Ari Berman (The Nation): Imperfect Union

From The Nation
Dated Friday February 4

Outrageous Outtakes: Imperfect Union
By Ari Berman

** Imperfect Union I: "In Iraq, 28 countries have troops on the ground, the United Nations and the European Union provide technical assistance for the elections, and NATO is leading a mission to train Iraqi officers."

Where to start? The 45 countries present at the beginning of the invasion shrunk to 28, and will further decrease when Ukraine, Hungary, the Netherlands and Portugal withdraw troops this year. Moreover, these 28 countries account for a meager 15 percent of the 180,000 total troops in Iraq, of which 150,000 (83 percent) are American. Subtract Britain's 12,500 soldiers and the international contribution falls to less than 9 percent. Meanwhile, many of the major European powers in NATO--France, Germany, Belgium and Spain--declined to train Iraqi soldiers. A coalition of the disappearing is what we're left with.

** Imperfect Union II: "The great and proud nation of Egypt, which showed the way toward peace in the Middle East, can now show the way toward democracy in the Middle East."

Around the same time Iraqis voted, the great and proud nation of Egypt, which receives $2 billion in US aid per year, arrested a key opposition member of parliament and three democracy activists who called on Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak--ruler since 1980--to step down at the end of his term. "Egypt isn't even remotely democratizing," Joshua Stacher, an Egypt expert at Scotland's St. Andrews University, told the Christian Science Monitor. "There's a huge disconnect between freedom rhetoric and substantial policy change."

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