The Gulf Crisis and New World Order — Page 351
The Gulf Crisis & The New World Order you will denounce me as a traitor, but if Tony Benn raises that voice, you will not dare to call him a traitor' (January 25, 1991) References: David Omissi - A uthor of Book "Air power and Colonial Control" U. K. writes: "The present Gulf war is not the first time Iraq has been visited by British bombers. When the RAF waged war in Iraq in the 1920s, it was not to liberate occupied territory: instead, British bombers were used against dissident tribemen. The work was not popular with RAF crews, and one senior officer (Air Commodore Lionel Evelyn Oswald Charlton) resigned his post rather than bomb villages in Kurdistan. . . . . . . . . late in 1920, Charlton was appointed Senior Air Officer - in effect second-in-command of British forces in Iraq. He was shocked by what he found there. The British military connection with Iraq had begun when it was taken from the Turks, in the First World War. In 1921 the British set up an Arab client state under King Faisal, son of Sheriff of Mecca. The New regime was not popular, especially among the Kurdish minority of the north-east so RAF bombers were brought in to force their integration into the mainly Arab state. Winston Churchill, then Secretary of State for War and Air, urged the RAF to use mustard gas, which had already been employed by the army 'with excellent moral effect' against Shia rebels in 1920. " For technical reasons gas bombs could not be used - but the campaign was brutal enough. Many villages were bombed simply because the tribesmen had not paid their taxes. . . . . . . . For a few months Charlton kept his doubts to himself and endured the anguish of carrying out a policy he believed to be barbaric. But in the autumn of 1923 he resigned, no longer able to 'maintain the policy of intimidation by bomb'. . . . . . . . . 351