The news this morning is that three British soldiers in southern Iraq have
been assassinated. The Ministry of Defence will not say who is to blame --
nor will they ever, probably.
But the experts who have been on TV and BBC Radio this morning are agreed
that southern Iraq, though always tense, is normally peaceful. Most of the
killings that go on there are of potential Sunni extremists by Moqtada
al-Sadr's Mahdi army, and the general rule of law in most of the southern
provinces is that of the Shia's Grand Ayatollah al-Sistani, and not of the
so-called government in Baghdad. (He, while considerably more benign than
the Sunnis of Baghdad has, however, enforced a ban on chess and Western
music and videos, discouraged clean-shaven males and encouraged [that is
forced] the re-veiling of women [except in a few brave pockets of
middle-class Basra].)
There hasn't been a death of a British soldier for months because they keep
a low profile (that is, they mostly stay within their compounds and polish
their boots). The consensus is that the killings of the Brits were carried
out by Sunni infiltrators from Baghdad, and the obvious conclusion is that
this is a follow-up of the London bombings and a reminder to Blair that
he'd better decide quite soon about withdrawing his troops.
If I were to advise Al Qaeda, I would say: "Stay your horses. You've done
enough now. Blair is far too frightened of the backlash from the City of
London businesses to delay withdrawing British troops for too much longer.
He needs to keep face, however, while he searches for a reason to explain
to the (by and large) credulous British public that he's withdrawing troops
for strategic or other reasons that have nothing to do with the London
bombing.."
Keith Hudson
Keith Hudson, Bath, England, <www.evolutionary-economics.org>
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