"But now they have tasted freedom, for the first time in their lives some of them. The bad guys are not going to go down easily.

"...now they have tasted freedom" - that's the problem. The point is "the bad guys" who are most in the picture at present are the guys who Saddam hated worst of all, and who hated him. This "the rebel cleric Moqtada al-Sadr" - his father was a Shi'ite cleric who was killed by Saddam in 1999.

They aren't fighting to get Saddam back.They are fighting to get the rod ofvthe occupation, and of the make-beoiueve regime that is being imposed on Iraq to fit the US Election timetable.

And up the road there are another bunch, for whom life under Saddam was at least better than it is now, and they are fighting too.

And up the road somewhere again, you have "Al Qaida", calling on Sunni Muslims to kill the Sh'ite's, in between killing the occupiers; and showing how it can be done.

All the headlines, inevitably, are about the soldiers from outside getting killed. But we know, don't we, that for every dead soldier there are a lot more dead civilians. Gunships firing missiles into crowded city areas - we never had that kind of thing in Northern Ireland did we? Is there something about ordinary people in Iraq that makes them more expendable as collateral damage than people in our own streets? Hell, it's not even that they look particularly different from us, and nor do a lot of the streets.

And this masquerades as a "War against Terror". Terror is what it produces, both directly and indirectly.

This is an unholy mess. And it won't be long before we'll be hearing how "well, it's easy to criticise with hindsight but..." But it didn't need hindsight to know this was going to be an unholy mess, because outside millions of ordinary people were shouting themselves hoarse predicting it.

.................

And here is an article pointing at a total cock-up that helped get us into this situation; and the people saying so aren't even anti-war, they are hard-nosed military experts: Violence blamed on US decision to disband Iraq army.

And who do they finger as the military genius in question? One guess, got it first time: "The decision was taken by Donald Rumsfeld, the American defence secretary, under pressure from right wing 'neo-cons' in the Bush administration."