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A slap in the face for Iraqi Parliament

Dahr Jamail is a journalist, in the truest sense of the world, working in and out and about in Iraq. His dispatches are probably the only ones which tell it as it is. To rely on the western media is basically to have reflected the good news the American military is feeding them.

Jamail raises a critical and relevant question - who is going to "liberate" the Iraqis from the Americans? - in this piece from IPS reproduced on AlterNet:

"The end of 2007 produced a telltale indication of what the New Year seems likely to bring to Iraq. "We the Iraqi members of Parliament signing below demand a timetable for withdrawal of the occupation forces [MNF] from our beloved Iraq," 144 members of the 275-member Parliament, a clear majority, wrote in a declaration April 2007.

Despite this, the George W Bush administration and the Iraqi government led by US-installed Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki pushed a resolution through the UN Security Council to extend by another year the legal cover for foreign troops to operate in Iraq.

The move on December 18 violated both the Iraqi constitution and the resolution passed earlier this year by the Iraqi Parliament.

Many Iraqi lawmakers say that any renewal of the UN mandate not ratified by Parliament is illegal. The move almost guarantees an increase in violence and a deepening of sectarian tensions.

"Bypassing the Iraqi Parliament and continuing to undermine the Iraqi political process will push more Iraqis to choose armed resistance instead of political non-violent resistance," Raed Jarrar, Iraq consultant at the Public Policy Office of the American Friends Service Committee in Washington, an independent peace group, told Inter Press Service.

"The US role in supporting the unpopular and unelected Iraqi cabinet will increase violence and undermine Iraqis' plans to achieve national reconciliation," Jarar said. "The best way to support reconciliation in Iraq is to stop supporting a minority of Iraqi separatists against the majority of Iraqi nationalists."

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