this, a mother coming home from the war and she's handed a crying infant who...
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
LYDEN: I think you said that one mother was very sad because the kids didn't recognize the mom.
BROWDER: I've heard that from many mothers, in fact. You know, here she's been thinking about her kids and tried to talk to them as much as possible during the six months or year, or even 18 months that she's been gone, and she comes back and they may have changed a lot because a year is a really long time in a child's life.
And I know Odetta, when we talked, you told me stories about how your kids have changed in some surprising ways the time you had gone.
JOHNSON: Oh, it was so drastic. I was just in shock. I got off the airplane and I saw my mom; she looked the same. And I saw two kids. My son was like two or three inches taller. My daughter, the style of dress, everything was different. And I was expecting to come back home to something like it was when I left.
LYDEN: I'm Jacki Lyden. I'm talking with military moms about the impact war has had on their families. My guests are author Laura Browder, Margaret Pooley, whose son served in Afghanistan, and Master Sergeant Odetta Johnson, now a major in the Richmond Virginia Police Department.
Margaret Pooley, what are you thinking might be the changes? You haven't seen your son in a year. He has gone from 18 to 20. That's not as much of a jump as Major Johnson's children were when they were so young when she went away, but do you think he'll have changed a little bit?
POOLEY: Yes. I think he realizes now that he had it pretty well here. He had an opportunity to go to college. He did well on the SATs and we would've helped financially with that. I think he met kids from all different walks of life in the military, kids who didn't have an option but to join. So I think he's going to have a better perspective on the world. It's not the little cocoon that he's lived in for his first 18 years.
LYDEN: Let me ask you Laura Browder, do you find that military families tend to adjust to having someone deployed over time? It seems like they have little choice.
BROWDER: Well, I mean they adjust in ways that are better and worse. I mean a lot of children have a really tough time coping and there are a lot of kids who end up staying back a year in school because they can't focus, they can't really concentrate on their schoolwork. But, you know, I think the Internet has also made a tremendous difference - for better and for worse - in how kids adjust.
And Odetta, I'm remembering another story that you told me when, you know, you would mention a place where you had been because you were in the Green Zone, right, and you used to drive here and there...
JOHNSON: Yeah.
BROWDER: ...outside of the Green Zone and you'd mention where you are going and, you know, you'd use the real name and your kids would go and look it up on the Internet and say oh Mom, you mean Suicide Alley, don't you? And so they could keep up...
JOHNSON: That was hard too.
BROWDER: Yeah,
JOHNSON: Because they were and I was trying to. I'd tell them after I'd come back from a mission - and the sad part is that I thought that I was giving them comfort, but actually I was scaring them because the Internet had all this additional information of prior events that had happened at that location and, you know, whether or not they considered that the safe area are not. And then they started every day after school wanting to look to see what was finding out.
But I would move to certain places when we would travel to go on convoys. But then I just stopped sending pictures and sending information. That's why it was such a shock when I came home and saw that the size that they were. Because we stopped sending pictures and we just started handwriting letters because I told them that would be a wonderful thing for me because I could read them over and over again regardless of whether or not the Internet was up or not.
LYDEN: Mm-hmm.
JOHNSON: And actually that really put a little bit more control in their life because then they could control how often I would receive their letters. So each time something happened where I felt like they were losing control or felt that like they might not have choices, I was trying to create a way so that we could still keep in contact as a family.
LYDEN: Laura, what have you learned that military families need the most?
POOLEY: They need the civilian world to understand more of what they're going through. You know, mothers go to war and they come back and, you know, the children have changed but the mothers have changed too. They've seen things and experienced things that their families often just can't understand.
BROWDER: You know, it's interesting, I interviewed over 50 women for my book and I'm working on a documentary right now called "Mothers at War." And one thing that's really struck me is that so many single women and childless women would talk freely and openly to me about their posttraumatic stress disorders, and almost no mothers would, because I think there is such a stigma in our society to being considered a bad mother.
And I think mothers who have been deployed really need to be able to talk about it and acknowledge what they've been through and not feel that they have to try and cover up and be perfect, because they've been through a lot and their families have been through a lot and they need all the support they can get.
LYDEN: Laura Browder is the author of "When Janey Comes Marching Home," a book that profiles female combat veterans. And she was with us from Georgia Public Broadcasting in Atlanta where she's traveling.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
LYDEN: Margaret Pooley is the mom of a Marine who just returned from an eight-month deployment to Afghanistan. She was with us in our studio in Washington, D.C. And Odetta Johnson is a master sergeant in the U.S. Army Reserve and a major in the Richmond Police Department, and she's the mother of two teenagers, and she joined us from Richmond.
