Iraqi guerillas: "
Mission accomplished".
A week after two of their colleagues were killed in an ambush, the remaining contingent of 60 South Korean contract engineers and technicians working for the U.S. government on a project north of the capital has decided to leave the country.
It is the largest known withdrawal of contractors over security issues and follows a week of confrontations between the workers and their managers that culminated with yelling and punches Sunday afternoon.
The decision by the men, who were working to fix electrical power lines, is likely to delay one of Iraq's most critical reconstruction projects.
Attacks on foreigners in Iraq are designed precisely for this outcome -- to isolate the US. Attacks on the UN and Red Cross drove those two agencies out of Iraq. Attacks on Italians and Spanish haven't succeeded in driving those forces out, but have increased pressure back in their home countries to do so. Now, these South Korean engineers are out, and won't help the South Korean government sell its own deployment of forces to Iraq (coming soon).
Of course, this all begs the question -- why aren't Iraqi contractors being used? Those guys were able to keep the Iraqi grid working pre-war, unlike the US companies now attempting (and failing) at the task.