What Iraq will get isn't self-rule -- from the Toronto Star -- good read!

[baby_bear]

http://tinyurl.com/v78p

The author, Haroon Siddiqui, is the Star's editorial page editor emeritus.

<snip>

The Prime Minister can't say it, but more than unilateralism, it was dishonesty that doomed George W. Bush's war on Iraq and soured much of the world on America.

Incompetence — exacerbated by imperial arrogance and cultural ignorance — turned the occupation into a nightmare.

Now, all those traits are in play in the American plan to ostensibly turn Iraq over to the Iraqis. The decision to hasten self-rule has little to do with installing real democracy. That's the patina the president needs to cover the panic suddenly gripping the White House.
...
Post-war, America couldn't disband the Iraqi army fast enough. Now, chief U.S. administrator Paul Bremer can't reconstitute it quickly enough for the White House. He has already twice shortened the minimal training of police and military recruits.

Crunching it further can only confirm the long-simmering suspicion that what America wants is not a real Iraqi army, lest it pose a future threat to American interests in the region, but rather security guards, policemen, intelligence agents and advance foot soldiers.

This is a tried and true colonial formula — in fact, a dead-ringer for what the British did in Iraq when faced with an insurgency after their post-Ottoman takeover in 1917.
...
Notwithstanding Bush's lectures on democracy, only the naïve would continue to believe that America wants anything other than a satellite state.
....
</snip>

More...great column, IMHO.

s_m

[lindashaw]

1. Very, very good. Thank you.