Well, thank you all for giving us so much to think about as these wars continue. Thank you.
BROWDER: Thank you.
JOHNSON: Thank you.
POOLEY: Thank you, Jacki.
LYDEN: And that's our program for today. I'm Jacki Lyden and this is TELL ME MORE from NPR News. Let's talk more tomorrow.
Copyright © 2011 National Public Radio
IN ITS 90th year the Royal British Legion in Wotton-under-Edge is trying to raise awareness of the charity and the work it does.The RBL nationally is celebrating its 90th birthday, but the Wotton branch was set up in the same year and is the joint oldest branch in Gloucestershire along with Stroud.
Its members are keen to promote their presence after some people mistakenly thought the branch had disbanded when the legion club closed around five years ago.Yet the branch is as strong as ever and last year collected £8,000 for the Poppy Appeal.
"There is still a British Legion in Wotton and we are thriving, we want people to know that," said Sheila Sainsbury, chairman of the legion and treasurer of the women’s section.Richard Arnold, treasurer of the branch, whose son is a pilot and recently flew out to Afghanistan, says she felt there were many misconceptions about what the RBL does and how people can get involved.
"People think that you have to have been in the forces to join or volunteer for the RBL, and that is not the case, we welcome everyone."People also don’t realise how much we do, we don’t just help veterans we help service forces, we help the wives or husbands and families of serving men and women."
Unlike Help for Heroes which deals with only injured soldiers the RBL helps in numerous ways, from fitting stairlifts in homes and funding holidays for bereaved children to working with former soldiers in prison and supporting war widows.
"Our work is incredibly diverse, the RBL nationally gives away around £1.25 million in welfare a week," added Richard."We would really like to get younger people involved with the legion."
To celebrate the 90th anniversary the Wotton branch is hosting a gala evening on Friday, September 23, from 7.30pm at the Civic Centre. Tickets are £12 and include a fashion show, a buffet supper, dance and music from Time 2 Dance.
For tickets contact Sheila Saisbury on 01453 842427.
I had never contemplated joining the Royal British Legion, but I did. As one elderly gentleman said to me in June, a wry grin across his face; “Its where old men get together in dusty clubs, drink warm beer and talk about war stories.” Infact what I discovered at the British Legion’s 90th Birthday celebrations in Manchester was everything but dust, anecdotes and reminisces.
Having turned 90 in 2011, the Royal British Legion was founded out of the horrors of the First World War, alongside a few other organisations which also emerged around that time, to provide WW1 veterans with a focal point of remembrance for the comrades who were lost in the supposed “war to end all others”.
Their return from trench warfare was met with everything but applause. In the 1920‘s and 1930‘s, alongside unemployment, housing was the other great social problem. “Rows of dismal terraced houses and crumbling cottages”, were the scenes that men came home to. Just months after the Russian Revolution, which ended Russia’s involvement in the First World War and gave birth to the Soviet Union, then British Prime Minister Lloyd George had raised hopes by stating that Britain would provide “homes fit for heroes to live in”.
Even creeping into the 1940’s, George Orwell noted that in parts of Britain there still existed housing conditions where; “You might walk through hundreds of miles of streets, inhabited by miners, every one of whom gets black from head to foot everyday, without ever passing a house in which one could have a bath”.
In July 1948, the Daily Mail told its readers: “On Monday you will wake up in a new Britain, in a state which “takes over its citizens six months before they are born, providing care and free services for their birth, their schooling, sickness, workless days, widowhood and retirement”. The Second World War was a decisive factor in the creation of the Welfare State, as the poverty, unemployment and trauma experienced after the First War had made the nation decide that Britain wasn’t going back to that dark era.
The “sickness” and “workless” days described by the Daily Mail had in many instances less to do with work availability and more to do with the disabilities that soldiers from both conflicts had come home with. Britain recently mourned the loss of its last Great War Veteran. In 1919, 'Combat Stress', the Veteran’s Mental Health Society, was formed by the wives, daughters and mothers of British Veterans who had returned from the front line and were living with excruciating conditions such as 'Shell Shock', now known as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.
At the end of World War One, thousands of men returned to Britain and because of the devastation to their minds, they were confined to War Hospitals. However, the founding mothers of Combat Stress believed that these men could be helped through rehabilitation. This philosophy allowed Combat Stress to also support those returning from Japanese POW camps after the Second World War. Through perseverance and commitment, this organisation has since been able to help over 100,000 British ex-service men and women.
Within weeks of joining the British Legion, I signed myself up to a 'Pilgrimage of Remembrance' to France in the first week of August. In the company of just some of the children who had lost their fathers in World War One, we visited over a dozen cemeteries and war memorials. Nothing spoke greater about a collective understanding of our heritage than the imprinted names, dates and regiments of the men who had died.
