‘There are serious allegations that we are investigating across the whole range of Ihat investigations, which incorporates homicide, where I feel there is significant evidence to be obtained to put a strong case before the Service Prosecuting Authority [SPA] to prosecute and charge.’ Mark Warwick head of the Iraq Historic Allegation Team (IHAT)
THE IRAQI HISTORIC ALLEGATION TEAM (IHAT) is a MoD creation which if it had been in existence after the Second World War would have to have dealt with probably hundreds of thousands of cases of what would then have been called overstepping the mark: but today would be considered everything up to and including murder. Today things are indeed different from the years 1939-45 when total war matched the ruthlessness of your enemy in order to keep it at arm's length from overrunning your country: IHAT today are investigating 1,500 complaints against British servicemen who served in Iraq – at a national political level it is a kind of masochism; of proving to the Islamic world and those Muslims who live among us that we are intolerant of any killing by a member of our armed forces that does not fit in with our modern politically correct and sanitised view of warfare that compromises the ideology of multiculturalism.
How many of our politicians have faced an enemy[1]; not on the parliamentary green or red benches but in the heat of battle when killing your country's enemies? Very few if any: the vast majority of today's politicians have an unrealistic view of armed conflict; they set down rules for what a serviceman can do in the heat of battle when he sees his comrade and dear friend or even a child at the enemy behest, die; often in the most barbaric of circumstances. This is not the United Nations or Amnesty International: or even Jeremy Corbyn preferring that the great British exponent of countless beheadings 'Jihadi' John should have been arrested and brought to trial instead of him meeting the fate that probably 90% of the British people felt he deserved to meet.
The professional soldier is taught to kill. You can, as many MoD commercials like to do, portray our armed forces as nothing more than an auxiliary force of the overseas aid budget with no other function. Killing is the primary purpose of our armed forces in defence of the nation they serve. There have been many abuses; but whenever and wherever our soldiers are sent by our collective politicians, into dangerous life threatening combat, they must do all they can to stay alive without the fear of a body like (IHAT) investigating them when they return home.
War is ruthless; war is cruel, and to stay alive cruel things have to be done that may disgust, if only from a political perspective, politicians. If we start, as IHAT now seeks to do to criminalise individual soldiers, acting on orders in the heat of battle; then the British army is doomed, not by its enemies but by its politicians. There is a febrile rush for power among our politicians and they will seek to put in forth the means by which they may imprison the pawns, not because they necessarily believe them to have committed a war crime – but because they seek power.
THE HEAD OF IHAT, Mark Warwick, is not a politician but an appointee to his post and he has been chosen for his ability and not (hopefully) as a political appointee. This acronym IHAT should never have been created in the first place; it was meant only as an appeasement to this country's Muslim population when British soldiers were sent to fight in Muslim countries. It was a betrayal of our military to impose restrictions on their military ability to fight. Time after time the arms of our military have been tied behind their backs by (ultimately) politicians. We have had a situation in Iraq where a sniper has had to consult a senior officer before opening fire on the enemy in the process of planting bombs. I remember one MoD commercial for the RAF, which actually showed a similar set of circumstances when three terrorists were allowed to leave a site where they had planted a bomb before the RAF fired its munitions – they launched a what; £50,000 missile? To blow up a £2,000 truck and the improvised explosive device (IED) the terrorists had planted; before they were allowed to go free and plant further IEDs.
Why would anybody want to join our armed forces under such circumstance? Circumstances where they could find themselves court marshalled if they fell afoul of this new enfeebled politically correct prescription for modern combat: our servicemen and women not only have to face a ruthless enemy; but also have to look over their shoulders at their generals, politicians, and human rights lawyers before they pull a trigger. To be over polite it is a most discomforting position for a professional soldier to be put in by his political and military masters.
Our armed military personal, as well as our armed security personal[2], are under almost intolerable scrutiny for their behaviour. As far as the military are concerned such containment in their fighting ability is the very antithesis of warfare: if you put such restrictions on the way an individual behaves in combat; in a life or death struggle, then you will not recruit any sane person to join the British army; or that part of the police service that is armed.
THIS QUAGMIRE OF rules and regulations on the way our military and armed police personal are supposed to behave leads only to confusion and the prison cell for our combatants and armed police personnel who fall foul of these reprehensible politically correct guide-lines ignited by multiculturalism. These constraining rules evolved in the UK, as a part of its intended (in the decades following 1960) purpose to create multicultural society; and at every opportunity appease every ethnic minority that raised an issue.
[1] I certainly have not; but I have sufficient imagination to realise that in the heat of battle there are no Queensberry Rules to follow – until, that is, today; when all such imagination is put to one side by our rulers; whose only thought is to appease an ethnic minority electorate.
[2] By this I mean our armed police who are facing shortages of recruits because armed officers are subjected to such hideous constraints on their use of fire arms that the Home Secretary is now seeking to change the law.
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