It's getting ugly

Resistance to foreign occupation in Iraq has moved beyond military attacks and suicide-bombings to mob violence. Today in Falluja a mob attacked a pair of SUVs apparently occupied by westeners, set them on fire, dragged the corpses out, and mutilated them with shovels. Other reports suggest the dead were Americans, possibly security guards, and paint a similarly gory picture of their death.

These sort of attacks reveal a lot of hate - and should cause people to fundamentally question the US view of the occupation. "Liberators" are not generally torn apart by mobs in the street...

Once things have got to this stage, an occupying army basically has only two choices: commit atrocities or leave. The first discards any pretence of attempting to win hearts and minds, and any shred of moral decency. It also jars with the US's purported war aims - taking hostages or "mowing the whole place down" at the slightest hint of a threat is neither a credible nor effective tactic if your goal is to build a free and democratic society (it's also a war crime, BTW). But leaving means that Bush loses the election. I wonder how many Iraqi civilians he's willing to kill for another term?

Update 02/04/04: The four victims were mercenaries, not civilians. For those who don't know, mercenaries, or "private security contractors" according to current euphemism, are playing an increasing role in Iraq, making up for the lack of international support (and shortage of US troops) by taking on basic security duties. South Africans and Chileans are particularly popular, bo doubt because they're used to keeping a subject people in line. The Independent had a pair of articles on it last week, which I should have linked to at the time:

Britain's secret army in Iraq: thousands of armed security men who answer to nobody
Occupiers spend millions on private army of security men