Summary
TONY Blair and George Bush will pray today, but not together. The West's buddies-in-arms will attend Easter Sunday services under the same blazing hot sun, thousands of miles apart: Bush on the US army base in Fort Hood, Texas, near his family ranch; Blair alongside Cherie, her mother and the kids in Bermuda, where he landed on Thursday as parliament entered recess.
It's not difficult to guess the request each man will address to the heavens. Last week represented the darkest hour so far in their joint battle to becalm and democratise a post-Saddam Iraq. The uprising among Shi'ite radicals led by Muqtada al-Sadr, an inexperienced and fiery young cleric who draws his support from the country's poorest and most volatile Shia areas, has been a serious blow to the relationship which the coalition forces have carefully cultivated with Iraq's majority group. The kidnap by Shi'ite militiamen of three Japanese civilians, whose captors have threatened to burn them alive today unless Tokyo pulls its troops out of Iraq, was another undoubted low: the images of the terrified hostages, knives tight against their throats, a spectacle of human degradation to rank alongside the charred bodies of the Americans left hanging from a bridge in Fallujah the week before. By Friday, the first anniversary of Saddam's downfall, at least 41 coalition soldiers and hundreds of Iraqis had been killed in the week's fighting.See the full content of this document
Extract
Two Friends in Need
These events were a shock to Blair and Bush. They had come to expect merciless savagery from the defeated Ba'athists and dehumanised al-Qaeda fanatics who had driven the insurgency thus far, but they did not expect the Shia - who form 60 per cent of Iraq's population and who have, after all, most to gain from...
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