Eye on Iraq: Iraqis trapped in a U.S. web

Published: June 14, 2007 at 12:33 PM
By MARTIN SIEFFUPI Senior News AnalystWASHINGTON, June 14 (UPI) -- It has become fashionable for senior Bush administration officials and their last-ditch supporters among U.S. pundits to blame Iraqis -- from top political leaders to ordinary people -- for the mess their country is in. What could be called the latest Krauthammer Doctrine states in its simplest and harshest version: "We gave you freedom -- but you messed it up."
Instead, what Bush policymakers -- primarily former U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and the neo-conservatives he so fatefully empowered -- gave the Iraqi people was a Rube Goldberg facade of a democratic constitution imposed upon a society that Bush policies had thrown into chaos and then left there.
This guaranteed not the establishment of a stable democratic functioning political system but precisely its opposite. The Iraqi people and their political factions (none of them can be called "parties" in any Western democratic sense) are now trapped in a system that guarantees division, factionalism and powerlessness. >>>cont
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