Iraq - The Big Picture

[Owlet]

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/FI17Ak02.html


Iraq's military occupation has ended, long live the occupation! "The
end of occupation and the transfer of authority to an interim government on June 28 offered at least a chance for a new beginning,"
writes Larry Diamond in the influential journal Foreign Affairs. The
residents of Najaf, Kufa and Sadr City, not to mention Fallujah and
elsewhere in Iraq, continuously bearing the United States' aerial
bombardment of residential quarters, helicopter "hell fires" and
(uranium-enriched) tank fire, may beg to offer a different perspective, but alas, history is often, though by no means always, written from the prism of the powerful and the dominant.

(Larry Diamond's full article is here. It's a long url and may require c&p)
http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20040901faessay83505/larry-diamond/what-w
ent-wrong-in-iraq.html

<snip>

All this points at what is desperately needed in Washington to turn the situation around in Iraq and the entire Middle East: a de-linking of its foreign policy from the policies and priorities of Israel enjoying the nuclear blackmail of the Middle East, and a re-linking of the United States' Iraq policy with the Arab-Israeli conflict,
energetically putting forth a viable formula for peace that could,
conceivably, contain the various initiatives of the Geneva Accords. Yet the sheer weight of pro-Israel lobbyists and media pundits makes it highly unlikely that such a prudent course of action will be on the
horizon any time in the near future. And this is, without doubt,
tantamount to an unfolding tragedy, not only for the suffering people
of Iraq and the region, but also for the spirit of the American
republic increasingly infected by the virus of neo-colonialist
expansionism exuded by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and his Likud branch of ideology. The de-Likudization of US politics today is a sine qua non of retrieving the great republic from the brink of self-metamorphosis into a world-despised empire.