A letter in the Sydney Morning Herald...

Iraq's best hope

Andrew Macintosh (Letters, October 10) shows the ignorance of those seeking to have our troops withdrawn from Iraq. He suggests they could train an Iraqi battalion to their high standards and they would then be free to come home.

That is exactly what our troops are doing. They are also seeking to rebuild infrastructure. When Iraq can sustain its own security forces and its infrastructure is repaired sufficiently for the country to operate on its own, the coalition will gladly withdraw. Meanwhile, how about supporting our troops instead of asking that they be withdrawn? The more support the coalition receives the less emboldened the terrorists will be and the sooner it will be able to withdraw.

Mitchell Beston Woy Woy

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Gus: Mr Beston, you would be so right if things were that simple...

"The more support the coalition receives the less emboldened the terrorists will be and the sooner it will be able to withdraw." is the sort of baloney the US administration want us to believe but the US are in there, in Iraq, for the long haul, letting us dream about a fanciful outcome, all we like, of an Iraqi society we do not understand but think we know ...

Now, how long do you think we will have to stay in Iraq for most Iraqis (75 peer cent), those who hate "our" occupation forces, to embrace "our" good work?... Is a battalion of Iraqi soldier — able to achieve the high standard of Aussie troops, considering the disparate origins of soldiers, their history and their local, personal and collective motivation... knowing that they will be under threat for many many years to come — going to be able to contain what the US troops presently cannot? Are we dreaming or what?

One can do as much good work as one can, in this deteriorating environment where more US troops are maimed for life than ever before — more than 1000 troops badly injured in five weeks — but goodwill is not enough anymore since goodwill was never there in the first place... The reasons given for the invasion were baloney and loaded with deliberate misreading of the aftermath in order to pursue a bad course of war from the start.

The same Iraqi people who loved the invasion for ridding them of Saddam are now loathing the troops (who are protecting a puppet government) for stopping them to achieve their dreams of an Islamist state that Saddam was preventing with his own bullying tactics. On top of that those who were in power, the Baath-Sunnis, —supporters of Saddam mind you — now have been relegated to second class citizens, and are not impressed by the new dynamics in which they are losing "their" freedom to a rush of "islamo-fascists" — not terrorists, but people who were "liberated" and became just that.

Either the Americans were stupid, which I think not, either they decided to control Iraqi oil no matter what, at what ever cost while minimising their own casualties... knowing the mess that was going to follow. There is no high moral ground under these circumstances created by Mr Bush-the-littler and his neocons, and the sooner our troops, still blessed with good fortune, come back home, the better — no matter what.

From the BBC
Blunkett: PM was ready to sack Brown over Iraq
Former home secretary [http://politics.guardian.co.uk/iraq/story/0,,1892458,00.html|reveals tensions inside cabinet] over going to war

Nicholas Watt and Julian Glover
Wednesday October 11, 2006
The Guardian

Gordon Brown offered unequivocal public support for the 2003 invasion of Iraq in the final five days, only after deciding that Tony Blair would sack him if he did not, David Blunkett has claimed.
In a detailed account of heated cabinet debates over Iraq, at which Tony Blair was challenged about his alliance with President George Bush, the former home secretary indicates that the chancellor was issued with a warning by Mr Blair. "Gordon had decided he was coming on board," Mr Blunkett writes after a cabinet meeting on March 13 2003, five days before the House of Commons voted on the war.
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Gus: unfortunately our Canberanean cabinet did not have such a heated debate. The Johnnee war porkie machine resembled an outdoor dunny in which whatever crap the US was pumping out from its brain-bowels (intelligence pre-digested by the White House —the home for brown noses and Easter Bunnies) would be collected and dished out to the pre-softened masses of the fearful Aussiemorons majority, those who watch the fox-box uninterrupted and accept any Johnnee fib at hip pocket value. It would have been Un-Johnnee-Australian to do otherwise, wouldn't it?

