Iraqi nationalism is the only political force capable of uniting Sunni and Shiite Arabs and ending the sectarian civil war, but for the past four years the United States has systematically worked to suppress it.
By Robert Dreyfuss
"Perversely, and entirely unintentionally, recent US-caused events in Iraq have sparked the one thing capable of both forcing an end to the American occupation and uniting the people of Iraq around a common purpose: Iraqi nationalism.....nationalism in Iraq has been revived recently as a result of three simultaneous US actions.
Those events are, first, the misguided effort, led by Senator Joe Biden, to partition Iraq into three mini-states, which passed the Senate 75 to 23 September 26; second, the September 16 killing of seventeen Iraqis by trigger-happy Blackwater security forces in a traffic-clogged Baghdad square; and third, the continuing American pressure to force the partial privatization of Iraq's oil, part of which, in Kurdistan, was illegally gobbled up in September by Ray Hunt of Hunt Oil, one of George W. Bush's Texas chums. Any one of these events would have been guaranteed to spark outrage among most Iraqis, but taken together they have galvanized nationalism to a degree unprecedented since the 2003 invasion. All three have been seized on as leverage by Iraqi political forces that oppose the fifty-four-month occupation of Iraq......"
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