The "Coalition of the Failing"

Or the failing of the "coalition." Pressure is building on Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi to immediately withdraw the 3,000 Italian troops in Iraq, rather than waiting until September to begin a pullout, as he has previously announced. The immediate driving force is public anger in the wake of the killing of Italian agent Nicola Calipari and the wounding of Giuliana Sgrena by US troops.

"Berlusconi was trumpeting his special relationship with President George Bush and the United States, and gets a slap in the face," said Jason Walston, director of international relations at the American University of Rome.

That "slap" arose from the fact that the US, to the surprise of no one but to the dismay of Italians, exonerated the troops in an inquiry that relied solely on their statements and which could not reconstruct the events because US forces had removed forensic evidence, including the car itself, from the site. Italy, however, refused to sign off on the conclusion and instead has issued its own findings. While concluding that the shooting was not deliberate, Reuters reported, the report

criticized the U.S. military on Monday for failing to establish rules for checkpoints in Iraq, saying nervous U.S. troops manning a haphazard road block were to blame for the killing of an Italian agent near Baghdad. ...

[I]t accused U.S. troops of failing to set up "the most elementary precautions" to warn drivers of the approaching checkpoint.

The US report tried to blame Italy for the incident, saying that its agents hadn't told US officials about taking Sgrena to the airport. But the Italians snapped back that US officials were "indisputably" aware that Calipari and a second agent were in Baghdad, that they were under no obligation to tell the US of their travel plans, and that

evidence given by Sgrena and the Italian driver, who have both said they were given virtually no warning before coming under attack, was "coherent and plausible."

The Italian investigation also concluded that a panicky US machine gunner went from shining a spotlight on the car to firing warning shots to firing fatal shots with the space of a few seconds - which, it seems at least to me, would hardly have given the driver a chance to stop. (I imagine myself driving at night and being surprised by a spotlight. By the time I could think "What the hell? I'd better stop" and step on the brake pedal, two or three seconds could easily have passed, perhaps enough time to go from being hit by a light to being hit by machine gun fire.)

Berlusconi, who is one of President Bush's most fervent allies in Europe, was due to address parliament on Thursday about the incident, but is highly unlikely to heed demands for an immediate pullout of the Italian contingent.

However, Reforms Minister Roberto Calderoli called the US report "clearly a lie" and Italian prosecutor Antonio Intelisano complained

"[i]t's not just that these people will not be tried, but there will not even be a disciplinary procedure against them," Intelisano said. "This is the reason why this decision, all things considered, has not been accepted or shared in this country."

In the light of that sort of rising anger even from within his own cabinet, Berlusconi, already overseeing an electorate overwhelmingly opposed to his Iraq adventure, may yet have to re-think his plans for a slow withdrawal and the value of his "special relationship" with Shrub.