How about us? With all the fears of the Arab Street, and the pointing to the Palestinians as the root cause of all that is wrong in the Middle East, Iraq's own Saddam-haters continue to say, "Thank you USA. Hey everyone else, how about us?


Pointer from Andrew Sullivan.

Regime change in Iraq will provide a historic opportunity - one that is as large as anything that has happened in the Middle East since the fall of the Ottoman Empire.


Iraq is rich enough and developed enough and has the human resources to become a great force for democracy and economic reconstruction in the Arab and Muslim world.



But most Arabs are in a state of denial. The gulf that opened up between Iraqis and the rest of the Arab world that began with the 1991 Gulf War has reached a kind of crescendo with the current crisis.


Out of the Iraqi opposition - as difficult and fractious as it may be - could emerge a new kind of Arab politics. One that I believe is far healthier than the politics that dominates the Arab world today.


Since 1967, Arab political culture has largely been dominated by Arab nationalism of one form and another. This has been an obsession to the exclusion of everything else.


And today, the spectrum of what is politically possible to talk about in Arab politics runs from Palestine at one end to Palestine at the other, with no room for the plight of the Iraqi people.



But, if you live in Iraq, Palestine is not the central question of your life - your home-grown tyrant is.[...]