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15 March

The Spanish election. What can I say? Nothing that hasn't been usefully said already, probably. But here are a few observations which strike me:

1. It looks like it's possible for Al-Qaeda, or whoever it was, to effectively change an election result with strategically-timed carnage. This has implications I don't even want to think about.

2. There is going to be an attack like this soon in Britain. If 'they' choose to target us, which I don't doubt they will, there is no way at all that we can stop them doing something like this here. It's a question of where and when, not if. And this is frightening as hell.

3. Spain may - if US/UK pressure doesn't succeed in swaying the new boy at the helm - soon withdraw its troops from Iraq. But is this a good thing? I was against the invasion of Iraq (though it took me some time to make my mind up on this; the judgement call was actually a lot tougher than the more simplistic lefties would have you believe.) Now though, whatever the arguments about whether the invasion was right (I still think it wasn't), it seems to me that we have a duty to leave troops in there as long as needed to clean up our own mess. We could pull out tomorrow, but if we did we would likely get either civil war, an Islamic Despotism or even the return to power of the previous one. We are caught between a rock and a hard place, but if we want any kind of decent democracy to emerge out of the mess that is Iraq - and far more importantly, whether we want to give genuine democrats in Iraq a chance to create one themselves - I think we should leave our troops in there as long as we need to. I have to swallow hard as I write that sentence - the spectacle of US troops protecting Paul Bremer as his looting neo-con crowd privatise the hell out of every Iraqi industry and resource sticks in my craw as much as anyone's. But that could be reversed. Another round of massacres couldn't.

Much as I was irritated by some of Nick Cohen's glib dismissals of the anti-war arguments a year ago, I think he has it right when he argues that our job now is to get behind the genuine radicals and democrats that Iraq has. See his New Statesman article here

Posted by paul at March 15, 2004 06:03 PM

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