Tim Collins (Ex-army)

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Colonel (retd) Tim Collins OBE (born Belfast, Northern Ireland, April 1960) is a former officer in the British Army. He gained prominence around the time of the the Iraq War following an eve-of-battle speech which the media declared 'inspirational'. The speech received much praise -- not least from Tim Collins himself -- and a copy of reportedly hangs in the White House's Oval Office.[1] The speech's theme of liberation vs. conquest, and its oft quoted line ('If you are ferocious in battle remember to be magnanimous in victory'), however, appear to be borrowed from a speech by Comte de Bourmont who on the eve of the colonization of Algeria in May 1830 perorated in front of the amassed troops: 'merciless in combat, you must be compassionate and magnanimous after victory...the Arab will see you as liberators'.[2]

By 2005 he was to make a complete about-face on his assessment of the invasion, arguing it has 'acted as the best recruiting sergeant for al-Qaeda ever'. He called it a "catastrophe" and a "right-rollicking cock-up".[3]

More recently Collins has engaged in pro-Israel propaganda activities including attempts to white-wash Israeli war crimes in Gaza during its 2008-2009 Operation Cast Lead.[4] The film, in which he (literally) compares bullet holes in the walls of the Israeli town of Sderot with wholesale destruction in Gaza he ends by giving Israel a clean bill of health because 'it is not as bad for instance as Fallujah, and certainly not as bad as Ramadi'.[5] The VNR was produced for the BBC's flagship Newsnight by a company called ConflictZones, yet the company has produced nothing besides this short film. Curiously, the company has no other information available on its website (which is a single page about the film) beside a generic email address. The company has also employed a domain anonymizing service to register its domain name, an odd precaution for a film-maker.[6]

Affiliations

notes

  1. Iraq war colonel awarded OBE, BBC News, 7 April 2004
  2. Text of de Bourmont's speech in Robert Fisk, The Great War for Civilization (Harper Collins: London 2005) p.636
  3. Tim Collins, This is a mess of our own making, The Observer, 18 September 2005
  4. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/newsnight/8470100.stm Celebrated Iraq war veteran's view of the Gaza conflict, BBC News, 19 January 2010
  5. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/newsnight/8470100.stm Celebrated Iraq war veteran's view of the Gaza conflict, BBC News, 19 January 2010
  6. ConflictZones accessed 1 February 2010
  7. HJS Statement of Principles