Telling It Like It Is

There is a flood of news from Iraq and the USA coming in lately - most of it very bad for Bush. Is this Karl Rove's premature End Game?

In all the confusion of new revelations and horrors, it can be hard to pinpoint exactly what the relevance of each story really is. By the time you place a story in the greater miasma of meaning, it's yesterday's fish-wrappings. So this story from The Independent is very well-tuned indeed:

"The Bush administration's last remaining justification for the invasion of Iraq has been demolished by a private poll revealing that only 2 per cent of Iraqis regard the occupying forces as liberators.

The poll results are devastating for both President George Bush and Tony Blair, who are fond of saying that future generations of Iraqis will thank them for liberating their country. Tony Blair has consistently said that history will prove him right for engineering the downfall of a cruel tyrant, even if weapons of mass destruction were not found.

President Bush, giving a pep-talk to American soldiers in Florida yesterday, said: 'We have come not to conquer, but to liberate people and we will stand with them until their freedom is secure.'

Yet the main findings of the poll, which was commissioned by the US-led Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) last month and which was leaked yesterday, reveal that only 2 per cent of the Iraqis polled in mid-May see coalition troops as liberators, while 92 per cent said they were occupiers. "