Robert Fisk's article (also available here) in Wednesday's Independent is worth reading.

Most commentators persist in talking about the American actions in Iraq as a failure. Certainly if we compare the reality to the stated aims of creating a stable united country, a "beacon of democracy in the Middle East", then it is failure on a large scale. But does anyone really think that a stable united Iraq was anyone's real aim? The Americans came to Iraq with the intention of breaking it: turning it into a "failed state", and splitting it into smaller parts. That failure will be blamed on others, but the clear beneficiaries are the US and Israel. The attack on the Askariya shrine at Samarra in February last year is widely believed to have been covertly carried out on behalf of the Americans with the aim of fomenting the civil war which is now going on.

That cannot be proved, but the arrest of British soldiers in Basra dressed as Arabs and carrying a bomb in their car in September 2005 was different: they were caught red-handed, and the British then proceeded to use tanks to knock down the walls of the jail where they were held in order to free them.

Iraq is America's laboratory for the future: most of the world's future. So take note of what they are doing there.

When the real aim (and its execution) and the rhetoric fail to coincide, they take refuge in the "incompetence defence": this has become a recurring theme in the "War on Terror" going back to it's use in explaining 9/11 ("I don't think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center" -- Condoleeza Rice).

(I shall be discussing the "incompetence defence" again soon in more detail in another place.)

And consider the extent of the destruction that will be required to achieve the "new map of the Middle East" which seems to have been floated by elements in Washington:
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=NAZ20061116&articleId=3882
http://www.globalresearch.ca/images/harita_b.jpeg.

John Pilger's article in the current New Statesman has been widely reprinted.

The Israeli journalist Amira Hass describes the moment her mother, Hannah, was marched from a cattle train to the concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen. "They were sick and some were dying," she said. "Then my mother saw these German women looking at the prisoners. This image became very formative in my upbringing, this despicable 'looking from the side'."

It is time we in Britain stopped looking from the side. We are being led towards perhaps the most serious crisis in modern history as the Bush/Cheney/Blair "long war" edges closer to Iran for no reason other than that nation's independence from rapacious America.

The rulers of the world in Washington are planning acts of almost unparallelled wickedness and recklessness, and it is almost as if no-one has noticed. As Pilger puts it, everyone is 'looking from the side'.