Innocents in Iraq..

let's remember just who is doing the killing in Iraq.

IT is interesting to speculate what those who argue Tony Blair "had it coming" over the London bombings must think about the suicide attack involving a fuel tanker in Baghdad over the weekend. Was that atrocity Mr Blair's, or George W. Bush's, or John Howard's fault too? Did the 100 or so innocent Iraqis who lost their lives have it coming, given most of them were Shi'ites, members of the group who, along with the Kurds, have mostly co-operated with the coalition of the willing and reached out for a democratic Iraq? Or what about the 24 children who were killed by a suicide car-bomber while they were accepting sweets from US soldiers last week? Was this the work of freedom fighters? The Western self-blamers have talked about the London bombings as blowback for the thousands of civilian deaths in Iraq since April 2003, but their macabre calculus overlooks a simple point: coalition troops are not behind the slaughter in Iraq. The attacks on soldiers and, increasingly, civilians are being perpetrated by the same people – loosely speaking, Islamist fanatics opposed to the spread of democracy and enlightenment – who organised and executed the London bombings.