LONDON -- Day One of modern Iraq. Never before have the people of Iraq had their political destiny in their own hands. There have been no celebrations. The sound of gunfire is of killing, not festivity.
Anyone who knows anything about Iraq knows that U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is not telling the truth when he offers a eulogy to the great benefits the Americans have brought to Iraq. The best chance the Iraqis have of making anything of their country is to roll back the political changes imposed by U.S. administrator L. Paul Bremer. The most counterproductive of these was to try to rid the Iraqi state of everybody who had been in, or had any links with, the Ba'ath Party, nominally the body that put and kept Saddam Hussein in power.
As critics said from the start, ridding the state of all Ba'athist links meant ridding the state of anybody with any experience in running the country from the top down to the policemen on the corner.