This is some powerful shit.
A liberated and free Iraq now marching in protests.
Tempest in a teapot anyone?
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U.S. Convenes Forum on Iraqi Future
Thousands Protest, Objecting to U.S. Involvment
Zalmay Khalilzad, the White House special envoy to Iraq, left, takes a note from a delegate at the opening of the U.S.-sponsored meeting on postwar Iraq on Tuesday. The meeting is being held near Nasiriyah in southern Iraq. (Tim Sloan - AFP)
By Thomas W. Lippman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, April 15, 2003; 2:05 PM
A U.S.-sponsored meeting of Iraqi political and religious leaders debating the political future of postwar Iraq took place today near Nasiriyah -- the town that saw the most intense combat of the war. The shooting may have subsided, but if today's gathering is any indication, the struggle for power could be just as ferocious in a different way and could last longer.
Participants in the meeting -- selected by the United States and invited by the U.S. Army Central Command, which automatically makes them suspect to nationalist-minded Iraqis -- agreed to reconvene in 10 days. But this accomplishment was clouded by the fact that one of Iraq's most important Shiite Muslim groups boycotted the meeting, and thousands of demonstrators who objected to any U.S. role in Iraqi politics denounced the event with a noisy protest.
"No to America, no to Saddam," they shouted.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...2003Apr15.html