From the ABC

655,000 Iraqis died [http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200610/s1762691.htm|due to invasion]: study

US researchers estimate that 655,000 Iraqis, or around one in 40 of the Iraq population, have died as a result of the 2003 invasion of their country, according to a study to be published on Thursday by the British journal The Lancet.
In October 2004, a paper also published in The Lancet calculated that almost 100,000 deaths had occurred in Iraq between March 2003 and September 2004 as a result of violence and heart attack and aggravated health problems.
Updating this, a team led by Gilbert Burnham of Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, Maryland, sought to make an estimate of deaths in the post-invasion period from March 2003 to June 2006, and compared the mortality before the invasion, from January 2002 to January 2003.
They randomly selected 47 sites across Iraq, comprising 1,849 households and 12,801 people.
Interviewers asked householders about births, deaths and migration and if there had been a death since January 2002 and, if so, asked to see a death certificate to note the cause. Of the 629 deaths recorded, 547, or 87 per cent, were in the post-invasion period. Extrapolated across the country, 654,965 premature deaths - 2.5 per cent of the population - have occurred since March 2003, the study says.
Around 601,000 were due to violence; around half of the deaths in this category were due to gunfire.
"The number of people dying in Iraq has continued to escalate. The proportion of deaths ascribed to coalition forces has diminished in 2006, although the actual numbers have increased every year," the study says.
"Gunfire remains the most common cause of death, although deaths from car bombing have increased."
The study acknowledges weaknesses in its data collection, saying that the "extreme insecurity" during the survey limited the number of teams that ventured out to interview families and the time they could spend interviewing.
"Calling back to households not available on the initial visit was felt to be too dangerous," it adds.
But there was also the possibility that some deaths may have gone unrecorded, it says.
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Gus" The sad part here is most likely this serious study will be dismissed as speculation by the bushits who obviously decided not to count the Iraqi casualties mainly to avoid this kind of exposure to facts, etc...
Even if only half that number — which would be somewhat under the actual figure in this kind of measurement on the ground despite its weaknesses — where acknowledged, it is a horrific number of death — more than enough to totally blacken any remnants of high moral ground (which did not hold water in the first place anyway)... Shame on the coalition of the wheeling and dealing...

From the Guardian
This terrible misadventure has killed one in 40 Iraqis
The government will do all it can to discredit the latest estimate of civilian casualties since the invasion: 650,000
Richard Horton
Thursday October 12, 2006
The Guardian
[http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,1920005,00.html|Many people refused to believe the Lancet] report in 2004 from a group of American and Iraqi public-health scientists who surveyed homes across the country and found that about 100,000 additional Iraqi deaths had taken place since the coalition invasion in March 2003. Several government ministers were deployed to destroy the credibility of the findings and, in large part, they succeeded. But now their denials have come back to haunt them, for the figures from Iraq have been confirmed by a further study.
The same team from Johns Hopkins University worked with Iraqi doctors to visit over 1,800 homes in Iraq, selected randomly to make sure that no bias could creep in to their calculations.
They identified more than 12,000 family members and tracked those who had died over an interval that spanned both pre- and post-invasion periods. The Iraqi interviewers spoke fluent English as well as Arabic, and they were well trained to collect the information they were seeking. They asked permission from every family to use the data they wanted. And they chased down death certificates in over four out of five cases to make sure that they had a double check on the numbers and causes of death given to them by family members.
All of these checks and balances mean that the 650,000 additional Iraqi casualties they report since the invasion is the most reliable estimate we have of civilian deaths. Most of these deaths have been of men aged 15 to 44.
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Gus: as mentioned before on the blog above, should the true figure be conservatively only half of that, The war in Iraq for phoney motives is still is a scandal of such proportion that the three warriors, Bush. Blair and Howard should be committed to an international war crime tribunal.

Obscene indeed Gus.

Both Bush & his little local echo, reject the latest estimate of civilian deaths attributable to the invasion & occupation of Iraq as not being “credible”.

As the coalition of the willing “does not do body counts”, we can only assume that the confident rejection of the estimate by our political warriors is based on the same kind of divine intelligence that they used to justify their war of aggression.

Given the undisputed carnage being wrought in Iraq, debate about the accuracy of such estimates seems somehow surreal, if not obscene.

Not as obscene of course as Bush’s follow-up comment on the conclusion of the John Hopkins’ study – “I am, you know, amazed that this is a society which so wants to be free that they’re willing to – you know, that there’s a level of violence that they tolerate.”

And we really wonder why they hate us?