The Liberation Game. posted by Richard Seymour

Well, the latest news from Iraq is that two car bombs have killed 41 Iraqis, and wounded 138 others . Suffice to say, I expect this is al Zarqawi's bunch. Their aim may not be, as Straw and the pundits stupidly and blandly assert, to "disrupt the transfer of power" - after all, why bother to disrupt something that isn't really happening? But their aim is to create civil war between Sunnis and Shi'ites, whom they regard as serpiginous and not properly Islamic.

This is not an action of the Resistance, but cold-blooded murder in the service of rotten political objectives. A bit like the war, then.



The failure of the occupation to date to provide not just security, but even regular electricity and water, has thus led Iraqis to believe that the best chance they have is if the "coalition" absents itself. Only 2% see the occupiers as "liberators", while 93% see them as - well - occupiers. Muqtada al-Sadr gets more support than that - polling approval of 67% of Iraqis - Tony Blair wishes he still had that kind of support...

You know what you should do when there's a fire, Tony? Get out, get the fire brigade out, and stay out. But you can't get out, the fire brigade won't be doing your bidding any more, and decades of failure in British imperial authority in Iraq still couldn't persuade you to stay out. Guess that's just tough shit.