It was a huge mess before and now it has got alot worse and will get alot worse as long as US forces occupy foreign terrain and the people that own that terrain want them out.
I am glad Howard decided to pull out.
Meaningless death to the young has no meaning. Bush and Blair have alot to answer for these kids deaths.
WHERE ARE THE WMD's may I ask ?? I would like to know the answer to this question, the international community would like to know as well.
The yanks are calling Iraqi militia 'terrorists'. How on earth can they be terrorists when all they are doing is protecting their terrain against invading aggressors.?
Bush you are an idiot, all your sympathisers and supporters are idiots as well.. I just hope what goes around.. comes around...
By Andrew Marshall
BAGHDAD, Oct 2 (Reuters) - Guerrilla attacks in Iraq have
become more lethal, the top U.S. general in the country said on
Thursday after three soldiers died in one day, adding urgency
to American efforts to garner help stabilizing the country.
With the military warning him to expect more casualties,
the pressure was on at home too for U.S. President George W.
Bush.
David Kay, the CIA official directing the weapons search in
Iraq, told U.S. lawmakers the arms-hunting team had found no
stockpiles of biological or chemical weapons but would keep
searching.
"We are not yet at the point where we can say definitively
either that such weapon stocks do not exist, or that they
existed before the war and our only task is to find where they
have gone," Kay said in a statement obtained by Reuters.
U.S. efforts to draft a new United Nations resolution on
Iraq drew unusual criticism from Secretary General Kofi Annan,
who said the world body could not play a proper political role
in Iraq under the terms of the U.S. draft.
At least 84 U.S. soldiers have been killed in action since
May 1 when Bush declared major combat in Iraq over.
"The enemy has evolved. It is a little bit more lethal,
little bit more complex, little bit more sophisticated and in
some cases a little bit more tenacious," said Lt. Gen. Ricardo
Sanchez, commander of ground forces in Iraq.
"As long as we are here the coalition need to be prepared
to take casualties," he told a news conference. "We should not
be surprised if one of these days we wake up to find there's
been a major firefight or a major terrorist attack."
Wednesday, a 4th Infantry Division soldier was killed in a
rocket-propelled grenade attack near the town of Samarra, a
female soldier from the same division died in a remote-control
bomb attack near Tikrit, and in Baghdad a soldier was shot and
killed while patrolling the Mansur neighborhood.
The violence continued Thursday in the town of Falluja, a
center of resistance to U.S. forces. Police said U.S. gunfire
killed an Iraqi man and wounded a woman and a six-year-old girl
after an American patrol was shot at Thursday. Two police
officers were also wounded.
Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who led the
campaign to oust Saddam over his alleged banned weapons, face
mounting political pressure over the failure to find any.
Efforts in New York to agree a wider role for the United
Nations are in stark contrast to events on the ground in
Baghdad, where many international U.N. staff have been pulled
out following two suicide bomb attacks on their headquarters.
UN STUDYING PROPOSAL
Washington is seeking a new resolution giving the United
Nations a broader mandate and encouraging reluctant allies to
provide more troops and cash to police and rebuild the
country.
A revised U.S. draft of a Security Council resolution gives
the United Nations a list of duties, similar to earlier
versions. But it falls short of demands by France, Russia and
Germany that the world body play a pivotal, independent role in
overseeing Iraq's transition to self-government.
While not rejecting outright the American plans, Annan told
Security Council members at a lunch that a U.N. mandate could
not be implemented properly under the occupation.
In comments to reporters after the lunch, Annan said the
draft U.S. resolution had not followed his recommendation of
setting up an interim Iraqi government before a constitution
was written and new elections were held.
Diplomats at the lunch said Annan had come as close as he
could to rejecting U.S. proposals that the United Nations help
with elections and the writing of a constitution.
U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell said the resolution
was not "an effort on our part to hang on for as long as we
can."
Key to the transition is a new constitution. Powell said
last week he wanted to see a constitution written in six
months, though officials have stressed that is not an official
deadline.
It is down to Iraq's Governing Council to decide how to
draw up the constitution. Thursday, the U.S. administrator in
Iraq Paul Bremer said he thought six months was feasible, once
the council decided how to convene the constitutional
conference that will do the drafting.
Washington hopes a new U.N. resolution can be adopted
before a crucial donors conference in Madrid on October 23-24.
An assessment by the U.N., the World Bank and the IMF said
$35.6 billion would be needed to rebuild Iraq over four years,
in addition to $20 billion estimated by the United States.
Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan said Thursday he
wanted parliament to decide rapidly whether to send Turkish
troops to Iraq to help Washington maintain security there.
In an apparent concession to its NATO ally, the United
States earlier agreed on joint action with Turkey against
hundreds of Turkish Kurdish rebels holed up in northern Iraq,