…but worthwile. This cartoon is a disturbing and moving picture of how ‘peacekeeping’ looks in Iraq at the moment.
Pulling out the troops is something I’ve opposed so far – but with the vast majority of ‘resistance’ attacks targeted at coalition troops not locals, are we really helping Iraqis by keeping soldiers there? I don’t know any more.
"with the vast majority of ‘resistance’ attacks targeted at coalition troops not locals"
??
It’s the locals doing the dying. No "coalition troops" were dumped in that river.
The PDF is 38MB! Apparently anyway. Is there not a link for those of us stuck with BT Internet?
Is there not a link for those of us stuck with BT Internet?
Your wish is my command: bunch of jpegs, about 1.7MB total.
Brilliant! And great cartoon.
I think I’m with Dave here: it would be a disaster if we pulled our (and the US) troops out; there’s very little evidence that the "resistance" would simply stop.
–Matt
The majority of people killed by the "resistance" are locals; the majority of people killed by the Coalition are locals. However, (I get the impression that, and am willing to be corrected if wrong) most of the locals who are killed are ‘collateral damage’ on Coalition-soldier-killing missions.
Oh, but if you pull out the troops, it would cause anarchy, of course!
Why?
Oh, well, because of all these terror groups… who are fighting the soldiers. My circular logic is perfect.
Well, this isn’t a complete argument, but for example, what about the spate of Iraqi-on-Irqai (as it were) kidnapping? Certainly the Independent has been reporting this for a while. This seems to have nothing to do with foreign troops, but is rather down to a complete lack of law and order (I believe Mexico, Brazil etc. suffer similar problems: kidnap a rich person, demand cash or you’ll kill them, and most times the relatives pay up, rather than go to the crap police). I don’t believe there’s any argument that if foreign troops left then this would get better.
It’s equally true that we should have gotten a working police force going by now, but short of going back in time and killing Bush+Blair (or something) there’s not much we can do.
I suppose I agree with John that of people being *killed*, the coalition troops are largely to blame. But shouldn’t we look at what might happen if we withdraw the troops: can you be fairly-to-damn-well sure that the country won’t descend into chaos leading to many more deaths. I mean, this was rather my argument against the whole war to start with: there seemed to be little evidence that we could control the aftermath.
Iraqi-on-Iraqi kidnapping may not improve with the exit of foreign troops, but there’s no reason to think it will get any worse. After all, the foreign troops aren’t trying to prevent this, are they? My impression, which I’d be glad to have disproved, is that they’re just guarding oil installations and "training" local forces. Is there anything else?
Personally I always thought we were obliged to clear up the mess – and the Geneva Convention agrees. But I don’t see that that’s what we’re doing.