Letter: Real sovereignty essential to Iraq

Wednesday, July 28, 2004 | 8:43 a.m.

We all are hoping the new government in Baghdad will succeed. But will the U.S. let it succeed? That is, permit real sovereignty, instead of such a limited sovereignty.

Alas, the Iraqi people are bound and hobbled by legal and economic systems we created for them, tailored to our interests, not theirs. Their prime minister. too, is of our selection. Can a body with so little self-determination survive the crime, insurrections, stagnant economy and the fact that all the best-paying jobs are going to foreign contractors?

In the documentary "The Fog of War," Robert McNamara, defense secretary during the Vietnam War, recalls a meeting with Vietnamese war leaders in Hanoi three decades after the war ended. McNamara says he was shocked to learn the Vietnamese had not viewed the war as a conflict over Communism, but as a struggle against colonialism.

Should Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld ever have a reunion with Iraq's new officials, will he, too, be surprised? Will he learn that the Iraq war, which he told us was a war to install freedom and democracy, was seen by the Iraqis as an invasion by foreign corporate colonialists?

ELINOR HOLCOMB