Basra: Profiting from their Destruction, the British are Back | Global Research

Basra: Profiting from their Destruction, the British are Back | Global Research

“When will there be justice in Athens? There will be justice in Athens when those who are not injured are as outraged as those who are.” Thucydides (460 BC – 395 BC.)

In December 2007, Major General Graham Binns, Commander of British Forces in Basra, handed illegally occupied Basra Province back to the Iraqis, with Basra city centre “festooned with flags, lights and banners to mark the occasion.”

In fact, the whole nonsense was window dressing. British soldiers had been under siege in their bases between February and September that year and had withdrawn to Basra Airport, on the city’s outskirts, leaving just seven hundred soldiers in Basra, squatting in one of Saddam Hussein’s palaces. They too slunk out to the airport, under cover of darkness on 3rd September.

At the hand over, Major General Binns said that Basra had been successfully wrested from its enemies and was now being handed back to its friends. However, at the time, a poll of 1,000 Basra residents for BBC’s Newsnight programme showed 85% saying British troops had been a negative effect on the Province for their five year occupation.

Given the litany of claims of murder, torture, abuse, theft, against the British army being handled by lawyers in the UK, for Basra region residents, ”negative” seems a bit of an understatement.