Towards a new horizon

Slogans often change the political landscape. When Karl Marx asked the world's workers to unite and break their chains, he unleashed forces that convulsed the globe for nearly a century.

As America dealt with the twin problems of economic recession and the rise of Nazism, US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt told the citizens of his country that the only thing they had to fear was fear itself.

Closer to our times, "it's the economy, stupid," that helped Bill Clinton to defeat an incumbent, President George H. W. Bush. It also made it possible for him to get the Americans to focus on some economic fundamentals.

Slogans have also been important in bringing about change in South Asia. Mujibur Rahman's "six points" focused the attention of the people of Bengal on how they may have been exploited by the policymakers from West Pakistan.

The campaign based on this slogan resulted in the Awami League's triumph in the 1970 general elections, civil war between East and West Pakistan, and the emergence of Bangladesh as an independent state.

Roti, kapra aur makan was the slogan raised by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto to attract the attention of the poor and the lower middle classes to his belief that they had not benefited from President Ayub Khan's "development revolution."

On the basis of this slogan, Bhutto and his Pakistan People's Party coasted to victory in West Pakistan in the 1970 general elections. This was a real revolution since the PPP, buoyed by the support of those the establishment had disenfranchised, was able to bring new classes into the centre of the political arena.

Indira Gandhi also used a powerful slogan - Gharibi hatao - to win a decisive electoral victory when her control of the Congress party was being challenged by the establishment. She went to the country's poor directly and they responded vigorously giving her the political strength to cleanse her party of the old forces.

But there were times when slogans have backfired. A vivid illustration of this is the "India shining" campaign with which the Bharatiya Janata Party expected to win another term for itself and its leader, the popular Atal Behari Vajpayee.

The Indian voters surprised almost all political pundits when the BJP was roundly defeated and the Congress brought back to power. The ordinary Indian voter did not find that India was shining for him or for her.

In fact, the slogan demonstrated unequivocally that the vast majority of India's billion plus people had not benefited from the record rates of economic growth the country had experienced for some years. They were angry and expressed their frustration by voting the BJP out of power.

The point of all of this is to underscore that with the realignment that seems to be proceeding in Pakistan under the prompting of General Pervez Musharraf, a slogan, backed by a solid programme, may politically rehabilitate the reconfigured PML.

There is no doubt any more that Pakistan's current military leader would like to place himself at the head of a new political movement. It appears to be his hope that such a movement would resonate with the people and win him their support as he proceeds with what I have described in some of my writings as "Musharraf's Pakistan Project."

The main purpose of this project is to achieve for Pakistan economic and political development that could be sustained over time. I would opt for Nokri, ziarat, tejarat and talim - or employment, agriculture, trade and education - as the slogan to win the support of the people.

Such a slogan would touch upon some of the important initiatives Pakistan needs to take to revive its economy, develop its political system and bring stability to its social structure. Let me explain.

One important lesson the exponents of the "trickle down approach" have learnt is that a high rate of economic growth does not necessarily help the poor. This is the message Ayub Khan received in the late 1960s and that was delivered to the BJP leaders by the recent elections in India.

I have said in this space before that Pakistan needs to see its economy grow at least five per cent a year in order to stop any further increase in its already large pool of poverty.

A five per cent growth rate is twice the rate of increase in population. A rate of growth equal to three times the population increase - or 7.5 per cent a year - would bring about a reduction of 10 per cent in the size of the poverty pool. I believe that this rate is within sight if the right set of policies is adopted. This brings me back to the question of the trickle down approach.

For Pakistan, a rate of between five and 7.5 per cent is a necessary condition for addressing the problem of poverty. But it is not a sufficient condition. This is the reason why development finance institutions have begun to distinguish between two types of growth: growth per se and "pro-poor" growth.

For any set of Pakistani leaders not to suffer the fate meted out to the BJP in India, it is important to recognize that the revival of growth would not on its own translate into political goodwill unless it brings benefits to the less privileged groups in the society. This is where nokri - or employment - enters the picture.

In macroeconomic terms, Pakistan seems to be on the verge of turning the corner. It is now growing at a rate of five to six per cent a year - a rate, as I have indicated before, that is sufficient to begin to address the problem of poverty.

But growth alone would not suffice. A pro-poor strategy must not only provide employment opportunities to the millions of people who are unskilled and illiterate. It must also be able to accommodate those who have the skills or the ability to acquire them.

Agriculture has the capacity to provide for the first group; trade in services should help the second. That is the reason why I have ziarat and tejarat as the second and third words in the proposed "four-word" slogan.

