From the Guardian
Unlimited (UK)
Dated Thursday September 25
Iraq has now become the crucible of global politics
The resistance to occupation has already changed the balance of power
By Seumas Milne
Is this what they mean by freedom ?" asked Zaidan Khalaf Mohammed on Tuesday after the US 82nd Airborne Division had killed his brother and two other family members in Sichir, central Iraq, in an air and ground assault on their one-storey home. The Americans had come, he said, "like terrorists", while US forces claimed they had only attacked when they came under fire. No evidence was offered and none found.
These killings are after all merely the latest in a string of bloody "mistakes" by US occupation forces, including the repeated shooting of demonstrators, murderous attacks on carloads of civilians at roadblocks and this month's massacre of members of the US-controlled Iraqi police force. In most countries, any of these incidents would have provoked a national or even an international outcry. But in occupied Iraq, US officials feel under no pressure to offer more than the most desultory explanation for the destruction of expendable Iraqi lives.
Six months after the launch of the invasion, it has become ever clearer that the war was not only a crime of aggression, but a gigantic political blunder for those who ordered it and who are only now beginning to grasp the scale of the political price they may have to pay. While George Bush has squandered his post-September 11 popularity, raising the spectre of electoral defeat next year as American revulsion grows at the cost in blood and dollars, Tony Blair's leadership has been fatally undermined by the deception and subterfuge used to cajole Britain into a war it didn't, and once again doesn't, support.
Every key calculation the pair made - from the response of the UN to the number of troops needed and the likely level of popular support and resistance in Iraq - has proven faulty.
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