OIL WARS

A year on: 'Mission (still not) Accomplished' ... but what was the mission? WMD, regime change ...?

A year after President George Bush famously declared 'major combat' in Iraq over, how is it that so many Iraqis now have such a visceral hatred of Americans? One reason is that the photographs of brutality and humiliation of Iraqi detainees by British and American troops, which have so shocked the rest of the world and angered Arab countries, have come as little surprise to Iraqis. For months it has been clear to them that the occupation is very brutal; for weeks they have been watching pictures of the dead and injured in Fallujah on al-Jazeera satellite television which CNN did not broadcast.