If anyone still believes that Iraq is now a sovereign nation and that coalition troops are there not as occupiers but as liberators who’ve not yet overstayed their welcome, they need only read the reports today of the British soldiers rescued from an Iraqi jail in Basra.
Although the circumstances of their arrest (they were in civilian clothes—isn’t there something in the Geneva Convention about that?) are still largely unknown, it was alleged that they were apprehended after a shootout with Iraqi police, whereupon the British authorities demanded an immediate release. You see, under Iraqi law, coalition forces are not allowed to be arrested, or if they are, they must immediately be turned over to, you guessed it, coalition forces. The British didn’t wait very long before they rescued their soldiers, and the Iraqi government now insists that there is no crisis between Britain and Iraq. But any nation that cannot arrest someone foreign suspected of a crime (diplomats are always excepted, of course) is not a nation: it is a colony. The Iraqi law that requires automatic subservience to British and American military personnel (and surely drafted by the U.S.) runs counter to any notion of sovereignty, and the demonstrations in Basra were a good indication of the humiliation Iraqis must feel at being, two and a half years on from Saddam, and purple fingers notwithstanding, something less than a nation. But we’ll “stay the course”, won’t we?
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