Pakistan has not exploited the full potential of its extremely well-endowed agricultural sector. The country has the largest contiguous irrigated area in the world. The bulk of the investment made to develop the impressive irrigation systems happened during the period of the British rule of the areas that now make up Pakistan.

The only significant investment made after Pakistan was born was done in the context of the Indus Replacement Works. As the name of the programme suggests, this investment was meant to replace the waters that were awarded to India by the Indus Waters Treaty. It did not appreciably add to the availability of water within the existing system.

Even more important from the perspective of generating growth from the sectors that would provide employment to the poor is to invest in reclaiming the original efficiency of the irrigation system.

Some analysts have suggested that nearly one-half of the amount of water that flows into the system is lost to evaporation or simply seeps into the ground because of the state of despair of the canals and secondary and tertiary distribution channels.

A programme aimed at lining the canals, straightening them, and improving the gradient at which water follows would not only add an enormous amount of water available to the farmers. It would also create millions of jobs if this work is done in a labour-intensive way.

A nokri-oriented strategy of economic growth, therefore, would focus on creating a public works programme aimed at improving the efficiency of the irrigation sector.

Such a programme should be designed by the people who understand the system of irrigation but should be implemented by the local governments set up by the Musharraf administration.

At the same time, the local government bodies should require the farmers to make a meaningful contribution since they will benefit from the increased amount of water that would become available to them.

Another component of the employment-creating and poverty-alleviating strategy directed at the sector of agriculture is to change the pattern of cropping. The British administration in India invested in irrigation to save their domain from being inflicted repeatedly by famines.

They saw that Punjab and Sindh had vast tracts of cultivable land that could be brought to use if the large amounts of water flowing through the Indus River system could be tapped for irrigation. This was the right strategy to follow for those times.

The British succeeded in their approach and they turned Punjab and Sindh into the granaries for the rest of British India. Now, almost three-quarters of a century later, the Indus basin needs to be turned not only into a granary for northern India, Western China and Central Asia. It should also become the orchard and the vegetable garden for all these places.

By improving the productivity of the land already under cultivation, Pakistan could more than double the output of its main food grain crops, wheat and rice. This incremental increase would find easy markets in the neighbouring countries that are potentially food-deficit.

As the incomes of the populations living in these areas increase, their pattern of food consumption will change in favour of high-valued items such as fruit and vegetables. Pakistan should gear up its agriculture sector to supply these changing needs.

Moving from being a granary to an area devoted to the production of fruit and vegetables would not only provide more income to the farming community. The production of these crops is also more labour-intensive. Such a reorientation would, therefore, create more jobs.

At the other end of the employment spectrum are jobs that would accommodate workers with more highly developed skills. This is where the service sector comes in, particularly the sector that provides services in information and communication.

India has already demonstrated the enormous amount of gains a country can make in these activities. India succeeded since it has trained manpower, entrepreneurial skills, finance and access to markets around the world.

There is no reason why Pakistan cannot follow the course India has already taken. This is where tejarat and talim - the last two words in our slogan - enter the picture.

Pakistan can create additional opportunities for the educated young in its workforce by encouraging the state and the private sector to use information and communication technologies to enhance productivity.

The development of "e-government" and "e-commerce" would help the indigenous ICT sector grow. That notwithstanding, real opportunities exist outside, mostly in developed countries.

It is estimated that some 10 million jobs in the service sector will be out-sourced to the countries that can meet the demand for the type of services that are required by the industrial world.

India, at this point, is the favoured destination for these jobs. There is no reason why Pakistan should not take a slice out of this opportunity. For that to happen, though, Pakistan will need to invest in education - talim.

Much has already been said about this subject. By now it is well-known that a series of Pakistani administrations have neglected the sectors of education, skill development and knowledge accumulation. It is still not too late to cover the gap and for the government to place emphasis on these aspects of human resource development.

In conclusion, if the revived Pakistan Muslim League is looking for a programme which could capture the attention of the people it could use nokri, ziarat, tejarat and talim as one way of doing it.

Human rights in policing

All countries, including Pakistan, are obliged, to varying degrees, by international law, to protect human rights in their area of jurisdiction. The extent to which a country "complies or fails to comply" with some of the most important legal obligations in this respect depends on the processes of law-enforcement applied, particularly on the ones executed by police agencies.

Human rights are universal, indivisible and interdependent. They are best understood as those rights enshrined in international instruments such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, regional human rights treaties and instruments dealing with specific aspects of human rights protection.

These international treaties and agreements represent commitments entered into by governments towards the people living within their jurisdiction. The rights concern the relationship between the individual and the state.

