The pressure is begining to tell.

The US-apppointed administrator of Iraq, Paul Bremer, today complained that "Iraq finds itself poor because of the astonishing mismanagement of the Iraqi economy over the last four decades, and the great costs to the Iraqi people of the political sabotage which continues, the cost of which is $7 million a day to the Iraqi people."

There may be some truth in that, but it is not the whole truth. The Iraqi people are also poor because the US has badly mis-managed the post-war deployment, because the US launched an illegal invasion without UN support, because the US enforced a decade of crippling economic sanctions and because - even prior to that - the US and other Western countries supported countless wars in the Middle East in order to maintain million-dollar payments for their arms suppliers. To say less is an insult to the Iraqi people.