Military Police

I must say I truly love the way that the Prime Minister and Defense Minister managed to wash their hands of the 'brutality' that came to light last week.

What's more brutal, giving a couple of kids a bit of a kicking-in or ordering your armed forces to invade a sovereign country (illegally) ? - wiping out whatever pitiful resistance it can offer.

Allow me to clarify one point about the whole brutality thing:

The Army are just that (an army), they are not the police. Basra is not the same as Birmingham. You can't expect trained soldiers undergoing mortar fire not to respond to an attack. It's what they are trained to do (and tend to do rather well).
Lets put it into perspective, if those kids threw rocks at the Israelis the Israelis would have either:

a) Responded with cannon fire towards the nearest housing estate
b) Called in an air-strike on the nearest housing estate
c) Demolished the nearest housing estate using bulldozers.
d) All of the above.

The army had to respond in some way because they had to show their hands weren't tied. Which of course, they now are courtesy of Blair and co. condemning them so quickly.

Personally I don't have a problem with them bringing back a couple of kids that were throwing rocks and giving them a hiding. It wasn't so long ago that we used to do that in our schools - and it was for a lot less than chucking fire bombs.

If this was something that had happened in the UK then I would of course be outraged but I think it's a bit rich for the government to put the military in a near un-winable situation and then stab them in the back when they do anything 'un-civilised'. Iraq is about as far away from civilisation as you can get at the moment. We're talking about a country that contains morons so hell bent on violence that they'll kill aid workers that have dedicated their working lives to helping them.

I certainly agree with what a lot of the Iraqis are saying in that Britain should leave.
F@ck Iraq!
It's doubtful that we will ever recoup enough revenue from the oil to break even from the billions that this war has already cost us.

Anyone who thought this was about anything other than oil needs their head examined.

It will obviously leave those who do need our help in the sh!t but exactly how many is that?

Elected officials in the area say they want nothing to do with us. Iran seems to be increasing its back-handed support for the region Britain are protecting/occupying and whatever friends we had when we arrived seem to have dwindled.

If we leave there is no doubt many Iraqis will suffer but given the number that were slaughtered during the war/invasion and the countless others that have been killed by roadside bombings, car bombings, shootings etc. since the war/invasion I would say that they're f@cked with or without us.

If we really want to help Iraq then we should be investing more in the mass production of ethanol to replace petrol and vegetable oil production to replace diesel. Combine this with a massive R&D investment into Fuel Cell technology and efficiency increases in all electrical appliances and we would perhaps go from being an energy user to an energy producer.
If the burger state followed suite then the demand for oil would diminish to the point where Iraq would have nothing worth fighting over.