As for Iraq’s future in the absence of an occupation, Johann Hari proposed a joint peacekeeping force drawn from willing Muslim Nations and financed entirely by the US and UK. I’m not so sure about making it exclusively Muslim but I think its the best bet.

Ultimately, I disagree with Justin’s suggestion that we should view this from a ‘you broke it, you bought it’ perspective. That’s like expecting the proverbial bull in the China shop to sit down with a tube of superglue and do a decent restoration job on all that crockery. I mean, the damn thing doesn’t even have opposible thumbs!

To take your ‘he who broke it fixes it’ argument – if somebody came into your house to remove vermin, and smashed up your living room in the process of removing said pest, and five years later had not only failed to fix the damage in the living room but had also smashed up the rest of your house, would you still be expecting him to stick around and clear up his mess? Or would you want him to get the fuck out of your house immediately?

What if you then found out that the original pest had actually been bred and nurtured by the Rentokil company?

Just look at the history of the US in Iraq. The courting of Saddam, the April Glaspie meetings prior to the invasion of Kuwait. The oil money and the rebuilding contracts for Bechtel and Halliburton. If the US got anything right, it was pushing through legislation in the piss-pot Iraq parliament to liberalise the countries oil.

For the war in Iraq – see the Opium Wars. It’s about addressing America’s oil addiction, yet it has little to do with supply, and everything to do with addressing the balance of payments and diverting profits to US engineering behemoths.

The so called pro-war liberals have been sold hook, line, and sinker. They’ve bought in to the propaganda and the bullshit. And yet, I still have time for Justin’s pottery barn rule (but again, who’ll be doing the rebuilding… rock and hard place).

Like Mike, I have difficulty in seeing this as a liberation gone wrong. The “mistakes” weren’t really mistakes, they were errors that were deeply-embedded in the way in which the USA (and the UK) looked at Iraq. State institutions were allowed to collapse becasue the free-market world view of the invaders doesn’t recognise the importance of state institutions. Iraqis were viewed as people who happened to be living on top of some giantic oil fields and who ought to be integrated into world markets. Iraqis were not viewed as a people with a history and with their own customs and institutions.

If the point of the surge was to buy time and create a window of opportunity to fix things, we ought to be seeing a flurry of activity to fix things right now (before that window inevitably closes). But we’re not seeing that. That’s either because the Americans don’t intend to fix things or don’t know how to. In either case we’re being a bit naive if, five years after the invasion, we still want the Americans to stay in Iraq to fix things.

Jonathan Steele give an interesting talk at Chatham House in late January. The paper is on the Chatham House website. His main point is that the first step in fixing Iraq is for the Americans to show clearly that they’re going to leave.

This was never a case of a ‘liberation’ gone wrong. The country has been brutally and sadistically raped, it really is as simple as that and I don’t think it’s appropriate to ask the rapist to stick around for a while to help ‘fix’ things.

And yes, you are right about Saddam Hussein. I’m sick of hearing the pro-war lot saying “well, at least we got rid of a brutal dictator, that was worthwhile, you have to agree”. NO! NO! NO! The world would be a better and safer place today if Saddam were still alive and it had been Bush and Blair who had been hanged.

If it had been a liberation, what subsequently happened could not have happened.

I’m against the Occupation. I don’t see where it can go even if it were well-motivated, which it is not. I think it’s indicative – to put it extraordinarly mildly – that when the Brits left Basra, only 2% of the locals wished we’d stayed.

I don’t think there’s any useful option but to hop it. You can only occupy other people’s countries for a short time without them resenting it and even then, only if you don’t give them reasons to hate you. But it’s been five years and those five years have involved torture to a grotesque degree, regular shootings of civilians, bombings of civilian areas, destruction of towns, corruption on a vast scale, the appropriation of Iraqi resources by the occupiers, the arming of sectarian militias. This is not the basis on which a country can be rescued.

If I were an Iraqi, I wouldn’t want the occupiers to stay. Come to that, though, I don’t know I’d want them to go. Come to that, I don’t think I’d know whether to stay or go myself. What I’d most likely be doing myself is heading for the exit with as much as I could carry with me, cursing pretty much everybody as I went, but the British and Americans loudest of all.

Only the Iraqis can save Iraq now.