Iraqis say U.S. should stop passing blame

It would appear that the Iraqi government have had enough of being blamed by the US for all that has gone wrong with their invasion of a country that never attacked them. The Iraqis are now saying that the US should accept responsibility for the chaos and stop blaming Iraq, Syria and Iran for the mess that now exists on the ground in Iraq.

"The Americans always try to pretend the responsibility for cleaning up this mess isn't theirs and tend to shift blame onto Iraq, Iran and Syria for everything that goes wrong," said veteran Kurdish lawmaker Mahmoud Othman.

"But they should stop this nonsense and admit that most of the accountability rests on their shoulders," he told Reuters.

The responsibility for restoring order after a war belongs, under international law, to the occupying force. Since the illegal invasion the US has NEVER, EVER, managed to restore order to the streets of Iraq. Indeed, in the early days after the invasion Rumsfeld appeared to applaud the anarchy which saw looting on the streets of Iraq by claiming that "Freedom is messy!"

Recently the Americans have sought to move the responsibility for the anarchy currently sweeping through Iraq's streets on to anyone other than themselves. It's the blame of the Iraqi government, or more commonly, the blame of the Iranians for supplying weapons to the Iraqi insurgency; despite the fact that no-one can actually confirm that the Iranian government are actually doing this. But the important thing is that it is the fault of someone else as far as the Bush administration are concerned.

This Iraqi fightback comes hard on the heels of the Bush administration's latest attack on the Iraqi government for failing to achieve progress on US imposed benchmarks, the most important to the US being the Iraqi Oil law.

The fact that such a contentious law is proving controversial can hardly be a surprise to anyone, and it seems ridiculous that Bush can seek to blame the Iraqis for having difficulty passing a law which allows foreign powers - and especially American oil companies - access to their most important resource.

But the Iraqis are right on their main point. The task of restoring order in Iraq is the responsibility of the occupying army, and the Americans are being duplicitous when they attempt to pass that responsibility on to the Iraqi government.

When the British occupied countries as large as India, the very first thing they did was to restore order. Without order the occupying power can achieve little else.

And, as the Iraqi government are now pointing out, the lack of order in Iraq has been a problem from the earliest days of this US invasion, and it's a problem for which the blame lies with the United States, not with the Iraqis, the Syrians or the Iranians.