Archive: The British Armed Forces: going beyond being the respectable Wehrmacht
First appeared at Luikkerland, 06 Jun 2011
Over the weekend came news that newly deployed British attack helicopters were used in Libya for the first time. The BBC has an interview with one of the pilots involved here.
What is enormously significant in this interview is the way that the pilot is not identified and has his face obscured from full view while he is on camera. Of course, naive people will believe some spiel about protecting the pilot and his family from retribution (I don’t know if any such explanation has even been issued, or indeed if the peculiarity of the incident just passed most people by and they didn’t see the need to ask questions).
However, I take the event as an indication that the armed forces apprehend the illegitimacy of the Libyan venture in general and in particular the use of what are essentially land assault vehicles (hovering tanks, if you like). Although the UN Resolution 1973 was purposely open to interpretation in terms of what could be done militarily within a No-Fly Zone, the use of ground troops is definitely not in the spirit, and using attack helicopters is going beyond the actions permissible by the agreement. (Of course, this is leaving aside the whole issue about the UN’s legitimacy and what gives it – a nest of gangsters – the power to decide that an attack on Libya is lawful).
I assume that this pilot was protecting himself from possible future accusations of war crimes. He and his comrades are participating in acts that violate basic international law (that which requires that a sovereign nation is not attacked so as to replace its government). Besides which, when we think of a combatant who appears on the news wearing headgear to obscure his features, and brandishing his arms while bragging about the death and destruction he has caused, then more generally we assume that he is a balaclava-wearing terrorist; beyond the Geneva Convention; a war criminal who targets civilians with deadly force to achieve a political goal. This is what the dreadful Liberal Fascist Coalition government has reduced the British armed forces to, and the worrying thing is that, as this interview shows, the top brass (at least) don’t seem to mind as long as they can get away with it.
On the other hand, if they do mind that they have been debased and are being asked to scrape the bottom of the barrel of human decency, and if they do care about their good reputation in history and indeed their personal Christian salvation, and if they cannot quit in disgust, then there are some criminals in Westminster who need to be brought to justice more than Gaddafi does.
