WARS AND IDEAS.(The Talk of the Town)(a sovereign Iraq will have to fight to survive)

Publication: The New Yorker

Publication Date: 05-JUL-04

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COPYRIGHT 2004 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

Nir Rosen on the problem in Falluja

The New Yorker's complete coverage of the conflict in Iraq

Sheikh Ghazi Ajil al-Yawar, who this week will take over Saddam Hussein's old job as the president of a sovereign Iraq, recently mentioned a favorite philosopher. In the spirit of his American counterpart, he might have noted the Prophet Muhammad; instead, the name that came up was Thomas Paine. A British-born deist and revolutionary pamphleteer of the Enlightenment is not the first figure you would expect to be named by a Sunni Arab leader who wears tribal dress in his official role and was living in Saudi Arabia when the American-led war began, last year. But the new Iraqi President's choice helped to clarify what is at stake as the occupation limps to an end.

The Iraq war, from its inception in Washington think tanks to its botched execution on the ground, has always been a war of ideas--some of them very bad ones....

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