It just doesn’t have quite the same ring to it, does it:
The rising political firestorm over the Blackwater massacre runs up against a legal firewall in the form of an edict issued by Paul Bremer, former U.S. viceroy, that forbids US military personnel (including private contractors) from being charged by Iraqi authorities or tried in Iraqi courts. It was one of his last acts, one that put the lie to the American proclamation of Iraqi “sovereignty.”
The truth is that we can no longer be reasonably considered to be “the good guys” in Iraq by the Iraqi people. That window has now closed. The fact that the US military and its camp followers are literally above the law in Iraq makes a mockery of the idea that we are attempting to bring the Iraqi people “democracy”, much less “freedom”. Right now, Iraq is every bit the puppet state that the Eastern European nations were under Soviet rule.
What conservatives who still support the occupation don’t understand is that the reason US imperialism is a serious problem isn’t because it’s bad for the occupied nations, although it usually is, it’s because it is bad for the imperial nation.