They control and regulate the exercise of "state power" over individuals, and endow the latter with freedom in relation to the state while placing requirements on the state to satisfy the basic needs of individuals.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which embodies civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights has been proclaimed as the common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations.

As an international instrument, it recognizes the ideal of human beings to enjoy freedom from fear and want that can only be achieved if conditions are created whereby the economic, social, cultural, civil and political rights of the people are respected.

This requirement of the United Nations Charter is one of the ways in which states are bound as a matter of international law to observe human rights. We assume that police officials are aware of national laws, which govern the exercise of their powers.

This is apparent in the trends of policing where the police knows the law too well. However, knowing about the law and being the law are two different things. Should our assumption be that those who are the law know the law as well? Should the exercise of power not be in accordance with protecting human rights? The emphasis is not on policing but on protecting "human rights while policing".

There is recognition of the fact that many of the interactions between the police and the public take place in the context of extremely challenging and difficult situations.

However, there is often no direct supervision of these interactions with the result that human rights rules are routinely flouted. Unfortunately, in Pakistan police officials are by and large unaware of international legal provisions that concerns them and their duties.

The absence of any training in this area has resulted in an inability to fully know the legal provisions of policing in international terms, and this must be questioned as it affects civil society when there is a poor system of checks and balances in the police force.

Awareness should be raised amongst the citizens of what they are entitled to and what they should expect from the police. It is equally important for the police administration to educate their forces - from the upper echelons to the lowest rung - so that they are made aware of and learn to respect the rights of the citizens.

The importance of policing in protecting rights and meeting standards as required by international law is a good enough reason for advocating that the international dimension to human rights protection should form part of the body of knowledge of all police officials, and certainly of those in the law-enforcement hierarchy who are responsible for educating and training the force. For this, it is important to implement a "human rights culture" within police circles.

The protection of human rights should stand alongside prevention and detection of crime, the preservation of social order, and provision of assistance in emergencies as one of the primary functions of policing.

Cry, the beloved city

So many of us came to Karachi from elsewhere and made it our home. It was the golden gate. It was not quite a one-camel town but it was not the bustling metropolis that it has become. We grew with Karachi and got attached to it and despite the lure of greener pastures, some of us had got too accustomed to its face and have stayed faithful to it.

Living in Karachi has never been easy. I made my debut as a columnist in 1955 and the first column I wrote was about rain and the havoc that a short, short shower could create. The flooding of roads, the breakdown of electricity and the telephone system. The plight of those living in jhuggis that pockmarked the city then had its own pathos, the homeless had been rendered homeless yet again.

The city continued to grow as more and more people came through the golden gate, and the city's civic problems multiplied. But something even worse was happening. Karachi was becoming a lawless city and it has been a battleground for a whole assortment of vested-interests who have taken their arguments to the streets, and the peace that was disturbed by sporadic acts of violence was replaced by perpetual violence interspersed by periods of relative calm.

Karachi is a city that lives on the edge, a neurotic city worse than Johannesburg or Nairobi whose law and order breakdown has a criminal colouring whereas Karachi's is given a political hue. It is all that more dangerous for criminal acts in the disguise of zealotry have an element of fanaticism and a warped rationalization.

Karachi has had a spate of bomb blasts that have led to the loss of many lives and injuries to many more. As if this was not bad enough, an enraged public has gone on a rampage and torched and destroyed property, hurled stones at passing vehicles and fought pitched-battles with the police and shut many parts of the city down.

This is a classic example of mob behaviour, senseless and random, and it has suited the terrorists and played into their hands. The anger should be directed at them, those who blow up mosques and other establishments. Not at one another who are, in the final analysis, the victims.

But this mob violence is a symptom of a deeper frustration, the frustration of a ghetto-mindset, of desperate lives without power and water, of a rickety transport system, not protected by the arm of the law but crushed by them.

Human rights are being violated, not in some grand fashion that alerts the media but in a myriad small ways as daily occurrences, as a toll one must pay for just being alive.

Lahore is Lahore means something. Karachi is Karachi carries no endearment. We may live in Karachi but we do so as lodgers in our own homes. The city has become a concrete jungle, and it is more than perception that land mafias work in cahoots with segments of the local administration and flout all building laws and regulations, and that skyscrapers have gone up like wild grass with no regard for zoning restrictions.

Air pollution is so foul that terrorism is not the only danger to our lives. The statistics about drug-addiction are terrifying. The list is long, a charge-sheet of callous negligence and misgovernance or no governance at all.

A day of disturbances costs Karachi one billion rupees. No cash value is attached to human lives lost nor to the climate of fear that these bomb blasts create. Who are these people or groups who have all but declared war on Karachi? It is not enough to say that they are terrorists. Terrorism covers a multitude of sins.