For those whose fathers were buried in those graves, it was the first time that some had been able to visit their 'absent' parent and for others, because of age, it was also to be their last visit. As they laid down their poppy wreaths, in accompaniment to the Exhortation; “They shall grow not old as we that are left grow old”, it were as if the sands of time had been shifted and 90 years of British Legion history fell completely into place.
Hussein Al-alak is a British based journalist and is chairman of the Iraq Solidarity Campaign UK. Hussein is also a member of the Royal British Legion and a mental health advocate for Combat Stress.
Britain's involvement in the war in Iraq galvanised support for al Qaida among Muslims in the UK, former MI5 boss Dame Eliza Manningham Buller said.The conflict provided a battleground on which "Jihad" could be fought, and British citizens travelled to support Saddam Hussein's regime in its battle against the bid to topple him.
In a lecture in central London, she said: "It increased the terrorist threat by convincing more people that Osama Bin Laden's claim that Islam was under attack was correct."It provided an arena for the Jihad for which he had called - so that many of his supporters, including British citizens, travelled to Iraq to attack Western forces."
Dame Manningham Buller, who has previously revealed reservations about the UK's decision to go to war in Iraq, was speaking to a live audience at BBC Broadcasting House on the subject of terror.It was the first of a series of three BBC Radio 4 Reith Lectures to be given by the former director general of MI5, called Securing Freedom.
She said: "It [the Iraq war] also made very clear that foreign and domestic policy are intertwined. Actions overseas have an impact at home. And our role in Iraq spurred our young British Muslims to turn to terror."Dame Manningham Buller said she did not like the term "War on Terror", which was widely used by the US and UK governments in the wake of 9/11.
Calling terrorism a "crime, not an act of war", she said that terrorism was "a violent tool, used for political reasons" to put pressure on governments by creating fear in the population.She said calling it a "war" legitimised terrorism, and added: "Terrorism will continue in some form, whatever the outcome, if there is one, of such a war."
Copyright © 2011 The Press Association
UK and US intelligence are examining ways of talking to al-Qaeda, with a view to an eventual peace settlement, the former head of MI5 has said.But Baroness Eliza Manningham-Buller, who ran the security service until 2007, said negotiations were a way off.She was speaking in London on Thursday, as she delivered the first of her BBC Reith lectures on the theme of "Securing Freedom".
She also branded the 9/11 attacks "a crime, not an act of war".The former head of MI5 said that military and security responses to terrorism can only go so far.She added that, eventually, "you have to reach a political settlement" with terror groups.
Baroness Manningham-Buller ran the security service for five years and presided over a massive expansion in it.She said she had always found the phrase "war on terror"' to be unhelpful and that the Iraq invasion had been a distraction in the West's pursuit of al-Qaeda.
As she delivered the first of her three BBC Reith lectures, Baroness Manningham-Buller said the Iraq invasion had provided an arena for jihad and had motivated some Britons to embark on terrorism.
Eliza Manningham-Buller's Reith Lectures begin on BBC Radio 4 on Tuesday 6 September 2011 at 09:00 BST.They are repeated from Saturday 10 September at 22:15 BST. You can also listen via the BBC iPlayer or download the programme podcast.
Britain and the US were planning to take action against Saddam Hussein without a second UN resolution five months before the invasion of Iraq, a newly released letter from Tony Blair's office shows.
A letter from Blair's private secretary reveals that "we and the US would take action" without a new resolution by the UN security council if UN weapons inspectors showed Saddam had clearly breached an earlier resolution. In that case, he "would not have a second chance".
That was the only way Britain could persuade the Bush administration to agree to a role for the UN and continuing work by UN weapons inspectors, the letter says.
Dated 17 October 2002, it was written by Matthew Rycroft to Mark Sedwill, private secretary to the foreign secretary, Jack Straw. "This letter is sensitive," Rycroft underlined. "It must be seen only by those with a real need to know its contents, and must not be copied further."
He sent it to a number of other senior officials, including Sir Jeremy Greenstock, Britain's ambassador to the UN. There is no indication that it was seen by Lord Goldsmith, the attorney general, who at the time was advising that invading Iraq without a fresh UN resolution would be illegal.
Rycroft's letter referred to a Downing Street meeting on the Iraqi crisis attended by Straw, the defence secretary, Geoff Hoon, and the chief of the defence staff, Admiral Sir Mike Boyce. Also present were Blair's chief of staff, Jonathan Powell; his director of government relations, Sally Morgan; his director of communications, Alastair Campbell; and his chief foreign policy adviser, David Manning.
