GENERAL Rose, who was the commander of the UN forces in Bosnia, has just publicly supported the right of the Iraqi insurgents to fight their war of independence while speaking to the Newsnight programme.
He added that the US and UK governments ‘must admit that they have been defeated and stop fighting a hopeless war’.
The general more than hinted that if he was an Iraqi he would be fighting with the insurgents against the US and UK forces. When challenged with the ‘shocking’ nature of his remarks he answered that he was merely retailing the views of the serving soldiers in Iraq.
He also dealt with the idea that terrible massacres will take place if US-UK troops leave Iraq. He said: ‘The British admitted defeat in North America and the catastrophes that were predicted at the time never happened. . .The catastrophes that were predicted after Vietnam never happened. The same thing will occur after we leave Iraq.’
Rose’s real concern is that the British army is getting badly hurt in Iraq and that its capacity as a fighting force will be permanently undermined unless there is a speedy withdrawal.
He is part of the new school of political generals who curse the politicians for using armed power when there could have been a political solution found.
In the preface of his new book on the American War of independence, called ‘Washington’s War’, Rose hits out at the Bush-Blair doctrine that military force without a developed and thought out political perspective can solve the problems of imperialism.
He says of the politicians: ‘My own experience as the commander of the United Nations Protection Force in Bosnia in 1994 demonstrated to me just how far politicians are prepared to go in their efforts to alter history.’
Rose condemns the ‘wholly inaccurate analysis’, that it was the bombing of the Serbs in September 1995 that brought peace at Dayton and it was the bombing of Yugoslavia that removed Milosevic from power in 1999. He says: ‘Nothing, of course, could be further from the truth,’ and adds that ‘Nearly one decade after the end of the Balkan Wars, European Union troops are still required to maintain a presence on the ground in order to prevent a return to war.’
‘He is scathing about the bombing of Yugoslavia and says: ‘When the bombing finally halted, the Serb Army withdrew into Yugoslavia, “an undefeated army”, in the words of the senior British commander on the ground.’ He understands that the key to the Yugoslav army withdrawal from an impregnable position was making full use of Boris Yeltsin to pressurise Milosevic, the Yugoslav leader.
He adds that the NATO view ‘has been translated into a doctrine of offensive military action, which has now been applied in Afghanistan and Iraq’, and in Rose’s view is harming the British army.
It is only natural that with the economic, political and military power of Britain now in terminal decline that the political generals and the political policemen should begin to come forward with their solutions for halting that decline and preventing it from causing revolution at home.
The fact is that General Rose’s admissions have been forced out of him by the weakness of imperialism and the strength of the Iraqi revolution.
He has not got an alternative course for British imperialism except to proceed more carefully. He knows that British imperialism is in the pocket of the USA because there is nowhere else for it to be, since it cannot stand alone.
He does not give his view on British capitalism’s domestic crisis and where it could lead to if the army is crippled in Iraq and Afghanistan. No doubt he does not differ from the analysis of that other political general, Frank Kitson, as laid out in his book ‘Low Intensity Operations’. This is that at a certain moment in the life of British capitalism very large numbers of people will take to the streets driven there by just grievances, and that the armed forces will have to intervene ruthlessly without hesitation or equivocation to restore order, else all will be lost.
However, all of the political generals and political policemen will not save British capitalism from the socialist revolution that is developing, provided the revolutionary leadership capable of leading it to victory is built up in good time as required.
