an elephant, you say...

In common with everyone else, the Guardian fails to see the elephant in the bathroom:

The fragile situation in the south of the country was dramatically exposed when Iraqi police arrested two undercover British SAS soldiers on Monday and handed them over to militiamen before they were rescued. The incident came after months of concern that local security forces in the region had been infiltrated by radicals.

Radicals, eh? Would they be radicals associated with militias supporting the government of Basra, by any chance?

Some reports say that the jail was being run by a local Shiite religious militia, not the Basra provincial government. These reports seem not to take into account the fact that the Basra provincial government consists of 41 seats, 20 of them held by the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq and 21 by a coalition led by the fundamentalist Shiite Fadila (Virtue) Party. SCIRI has a paramilitary, the Badr Corps, which ran candidates in the Jan. 30 elections.

Since the police are an executive arm of the government, it follows that they would be infiltrated by the militias, who themselves are an executive arm of the parties in control of the Basra government. The new development here is that the “official” milita, ie the police, handed the two soldiers over to the unofficial police, ie the Sadrist militia.

Juan Cole speculates that the two soldiers would have been held hostage in exchange for the release of two senior Sadrist clerics, who were arrested by the British authorities under suspicion of being connected to various bombing attacks which killed several British servicemen. Assuming that this is correct, it follows that these attacks were undertaken with at least the tacit support of the Basra government, itself elected under the supervision of British occupation forces. In short, the government we installed is telling us that it’s time to leave.

Comments

[Jeremy]

Simon Jenkins was on fire in the grundian today... he saw the elephant

whats really disappointing is the meme that even the ever increasingly pathetic lib dems are coming up with: to leave would be bad...