Around 800 people a month are dying in Iraq from attacks by insurgents and it’s getting worse. The figures for the numbers killed in military operations haven’t been released apparently. If this doesn’t put the London bombing into perspective I don’t know what does.

“The Americans have to be smarter – to hide and lay traps for the insurgents,” Mr. Summaidai said by telephone in early July. “Not just to terrorize the community. That will not work.”

There’s the T word again. Terror. Apparently the US military are scaring the hell out of the population (no mention is made of other nationality forces). I’d love to say that this is a situation with a simple solution that the leaders are overlooking, but it just isn’t. The soldiers are scared, and that will always lead to them attempting to regain control by scaring the population. You can’t take the soldiers out now because that would leave a power vacuum which would likely result in even worse conditions for the country’s population, but leaving in there isn’t helping anyone either.

There’s no happy ending to this post, because at the moment I just can’t see the situation getting better any time soon, but it does reiterate that a four bombs and around 50 dead in London is nothing compared to the suffering that is going on in Iraq and that Britain is partially responsible for. It’s a tragedy for the families, and a terrible event all around, but it is not anywhere near the scale of suffering that is happening right now in Iraq.

There is a difference between Britain taking blame for these events in Iraq and taking responsibility, I don’t blame our government for being there, and there’s no point in going over old mistakes at this point; that doesn’t bring anyone back to life. We now have to take control of events as best we can and face up to the fact that the coalition is now responsible for trying to make Iraq as safe or preferably safer for its population than it was when we got there. We broke it, but all the Queen’s horses and all the Queen’s cannot put Iraq back together again.