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Britain's Iraq war poster boy

42-year-old Colonel Tim Collins was Britain's Iraq war poster boy. The adulation suddenly died away when Collins was accused of war crimes. He was totally cleared by a searching investigation. But when he left the army and began to speak his mind about the Iraq war and the wider war on terrorism, many in the British establishment must have wanted to strip him of his OBE. 

TRANSCRIPT - Posted 06/02/05

Tim Collins, thanks for joining us.

TIM COLLINS: Hi, how are you?

TONY JONES: Very well. Can I take you back to that day in the desert on the eve of the Iraq war. What can you actually recall about that speech you made to your troops which has become so famous, so often quoted?

TIM COLLINS: Well, really the war had gone off ahead of time. It was a strange day, because the Iraqis had set fire to the oilwells across the border, so it was almost like eventide even though it was the afternoon. And it was one of my soldiers who asked me, "Are we going to invade Iraq?" And I said, "We are." And he said, "We're happy to go, but we've no idea why this war is happening." And it was at that point I realised I had to get the men of the Royal Irish Battle Group together. Not only because I owed them an explanation or Celtic tradition as an Irish regiment, but I knew that as well as soldiers from north and south of Ireland I had soldiers from the Irish Diaspora, including Canadians and four Australians and I owed them an explanation as to why this war was happening.

TONY JONES: And what did you say to them? What was your explanation? What did you say to help them gird their loins and understand what labour for them?

TIM COLLINS: Well, the main thing I wanted to get across to them was the fact this was a huge endeavour involving a number nations as part of the Coalition including Britain and Australia and the United States, and this was a war of liberation. We were going to go and do a historic thing, we were going to free a country and I wanted to make it clear to them we weren't going to fight with the Iraqis. We were going to fight with the people who were holding the Iraqis effectively prisoner, Saddam Hussein's Baath Party regime and I wanted to make it clear to them if they rushed in and started shooting indiscriminately it would be like liberating Auschwitz and shooting the prisoners. So I wanted to make it clear the allies would include the Iraqis who we were going to free.

TONY JONES: One of points you made, "We will not fly our flags in their country. "The only flag that will be flown in this ancient land is their own". Ironically, of course, because the Americans put up their flag the first thing they got into Baghdad.

TIM COLLINS: That's a shame, because the fact is we were doing a neighbourly thing for a neighbour and you wouldn't expect someone to come into someone else's garden and claim it for themselves and by putting our flags up, that's what we'd be doing. We'd be going there as good neighbours to free the Iraqi people and I thought it would be wrong to show our flags in their country unless they specifically invited us to do so. And indeed, anywhere we did capture the first thing we did to make it to the Iraqi people what our mission was, was to hoist the Iraqi flag to show they had their country back, it was their country, their flag and we were there as their allies, their neighbours.

TONY JONES: What do you think it was that struck such a chord in that speech? Comparisons were made and I'm sure you'd claim they were outrageous comparisons with Shakespeare's Henry IV to Lincoln at Gettysburg, Churchill after Dunkirk. Even President Bush apparently pinned a copy of that speech, the transcript of it, on his wall. What struck such a chord?

TIM COLLINS: Well, I think the whole international community was looking for an explanation as to why the war was happening and really the explanation that was being given at the time was an altruistic war in the face of weapons of mass destruction really wasn't cutting the mustard with most of the people around the world and essentially at the point where I made it clear that we were doing a thing for the Iraqi people, that we needed the Iraqi people back in the international community, back in the regional community, I think that struck a chord not only with the men of the Royal Irish but indeed everybody in the English-speaking world that read the speech thereafter.

TONY JONES: Now taking men to war, taking them into a situation where some of them, at least, are going to be killed and some, perhaps many of them will kill, it must be an extraordinary responsibility. What did you tell your men about taking life?

