US troops and their Iraqi allies are facing a better coordinated and more effective insurgency. Over the last month 81 coalition troops have been killed, the highest tally since November 2005.
Over 50 military families were set to lay a wreath at Downing Street on Wednesday of this week to show their anger at the war in Iraq and at Tony Blair’s refusal to meet with the families of soldiers killed in Iraq.
An RAF doctor who refused to serve in Iraq because he believes the war is illegal was sentenced to eight months in jail and ordered to pay £20,000 in costs last week.
"How are we supposed to get rid of the helipad now? Can you imagine taking a jackhammer to the remains of one of the most important cities in the history of mankind? This is Babylon."Donny George, head of Iraq’s board of antiquities after US contractors paved over the archeological site to create a helipad
The continuing carnage in Iraq three years after the invasion is damaging George Bush’s popularity at home. Part of this is due to publicity around the mounting death toll for US troops. But failure carries a particularly heavy stigma in a context where success has been hailed as implying virtue, and even heavenly approval.
It’s worth reminding ourselves that it is less than a year since Tony Blair won his historic third general election victory—and already he is in real trouble.
The US has been caught trying to lay the blame for a massacre of Iraqi civilians on the resistance. The revelations come as reports of two new attrocities have surfaced.
Tony Blair hopes he can ride out the storms of protest over the murderous war in Iraq. He hopes he can brush aside the resistance to the government’s plunder of workers’ pensions and the plans to make us all work longer.
Read our new monthly supplement SR, with this issue, with a lead article by Chris Jones on New Myths of the East End, an interview with Us author Studs Terkel and Third World Reports on Mali, Thailand, Iraq and Latin AMerica
It is a big step to describe what is currently going on in Iraq as a "civil war", but I think we can say that we are witnessing the beginnings of such a conflict.
The rescue of Norman Kember and his fellow hostages in Baghdad is a tiny glimmer of light in an Iraqi picture that remains uniformly grim. John Reid’s gung-ho remarks on his recent visit to Iraq simply provided further evidence of the defence secretary’s very troubled relationship to reality.
