IRAQ: Ming’s right – more to be said?

I agree with every word Ming Campbell said on his site:

http://www.mingcampbell.org.uk/

I happen to think there’s more to the story.

We all breathed a sigh of relief when Brown became Prime Minister – yet are we not just experiencing a better actor?

You’d have thought that the benchmarks for such a thing (after all it’s only service men and womens lives and billions of pounds of taxpayers money!) would be well-advertised on the MOD website. Not a sausage. I rang the MOD to which the reply was `you have to send in a request under the FOI!`. I sent a question on their own site. My experience of these sorts of things are not good; If you use your own email address you can keep tabs on it – if you use the organisation’s own website to send something it can be lost in the ether. Not holding out much hope i managed to get something from a Lib Dem MP’s office.

The only things that could be found was a committee set up under Al-Maliki looking at progress under five themes – NOTE: were these themes agreed with the British Government? What role did our Government take?

None of these criterias deal with the POLITICAL CONTROL of the Police etc – ie which shia militia is controlling things. Perhaps someone from the Government could give a definition of `corruption` Iraq-style.

None of these criterias deal with the AFTERMATH of withdrawal. It is not enough to say that we are holding back problems now if after three years, after the last of the service personnel has left, it all explodes. Or are we expecting to provide a presence indefinitely?

Finally some questions for Mr Brown:

a) If things are going so well why do we need to keep a presence `in case trouble erupts`?

b) If you are content with what has been achieved why not provide British Government benchmarks? What do YOU expect, Mr Brown, as a measure of success? You are after all one of those that voted for the war and you are the Prime Minister.

c) What are the current assessments on the Iraqi Government criterias asked by Micheal Moore MP in June 2006?

d) How will you judge the Aftermath?