'What have you done to us, George Bush?'

Living in this daily chaos, they are bemused by politicians outside Iraq who talk of "sovereignty" with that blank electioneering-gaze in their eyes and satisfied smiles on their faces.

Not surprisingly, Iraqis dismiss the interim government as illegitimate. “I don’t remember voting, did I miss something? When was the election?” one Iraqi man told a journalist when asked his opinion about the new Iraqi Government.

With US-appointed politicians known only by their bad reputations making up the so-called Iraqi Government, with the tanks of foreign military occupiers still rumbling down the streets, with the horror of the Abu Ghraib torture pictures still haunting everyone, with the bodies of women and children massacred in Fallujah so numerous they had to be buried in a football field and with smug politicians saying everything is okay in Iraq, when it’s clearly not; the Iraqis are losing their patience. The pseudo-sovereignty has changed nothing.

After living in the Iraqi community in Baghdad for six months, after hundreds of conversations with ordinary Iraqi people, I know there is one thing they desire above all else: peace and security.

This cannot be achieved while ever violent foreign occupiers remain in control of the country and pull the strings tied to the interim Government.

“But the troops must remain in Iraq to provide security!” cry commentators who have never been there to see the carnage the troops have created.

Spend 24 hours in Baghdad and it becomes blatantly obvious that it is the pure presence of the troops that is causing the lack of security.

While ever they are there, violence will continue.

A day in Iraq will also destroy the well-spun myth that there are divisions in the Iraq community that would cause civil war. This is a convenient story created by the coalition and happily propagated by the mainstream media. It is the means to "divide and conquer" and to justify further military involvement. The fact that Muslims, both Sunni and Shia, and Christians, have been living in harmony in Iraq for centuries is overlooked.

Withdraw the troops and the Iraqis are ready. Ready to elect their own government, to provide their own security, to manage their own oil and natural resources, to control their own destiny.

They are ready for peace.

Governments, media commentators and people of the world must stop the patronising. Stop telling Iraqis what we think they need and give them the chance to tell us.

Coalition partners should withdraw troops and contribute to the reconstruction of Iraq in a more meaningful, practical way.

Send home the soldiers with guns and bad attitudes and send over people with tools, tractors, toys and training.  
  
Send friends to help – human beings to walk alongside the Iraqis as fellow human beings. 

This will create the peace the Iraqis are waiting for and the peace they deserve.