Yesterday I was at a rememberance service for a young soldier from my town who died in Iraq.
He is the 2nd from a town of only 8000 inhabitants.

He died by "friendy fire"

Would someone care to explain or justify "friendly fire" to his parents.
His commanding officer, who flew back for the service, explained how this young man died after "unsupervised, young and apparently virtually untrained trigger happy american soldiers opened fire on virtually anything that moved for target practice"
He went on to explain how senior military personnel act to try and hush up such incidents. He was unwilling to keep quiet any longer.
He also reminded us of the two british helicopters shot down by US forces that the US supreme commander also tried to hush up until he got caught out.

My problem is not whether anyone seeks retribution or how or when. I just believe we (and we are both in it together) have lost the plot.
Nothing has been achieved in Iraq in the past 18 months. Nothing ever will. An armed force of 180,000 trying to successfully control a population of 28,000,000 on foreign ground is not going to happen. That country will never again be stable. The minute you withdraw all its allies will be subject to constant terrorist attack. If you dont withdraw, one by one all our troops will be picked off.

I do have a problem though with people who quote statistics to try and justify why not enough Iraqi's or Afghanistanees have not been shot by the troops yet. That is absurd.

This morning it was reported President Bush "does not rule out future attacks on Iran or Syria either"
Great, just what we need. Iran. Russia will be licking its lips. Why not just invite President Putin to fire off all his pristine new and fresh nuclear warheads now and get it over with? Even if it don't happen we are about to go back to where we were 50 years ago in our relationship with Russia.