The Americans and their coalition partners are waging a war on terror and the enemy has been identified as Islamic militants or Jihadis. What Israel is doing to the Palestinians is called self-defence.

Bush and Blair talk of a " civilized world" and the Muslim world is excluded from it. No one is counting how many Muslim lives have been lost since 9/11. But far worse is that Muslims are beginning to kill Muslims as in Karachi, and attempts are being made to pass this off as sectarianism.

Targeting Shia and Sunni places of worship are meant to inflame passions and this attempt has not only to be foiled but defeated. Nowhere in our religion is it accepted that we should kill one another.

It is for our religious leaders to send out this message from every platform available to them. The message should be loud and clear - that Muslims killing Muslims is un-Islamic. Why are we aiding and abetting those who have imperial designs on the Muslim world?

There is talk of administrative changes. We hear this whenever there is a bomb blast and the rhetoric is raised several decibels. Past experience has shown that these are cosmetic changes, taken more to pacify an agitated public opinion than get to grips with real issues.

If there are terrorist groups in the city, we need to find them. These groups do not exist in a vacuum, they are not hiding out in some safe houses. We need to enlist the help of the people but it is important that the agencies whose job it is to ferret out these terror-groups are perceived as friends.

There has always been a disconnect between the people and law-enforcement agencies, there is no trust between them and the relationship between the two has been an adversarial one.

This cannot be changed overnight. Nothing better illustrates this than the fury of a mob that is invariably directed at the police at the first signs of trouble, as if the police is somehow responsible for a bomb blast. Where is there any sense in burning a police thana?

The highest priority must be to go after the terrorists but equal importance must be given to fostering a sense of community in Karachi that must take precedence over political rivalries. Karachi's bleeding has to be stopped. We beg to differ with Voltaire. The more it changes, the worse it gets.

Avoiding a collision course

In the present atmosphere of mistrust between the Muslims and the West, it was heart-warming to see President Bush furnish fresh proof of characteristic American candour at the White House Rose Garden on May 6.

Standing beside King Abdullah II of Jordan, he uttered the magic words with unfeigned regret: "I told him I was sorry for the humiliation suffered by the Iraqi prisoners, and the humiliation suffered by their families.

I told him I was equally sorry that people who have been seeing those pictures didn't understand the true nature and heart of America. I assured him, Americans like me didn't appreciate what we saw, that it made us sick to our stomachs."

Many Muslims who understand the "true nature and heart of America" would readily concede the veracity of the president's claim. Despite serious misgivings about US foreign policy vis-a-vis Palestine, Kashmir, Afghanistan, and the WMD search in Iraq, Muslims do not regard the US as a country to despise though they identify the US media as the unquestionable villain in presenting Muslims in an unfavourable light.

Besides the media, there are quite a few individuals who disparage Islam with unfailing zest. Remember Bill O'Reilly, Reverend Jerry Vines and Reverend Jerry Falwell who spoke against the Holy Quran, the Prophet (PBUH) and Islam.

Misleading vitriol has certainly led quite a few Americans astray and explains a lot for the ghastly acts of prison abuse committed in the Abu Ghraib prison and in Afghanistan.

The president's apology and description of prison abuse as an act of a few rather than the attitudinal pattern of the many in the US army is indeed reassuring. One hopes that in due course of time Washington will speak with the same degree of candour and fair-mindedness about other issues plaguing the world scene - Kashmir, Palestine and Chechnya. Religions should not be a divisive force to blur one's vision and sense of objectivity.

In making this claim, one is reminded of one of the inspirational edicts of Thomas Jefferson. "We have solved, by fair experiment, the great and interesting question whether freedom of religion is compatible with order in government and obedience to the laws.

And we have experienced the quiet as well as the comfort which results from leaving every one to profess freely and openly those principles of religion which are the inductions of his own reason and the serious convictions of his own inquiries." Current hard times, one hopes, would gradually pass away. The "winter of despair" should make way for a "spring of hope."

This optimism is well-founded. "The most astounding and gratifying revelation of my Islamic sojourn is the emergence of overwhelming evidence that a close kinship exists between Christianity and Islam, especially in primary literature," claims Paul Findley, Congressman for 22 years in his book Silent No More.

The entrancing country called the US has embraced men of all colours - white, black, yellow and brown - and creeds - Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus and atheists. And there appears no logical reason why people belonging to the three Abrahamic faiths and having so much in common should unnecessarily be at loggerheads.

