New Hampshire
‘Let freedom reign!’ scribbled President Bush in the corner of the briefest of hand-written notes from his national security adviser:
‘Mr President,
‘Iraq is sovereign. Letter was passed from Bremer at 10.26 a.m. Iraq time — Condi.’
And that was it. No ostrich feathers, no Princess Alexandra, no tea on the lawn at Government House. After 15 months of running Iraq, the Americans are out. Sure, they’ve got a lot of troops there, but they’ve got a lot of troops everywhere — Germany, Japan, South Korea, Qatar, Kosovo, Afghanistan, the Philippines, Diego Garcia … What’s one more?
What the future holds for Iraqis is up to them. But the Americans have bequeathed them a better Iraq than the one the British invented for them eight decades ago: no imported princeling, no rigged referendum installing him as king, no exclusion of the majority population from political power. Iraq now has the most representative and progressive government in the Arab world.
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