This is the note Condi Rice passed to the President this morning at the NATO meeting, with his note on it. This is Bush/Blair’s comments on the turnover. This is the Reuters story on it. I can’t helping bringing to your attention this headline from the Washington Post on the change of regime in Iraq: "
Iraqis See Little Change in Symbolic Transfer of Power:
Continued Violence, Power and Infrastructure Problems Expected." Here is the whole
article. Isn’t that amazing? Decades of tyranny, murder, mayhem, oppression. Now a better future, one of their own doing, and--at the least--hope. Yet, this is the best the Washington Post can come up with. I guess this would have been their headline when Mussolini was overthrown: "Italians now fear trains will not run on time." Thank you WaPo, thank you. The United Nations officially welcomes Iraq "back into the family of independent and sovereign nations." If you doubt that there is hope in Iraq, look at these poll results from Iraq: massive support for the new government.
I believe the Washington Post’s point was that many of Iraq’s citizens saw little change occuring in the actual installation of an the Potemkin government that was sworn in yesterday, not that little change was evident after the overthrow of Hussein. The paper raises, I think, a fair question, as does your inadvertant comparsion of the two junctures: does one see change occuring during the transition from a miltary occupation to a democracy comparable to that observed in an earlier shift from domestic dictatorship to foreign military power? If the former change appears so scant in comparison, can one really speak of it as meaningful?