New Hampshire
On Monday the Daily Telegraph gave a big chunk of its comment-page real estate to Mr Will Day of something called Care International. I’ve never heard of it myself but doubtless that’s because I’m a fully paid-up member of Don’t Care Unilateral. Anyway, the headline on Mr Day’s column read: ‘Things Are Getting Worse In Iraq, So Give The UN A Chance’.
You can guess how it went from there: ‘Something in Iraq is going fundamentally wrong…. Did the coalition planners think things through..? They can’t have …Nobody is safe …complete breakdown in security …making their lives a misery …almost total lack of basic services…’.
I didn’t see any of this during my stay in western and northern Iraq last month. I went to quite a lot of effort to look for complete security breakdowns, miserable lives and total lack of basic services, but I couldn’t find them in Tikrit or Rutba, Kirkuk or Ramadi, Samarra or even Fallujah, where they’ve had one or two little local difficulties but nothing like the widespread civic collapse Mr Day confidently asserts.
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