Tim Collins, a UK Colonel who once made headlines with a speech motivating his troops for the "liberation" of Iraq, says Iraq is a mess of our own making:
When I led my men of the 1st Battalion the Royal Irish Regiment across the border into Iraq we believed we were going to do some good...
What I had not realised was that there was no real plan at the higher levels to replace anything... We were to beat the Iraqis. That simple. Everything would come together after that...
One cannot help but wonder what it was all about. If it was part of the war on terror then history might notice that the invasion has arguably acted as the best recruiting sergeant for al-Qaeda ever: a sort of large-scale equivalent of the Bloody Sunday shootings in Derry in 1972, which in its day filled the ranks of the IRA. If it was an attempt to influence the price of oil, then the motorists who queued last week would hardly be convinced. If freedom and a chance to live a dignified, stable life free from terror was the motive, then I can think of more than 170 families in Iraq last week who would have settled for what they had under Saddam...
It is time for our leaders to explain what is going on.
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