The Policy Blender

Upon re-reading the above comment for the twelfth time, I do see how logic can used to arrive at the same conclusion as Professor Ramadan - that attacks on British and US troops are justified.

I can't help feeling that if I'd made that point though, perhaps relating to a different context to Iraq, I would have been accused of gross over-simplification and of deliberately miss representing facts, conjecture and logic.

Tax takes money away from the poor so tax is bad. Cancer probably kills people who may turn out to be mass murderers, so cancer is good etc.

I don't feel that attacks on British and US troops are justified. I also don't feel that killing of civilians is justified, though I accept that it happens.

The following point that I would like to add, for clarification, is something that normally gets left behind as most opponents of the war hop on a horse and charge off into the sunset of ethical rhetoric:

The British and US troops occupy Iraq to secure it for the Iraqi people and do not deliberately kill civilians. The 'insurgents' (Chris' inverted comas) are trying to prevent the British and US troops securing Iraq for the Iraqi people. They do deliberately kill civilians, in fact the more the merrier.

If the insurgents' only goal was that the occupation should end, then they should stop killing people and all the troops would leave. Simple. That's not what they want though, Al Zakawi said as much in a letter intercepted last year - something along the lines of: "…we could not justify our jihad in Iraq if the Americans were to leave…"

So, to justify terrorists killing those who are seeking to protect the innocent from those same terrorists by using logic that suggests the killing would stop if the protectors were to leave, is morally bankrupt bordering on psychopathic.

I've been pushing to replace the words 'insurgents' and 'soldiers' with the word 'murderers' from the beginning. But that probably is naive.