All of Us Participate in a New Iraq
by Dahr Jamail

At one point during that presentation in Austin, I attempted in vain to describe to the audience what life in Baghdad is like. It was in vain, because how can anyone in the United States begin to imagine what it is like to be invaded, to have our infrastructure shattered, to have occupying soldiers photographing detained Americans in forced humiliating sexual acts and then to have these displayed on television, to have our churches raided and worshippers therein shot and killed by occupation troops? It is only when more people in the U.S. begin to fathom the totality of the destruction in Iraq that one may expect to hear the public outcry and uprising necessary to end the occupation and bring to justice the war criminals responsible for these conditions. Until that happens, make no mistake: all of us participate in a new Iraq, our hands dyed in the blood of innocents.

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Saving Iraq: Mission impossible
by Juan Cole

The man who would be Iraq's prime minister announced Tuesday that "90 percent" of the work in forming a new government was done. You would never know, from the petty squabbling in the U.S.-protected Green Zone over who gets what ministry, that beyond its concrete barriers a brutal "war of the corpses" rages each night in the nightmarish streets of Baghdad, and that the rest of Iraq continues to spiral out of control. Guerrillas killed 20 and injured 70 with a truck bombing in the far northern city of Tal Afar (reduced by the U.S. last August, and extolled by Bush as "a free city that gives reason for hope for a free Iraq"). The shooting down of a British military helicopter in Basra on Saturday, and the anti-Western riot that followed, signaled that even the relatively quiet Shiite south is seething with a thousand mutinies. Iraq stands on the brink of all-out civil war. Is Prime Minister-designate Nouri al-Maliki the man to forestall it?

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Sir! No sir!

  thanks to Blaine England