TIM COLLINS: I wanted them to understand that I was going to be asking them, some of them very young, some of them teenagers, that I would be requiring them to take human life in combat if that was required. I wanted them to understand that this wasn't something to be done lightly. This wasn't a video game. And I wanted them to understand that having taken another man's life in battle that they should treat his body afterwards with dignity and respect. I also wanted to emphasise there should be no indiscriminate killing, that people had a right in international law to surrender and they should respect that right and ultimately do unto others as they would have you do unto them. Ultimately, I wanted my men to understand the solemnity of what we were about to undertake and also to understand they might have to lay down their lives for country.

TONY JONES: You made the specific point that you had actually seen men in other conflicts that had needlessly taken the lives of others and they carried with them I think as you say, the mark of Cain for the rest of their lives.

TIM COLLINS: Well, I'm a veteran of a number of conflicts, including the first Gulf War and being a soldier and growing as a commander is a learning process and I've seen things going on in previous wars which on reflection I think is not the sort of standard of behaviour I'd like to see from the men of the Royal Irish Regiment.

TONY JONES: Now we recently spoke to the military historian Anthony Beaver and he made the point that one of the main lessons he took out of his studies of the battles between the armies of Hitler and Stalin was the effect of propaganda that dehumanised both the enemy soldiers and the enemy civilians. That, above all, led to abuse and atrocities. You seem to have come to the same conclusions about the war in Iraq.

TIM COLLINS: There's no doubt. I think you find that the Royal Irish battle group, we're 22 nationalities serving in the battle group, although we are predominantly Irish. As I say, we had Canadians and Australians and we had chaps from South Africa and because they had travelled the world they were able to relate to others as humans. The difficulty one recognised was if you come from an insular society like the United States where everyone is an Irish-American or African-American, the difficulty is with non-Americans and I wanted to emphasise to my men, including my 25 US Marines, that the Iraqis were a valid people in their own right. We had to see them as humans. We had to empathise with them as humans with a problem. So the point where you lose that empathy as other humans you get things like Abu Ghraib happening and I have a certain sympathy for the common soldiers who become involved in those things because if the Commander in Chief is talking about them, the enemy, the Iraqis, that in itself, that language, is dehumanising them and we have to talk about them as a people, just like us.

TONY JONES: Now, given the way that you obviously feel about this and the strength of your feeling and the way you expressed it in your speech, it must have cut you very deeply to have levelled against you what proved to be, I must say, at the outset, unfounded allegations of war crimes?

TIM COLLINS: Yes. I mean, they were nonsense ultimately and some of the charges sitting back in England when I was having these put to me seemed ludicrous - invading someone's personal space, shouting at them. Bearing in mind this is a war. One charge was firing my gun during a war. That's just bizarre.

TONY JONES: You write that the army unwittingly made you into a British dreyfus. That's a pretty strong - and I read what happened to you and the extent of it, the amount of media coverage and the way in which your own military hierarchy seemed to virtually abandon you during that period. As a professional soldier in the 21st century, what lessons do you draw from what happened to you?

TIM COLLINS: The fact is that there is not a full enough understanding in modern Western societies to what they require of their soldiers and what conditions are like in a battlefield and hence various inquiries here in the UK that are dogging the army's footsteps. Cases being handed to civilian authorities to investigate. The simple fact is this: if there's a decision taken to employ an army in the field extraordinary events have happened to cause an army to be deployed so extraordinary measures have to be deployed in order to control an army. That's why we have military law. What you can't do is try and apply the norms that you would have in a scuffle outside a chip shop in Charing Cross or in Sydney to what happens in a battlefield, because the two don't match up. Extraordinary things are happening, so you have to have extraordinary circumstances. At the point where people step outside military law, then that's got to be dealt with by military law.

TONY JONES: One of the reasons I'm asking you about this is we've just seen in the country published allegations that an Australian SAS patrol in Afghanistan in 2002 ended up killing a number of civilians, apparently armed civilians, it must be said, after an accidental engagement. I think you read part of that story. What's your take on it?

