The Prime Minister Gordon Brown recently announced that around 1000 troops will be withdrawn from southern Iraq within the next few weeks. That’s great news if you’re one of the soldiers who are leaving that war-torn country.
But why doesn’t he go all the way and withdraw all our troops, so that US President George W Bush and his cohorts should clean up their rotten mess. They should have never been deployed to Iraq in the first place. The announcement is a cynical ploy by Brown, who incidently supported the war, to win back faltering public support for the Labour Party at home.
There should also be demands to withdraw troops from Afghanistan too. In fact, there should be a proper national debate about whether Britain actually needs an army. Why do we prefer to employ young men from to kill or maim other men, and to pay them a lower rate than most public sector workers?
Forget about the arguments about for and against this terrible war. If Iraq wasn’t invaded, both the lives of the troops and civilians wouldn’t be in so much danger.