Iraq Follow

'From the hotel rooftop we can see the whole of Baghdad. As night falls sporadic gunfire starts. The city rests under an uneasy curfew.'

HUGE NUMBERS of people marched through the streets of London last Saturday against the occupation of Iraq. Most wanted regime change too-here in Britain. The 100,000-strong protest was called by the Stop the War Coalition, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and the Muslim Association of Britain, and took place on the eve of the Labour Party conference.

A CLEAR majority of people in Britain now think the war on Iraq was wrong. An opinion poll in the Guardian on Monday showed 53 percent think the war was unjustified and only 38 percent believe it was right to attack Iraq. This is the reality looming over Tony Blair at his party's conference starting on Sunday.

DELEGATES COULD potentially humiliate Tony Blair at Labour's conference. It will be a test for the union leaders-if they really used their power they could wound Blair fatally and force his resignation. Party managers will find it very hard to keep Iraq off the agenda and, if there is a proper debate, then there will be motions directly rejecting what the government has done.

WITH EVERY day that passes, the occupation in Iraq is creating more horror and hardship for the country's people. There are 1,000 killings a week in Iraq, Independent journalist Robert Fisk reported recently. This has been confirmed since by other journalists who have visited the country's morgues.

What's the reaction in the US establishment to what's happening in Iraq?

WHAT WAS staggering before the war was how the media failed to ask even obvious questions about US and UK government claims about Iraq and weapons of mass destruction. Scott Ritter, the chief weapons inspector, claimed that by December 1998 Iraq had been "90-95 percent", that is "fundamentally", disarmed. That was one thing almost never discussed. Another was that when the inspectors left Iraq in December 1998 they were pulled out by the UN. Yet Tony Blair, Jack Straw and the rest of them said the inspectors were kicked out. And they were almost never challenged by the media, who parroted that same line.

INTENSE negotiations are taking place at the United Nations Security Council about the possibility of the UN taking responsibility for running Iraq. Many people, disgusted by the US and Britain's role, feel that it would be a good move for the UN to take over.

FOR FIVE months we've been told things will get better in Iraq. But with every day that's passed since the "end" of the war life for millions of Iraqis has gone from bad to worse. There are 1,000 killings a week, according to reports from distinguished Middle East journalist Robert Fisk. He wrote in last week's Independent on Sunday, "Occupation powers insist that journalists obtain clearance to visit hospitals.

THERE IS an escalating war in Iraq. The lying politicians who launched the invasion six months ago won't admit it. But it's the only honest conclusion from the terrible death toll. The director of the Baghdad central mortuary told the New York Times how the number of killings has rocketed under the last five months of occupation. There were 462 in May, 626 in June, 751 in July and 872 in August. Most of them, about 70 percent, were shot dead. That is in just one city.

"IRAQ: THE New War". That headline in the prestigious New York Review of Books captures the scale of the fighting that continues in Iraq. The word occupation does not adequately describe what is happening. There is a new phase in this war that we were assured was won when Western television stations took carefully choreographed shots of the fall of statues to Saddam Hussein five months ago. It is like the colonial wars conducted in the 1950s by the British army in Kenya, Malaysia, Aden and Cyprus, and by France in Algeria.

THE FEROCITY of the attacks on the BBC was underscored last Saturday when Radio 4's flagship news programme, Today, handed its weekly essay slot to Charles Moore, editor of the Daily Telegraph. You had to suspend disbelief as Moore told his listeners the BBC was left of centre, anti big business and-wait for it-passionately opposed to the war in Iraq.