TIM COLLINS: Well, I've ever served a number of times with the Australian SAS and I know the squadron commander who is mentioned in the story extremely well. He served with me in the British SAS when he was attached here and I know him to be a man of the highest integrity and professional conduct and I would trust his judgement implicitly without hearing the facts of the case. But having read the facts of the case, the simple matter is you are taking young Australian soldiers, albeit amongst the best in the world and putting them amongst people whose culture it is to fight and have weapons. Frankly, if they found themselves in that conflict, I think we have to imagine ourselves on the ground, but, ultimately, I think the people on the ground know best and I would trust the judgement of people like Vance Khan to give me their view and I would go with their judgement.

TONY JONES: One of the interesting things about this is you've obviously, since you came back, had second thoughts about the whole political and moral underpinnings of the war on terrorism. You've even suggested it could well have been simply a visceral reaction to September 11. What changed your mind about the war, because obviously you had the highest ideals when you went into Iraq?

TIM COLLINS: Yes. My concern is ultimately that no-one has sat down and explained to the population here in the United Kingdom - or indeed anywhere that I know of - what this war is about, where it begins and where it ends, when we know we're going to be winning and when we expect it to end. It seems to be a war without any front, back or sides. I understand also that we're fighting an enemy who doesn't respect our society, but at some point the cycle of violence has to be broken and the people who go out on to the hill in Afghanistan or in the back streets of Gaza in Palestine or the people who take to the deserts of Iraq to fight the Coalition, many of them are motivated by outrage at what is happening, for instance, friendly fire incidents or a wedding party being bombed like that, as well as the legitimate terrorists that we're taking on. I think at some stage we have to break the cycle of violence and step back from it and ultimately I'd remind the viewers that Von Clausewitz, a German thinker on military history, talked about war being a continuation of politics by other means and that's right and proper. If there's no other way forward. But following von Clausewitz's logic, after war there must be politics afterwards. I don't see the point where we're trying to talk through this issue where there's any negotiation to end this war. It seems to be a war without end and I don't think our society, the West, or indeed the world can afford that.

TONY JONES: You had a very interesting thing to say to the BBC about Al Qaeda. You said, "We have to look at 9/11 "and ask yourselves why a group of people, a culture, "feel motivated to attack another culture. "What injustice was happening to force them to make that attack?" Now, were you yourself attacked in Britain when you suggested September 11 attacks may actually have been motivated by injustice?

TIM COLLINS: Yes, because ultimately the view I take and the view I stand by is that some sense of outrage forced these people to carry out those heinous attacks and as well as punishing the guilty I think we also have to look into our own souls and ask what it was that caused these people to do such actions and as Aristotle once said, "Men don't fear justice, but fear a lack of justice." I'm sure it's a perception of injustice somewhere along the line that motivated these young men to attack the West. What I would say is as well as protecting ourselves, as well as going after the guilty, we have to reflect on what projected injustice that they may perceive either to explain it or deal to deal with it.

TONY JONES: You also told the BBC that the invasion of Iraq was either "grossly incompetent "or simply a cynical war "to vent some form of anger on Saddam Hussein's regime "with no regard to the consequences on the Iraqi people." Can you explain why you came to that conclusion?

TIM COLLINS: Having served in Iraq and having seen Iraq shortly after the invasion happened, it was clear to me and even when I asked, "What is the plan for rebuilding Iraq? "How should we set about setting these people back on their feet?" The answer is, "There is no plan. Make it up as you go along." We made it up as best we could. I think it behoved the Western alliance to have had some form of plan to re-establish Iraq, put it back on its feet, after we'd taken away Saddam's regime and one must be left with the conclusion either there was no plan because of incompetence or there is no plan because of malice. I don't know which one it is and I think history will judge harshly looking at the state of Iraq now. As I also said to the BBC, if you create a vacuum, you've got to live with what goes into that vacuum and nature abhors politics and we're living with the result of the vacuum we created in Iraq and that is costing young Iraqis blood. It is also taking British soldiers, American soldiers and Australian soldiers' lives as well.

TONY JONES: Tim Collins, it's been fascinating to get your perspective on things having been on the ground and now back home as a civilian. Thank you very much for coming and talking to us tonight on Lateline.

TIM COLLINS: Thanks, it was a pleasure.

Copyright ABC Australia.

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