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Fisk: Whither Iraq?

On ABC Radio National's Breakfast program this morning the US ambassador told interviewer Fran Kelly and the listening audience that Iraq was a "fledgling democracy". Evidently the ambassador hasn't kept abreast of all the dire and diabolical news out of Iraq - the latest, just overnight, of some 150 people having been kidnapped.

Veteran journalist and author Robert Fisk [see Common Dreams here] has a different take on things in Iraq:

"Great news from America!" the cashier at my local Beirut bookshop shouted at me the other morning, raising her thumbs in the air. "Things will be better after these elections?" Alas, I said. Alas, no. Things are going to get worse in the Middle East even if, in two years' time, the U.S. is blessed with a Democrat (and democratic) president.

For the disastrous philosophers behind the bloodbath in Iraq are now washing their hands of the whole mess and crying "Not Us!" with the same enthusiasm as the Lebanese lady in my book shop, while the "experts" on the mainstream U.S. East Coast press are preparing the ground for our Iraqi retreat -- by blaming it all on those greedy, blood-lusting, anarchic, depraved, uncompromising Iraqis.

I must say Richard Perle's version of a mea culpa did take my breath away. Here was the ex-chairman of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee -- he who once said, "Iraq is a very good candidate for democratic reform" -- admitting he "underestimated the depravity" in Iraq. He holds the president responsible, of course, acknowledging only that -- and here, dear reader, swallow hard -- "I think if I had been Delphic, and had seen where we are today, and people had said: 'Should we go into Iraq?' I think now I probably would have said, 'No, let's consider other strategies ... ' "

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