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David

On Fri, 25 Aug 2006 16:53:36 -0400, wrote:

The war, which continues in Iraq, is the culminating episode in the
long 20th-century history of the rebellion of the colonized against
the empires of the west: it is the story of Vietnam, Algeria and the
Congo, of Nicaragua and the Lebanon, of Chilean guerrillas, Australian
Aborigines and Celtic nationalists, of all the counter-cultural forces
of the century past.

And to understand such an epochal struggle across the continents, we
don't need to get exercised about weapons or mobile labs as possible
causes. The reason for what happened lies in the nature of America's
hegemony in 2004, the solitude of its self-understanding, the tragedy
of its geographically enforced isolation, and the sum total of over a
century of European, and especially British, meddling in the Middle
East. The always invented cause is a throw-away prop to argument: it
can come and go. But the reason was there long before the deeds of
war. We did not need the Iraq war to happen to establish our knowledge
of the nature of US power, and British collusion in that omnipotence.

This is why Iraq troubles the way we live now, and have lived for a
long time. It is a call to self-examination and the national
conscience, neither of which are natural ports of call for the breezy
certitudes and quick collapses of British journalism.

http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0311-04.htm