Posted 1:31 PM by Paul
Year Zero...Again

You just cannot get away from Iraq. The last 48 hours have seen two appalling suicide car bomb attacks which have killed around 100 people. Nearly all of them Iraqis standing in line to sign up for jobs with the new security forces. Your blood runs cold just thinking about it. Impoverished men doing the best for their families to try and get work to feed and clothe the kids. They are doing what my dad would have done. What I would have done. Ideology versus family. No contest.

However, part of the Iraqi population sees these events in an entirely different light. For them, the men standing in line were collaborating with an occupying power and deserved their fate. The man or woman who drove the car was not a crazed zealot but a hero or heroine of national liberation.

The response from Government mouthpieces in the UK has been predictable. I heard a Scottish MP rehearsing the same old well worn themes on the BBC today. The needle is stuck.

This is the work of outsiders and Islamisists. No Iraqi would do this to their own people. How can we state this with any conviction? It's a strange response as it forgets that until very recently Iraqis were doing all sorts of awful things to each other, including dropping nerve gas on the neighbours.

No one could have foreseen the suicide bombings. Hindsight is a wonderful thing. Israel and the West bank. It was not only predictable and predicted but actually happening a few hundred miles to the West. It was prime time news not speculation.

This shows the World what we are up against and justifies our intervention. But there were no suicide bombings before the invasion. This will have not escaped the notice of ordinary Iraqis. Things were terrible. Then they got worse

Saddam was madman and it was worth it to see him go. But so is Mugabe. Why don't we depose him too? Is it because their is no oil in Zimbabwe?

None of this should surprise anyone. Before the invasion, statesmen and women were lining up for the TV cameras to warn of the dangers of precipitous action against Iraq. They feared it would bring a Civil War rather than peace and democracy. One of them was Denis Healey, the former Foreign Secretary and the best leader the Labour Party never had. In our youths we denounced him as a tool of US policy makers and a right wing lackey. He would now probably be expelled for dangerous left wing tendencies. His message last year was simple. If we are were not careful, this would all explode into a civil war as age old tensions between Kurd and Arab, Shia and Sunni exploded to the surface. They would not need any help from any external agitators.

But what did Denis know anyway? Old fool. I mean he had only been Foreign Secretary during the Cold War and a beachmaster in the Anzio landings. What did he know about war? Denis was part of the Old Order and thus ignored. Tomorrow belonged to a new braver, more dynamic generation

The world started afresh on that May morning in 1997 when Tony walked into Downing Street. As Tony said in his speech to both houses of congress, " History has little to teach us in this new situation."

Year Zero. But no so much Pol Pot as Robespierre.