fisk:

Few, save of course for the Iraqis, understood the cruellest paradox of the event. For it was the new "Iraqi Foreign Minister" who chose to leak the "bringing forward" of sovereignty in Iraq at the Nato summit in Turkey. Thus was this new and unprecedented date in modern Iraqi history announced not in Baghdad but in the capital of the former Ottoman empire which once ruled Iraq. Alice in Wonderland could not have improved on this. The looking-glass reflects all the way from Baghdad to Washington. In its savage irony Ibsen might have done justice to the occasion. After all, what could have been more familiar than Allawi's appeal to Iraqis to fight "the enemies of the people".

It was difficult to remember that Mr Bremer was touted for his job more than a year ago because he was a "counter-terrorism" expert and that what he referred to as "dead-enders" [Baathist diehards] managed to turn almost an entire Iraqi population against the United States and Britain in just a few months.

According to Mr Allawi yesterday, the "dead-enders" and the "remnants" belonged to Saddam Hussein. Those of them who had not committed crimes could even join the new authorities, he announced. But it had already been made clear that Mr Allawi was pondering martial law, the sine qua non of every Arab dictatorship--this time to be imposed on an Arab state, heaven spare us, by a Western army led by an avowedly Christian government. Who was the last man to impose martial law on Iraqis? Wasn't it Saddam Hussein?

No, Mr Allawi and his chums--along with the convicted fraudster Ahmed Chalabi, now dug up from his political grave--are not little Saddams. Indeed, it is Mr Allawi's claim to fame that he was a Saddam loyalist until he upped sticks and fled to London. He almost got assassinated by Saddam before--this by his own admission--he took the King's shilling (MI6) and the CIA's dollar and (again by his own admission) that of 12 other intelligence agencies.

Perhaps most remarkable of all was Mr Allawi's demand that "mercenaries who come to Iraq from foreign countries" should leave Iraq. There are, of course, 80,000 Western "mercenaries" in Iraq, most of them wearing Western clothes. But of course, Mr Allawi was not speaking of these men. And herein lies a problem. There must come a time when we have to give up cliches, when we have to give up on the American nightmares. Al-Qa'ida does not have an original branch in Iraq. And the Iraqis didn't plan September 11, 2001.

He warned "the forces of terror" that "we will not forget who stood with us and against us in this crisis". As the new "Cabinet" stepped forward to place their hands on the Koran, a large number of Iraqi flags lined the podium behind them--though not the strange blue and white banner which the former Interim Council had concocted two months ago.

http://rense.com/general54/pit.htm