The meeting concluded, wrote Rycroft, that "the only way to keep the US on the UN route was for there to be a clear understanding that if [chief UN weapons inspector Hans] Blix reported an Iraqi breach of the first resolution, then Saddam would not have a second chance".
In a devastating passage, Rycroft added: "In other words, if for some reason [such as a French or Russian veto] there were no second resolution agreed … we and the US would take action."The Downing Street letter is particularly significant considering the government's repeated emphasis in public at the time on the need for UN approval before any invasion of Iraq.
The first resolution referred to in Rycroft's letter was number 1441, passed unanimously in November 2002. Goldsmith and most of the government's legal advisers insisted a second UN resolution was needed before military action could lawfully take place.
Blair was put in an even more difficult position with Washington as, in the event, Blix never reported an unconditional breach of the first resolution.
The Rycroft letter also appears to conflict with Straw's actions at the time. A statement recently released by the Chilcot inquiry revealed that in October 2002 Straw told his French counterpart, Dominique de Villepin, that US acceptance of the wording of the first UN resolution "implied" a further one was required.
The statement was written by Sir Michael Wood, the Foreign Office's top legal adviser, who also opposed the invasion. It also disclosed that Greenstock had told his US counterpart that Britain would state publicly after the resolution was passed "that there needed to be a second resolution".
The issue is at the heart of the deep and continuing arguments over the legality of the invasion. Goldsmith originally advised Blair and Straw that the first UN resolution did not provide sufficient legal cover for war.
Goldsmith said he changed his mind in February 2003 after Bush's legal advisers told him on a US visit that they had agreed to the wording of 1441 only because it had not crossed their "red line" – the clear message was that, as far as the US was concerned, no new resolution was needed.
Philippe Sands, professor of international law at University College London, said: "The letter of 17 October 2002 is consistent with the conclusion that the prime minister wanted to proceed to action with the US on the basis of a single security council resolution, irrespective of what the law required, and ignoring the views at the time of the Foreign Office legal adviser and the attorney general."
According to Wood's statement to the Chilcot inquiry, Straw told the US secretary of state, Colin Powell, "that we needed a second resolution and that it was extremely unlikely we could find a legal basis without it".
Sands said: "It reflects the widespread view that what became UNSCR 1441 would not authorise military action without a second resolution. His latest statement shoots a very big hole in the arguments of Messrs Goldsmith and Straw, and one wonders why they ultimately failed to reflect its contents in their words and actions."
Chris Ames and Richard Norton-Taylor, guardian.co.uk
Steven Grayhm, Matt Dallas and Charlie Bewley were in Detroit this week as part of a cross-country journey to research their film project about soldiers who've served in Afghanistan and Iraq.The three actors are developing a feature film called "Thunder Road" about vets grappling with difficulties after their time overseas.They're also filming footage during their travels for a future DVD of the movie.
Grayhm, who played young Eddie in the Mitch Albom TV movie "The Five People You Meet in Heaven," wrote the script for "Thunder Road." He says the basic idea hit him in 2003, when he was glued to the coverage of the start of the Iraq war.
The three friends, who plan to produce the feature, are all busy with their acting careers, but they decided this year to research the movie, with British actor Bewley, who plays Demetri in several "Twilight" films, taking occasional breaks to return to London."The three of us forged ahead and decided we would take this on very seriously, we would take the time to go meet the soldiers face-to-face," says Grayhm.
The experience has prompted Grayhm to change the script quite a bit, a process that's deepening the story's psychological aspects.Dallas, who played Kyle on the TV series "Kyle XY," says one of his biggest fears was that they'd have trouble finding veterans who would open up to them.
"But as we've met people, we've found they want to get their stories out. We've heard this from so many veterans who've come back. They get the attitude of 'You chose to go over there.' I think they just want people to know what they've been through," he says.
The trip, which launched in mid-July, has included stops in Los Angeles, Arizona, Texas, New England, Pennsylvania, Tennessee and Michigan. Their next stop is Minnesota. They plan to return to L.A. by Sept. 15.
During their time in Detroit, they met with veterans and were scheduled to visit a Veterans Administration office.They also went to a Detroit Tigers game. The Tigers donated a dozen baseballs, which they plan to sell online to raise money for veterans-related foundations.
The trip is being done on a shoestring budget in a Prius donated by Toyota Santa Monica. Puma has donated activewear for the vets they meet. While in town, the Hyatt Regency Dearborn put them up and Trader Joe's Grosse Pointe location donated food.
Grayhm hopes to return here next year to film "Thunder Road." He and Dallas will play childhood friends from the Motor City.To find out more about the trip, go to the "Into The Heart of America: A Soldier's Story" page on Facebook.
The Detroit Free Press