Which brings us to the oft-debated question: are Islam and the West on a collision course? Professor Ralph Braibanti, an eminent scholar on the faculty of Duke University since 1953, makes the incisive point in his illuminating essay Islam and the West: Common Cause or Clash? An excerpt: "The ecumenical decree of Vatican Council II, Nostra Aetate (In Our Times) 1965 was a stunning repudiation of an attitude towards Islam regnant for more than half a millennium.

It erased in a few poetically elegant sentences the imagery in Dante's characterization of Mohammed ... Its newly sensitive appraisal of Islam eclipsed the somewhat less felicitous but more potentially powerful final sentence of paragraph 3: 'On behalf of all mankind, let them [Muslims and Christians] make common cause of safeguarding and fostering social justice, moral values, peace and freedom [et pro omnibus hominibus justiciam socialem, bona moralia necnon pacem et libertatem communiter tueuntur et promoveant]'.

"This is clearly an exhortation to act. The errors of the past were acknowledged, animosities were to be forgotten, and points of agreement between the two religions were portrayed without animus or condescension," writes the erudite professor.

Viewed in this context, the visit of Pope John Paul to the Ommayad Mosque in Damascus on May 6, 2001, was an event of singular importance. The pontiff said it was time to open a new chapter in relations with the Muslims.

"For all the times that Muslims and Christians have offended one another, we need to seek forgiveness from the Almighty and to offer each other forgiveness. Better understanding will surely lead to a new way of presenting our two religions, not in opposition as has happened too often in the past, but in partnership for the good of the human family," he said.

The partnership or the "way forward", as well-known scholar Prof Akbar Ahmed calls it, is achievable by way of initiating a dialogue between the two civilizations - the West and the Muslim world. Conciliation, not confrontation, would yield tangible results. The West should be seized of the fact that it too is obliged to build "bridges of understanding" with the Muslim world.

It must evolve a long-term strategy to interact with the Muslim nation, a strategy that should not be driven by interests of the corporate world or the multinationals, trading empires in their own right.

"The West needs to respond to the Muslim world firstly by listening to what Muslims are saying and secondly by trying to understand Islam. With some patience and understanding the general desire to assist the Muslim world will take shape.

The West must send serious signals to the ordinary Muslim people - via the media, through seminars, conferences, meetings - that it does not consider Islam to be the enemy, however much it may disagree with certain aspects of Muslim behavior," says Dr Ahmed.

George Sarton's monumental work delineating the history of sciences testifies to the rich contribution of Muslims to various disciplines. Not surprisingly, many Western historians concede ungrudgingly that the roots of western civilization lie in the Islamic civilization.

What is more, in the United States today the seven million Muslims inhabiting the country have made their mark in various fields. Compared to an average American, Muslim Americans are better educated: 58 per cent Muslims are college graduates.

They have a yearly income of $50,000 and have made successful inroads in four fields: religion (there are more than 2,000 Islamic centres and mosques in the US), education, ethnic media and public advocacy.

According to Paul Findley, Muslims have remarkable attainments in higher education. Ba-Yunus summarizes an unpublished study showing that employed Muslims in the 20 to 40 age group averaged three years of college - two years more than the national average. The middle and upper brackets with a median of $39,700 strikingly high for a group that includes many recent immigrants.

US Muslims are prominent in engineering, business administration, medicine, finance, accounting, electronics, science and education, as well as retail establishments. Egyptian-born Ahmed Zewail, 53, a professor at the California Institute of Technology in Los Angeles, received the 1999 Nobel Prize in chemistry for his development of a high-speed camera that can monitor chemical reactions at one quadrillionth of a second and record the motion of atoms.

Chief executive officers of major industries who are Muslims include Safi Qureshey of AST Computers, Ray Irani of Occidental Petroleum, and Farooq Kathwari of Ethen Allen Furniture Company. Among Muslim notables are six professors and internationally acclaimed political scientists.

Prior to September 11, Muslim Americans were on the march. They must recapture their momentum with renewed zest. There is a message for them in an observation of George Washington: "True friendship is a plant of slow growth, and must undergo and withstand the shocks of adversity before it is entitled to the appellation".

The author is editor of Pakistan Link, US.

The sovereignty charade

The White House's Iraq falsehood factory went into overdrive recently trumpeting claims the new "caretaker government" the UN had supposedly just installed in Baghdad was "fully sovereign" and "totally independent."

We would like to believe America's president. But this latest claim comes from the same truth-deficient people who concocted Iraq's imminent threat to destroy the US with nuclear and germ weapons, Saddam's vans and drones of death, Saddam's tryst with bin Laden, and a cascade of other preposterous fictions that would have made Nazi propaganda minister Dr Joseph Gobbles blush deep crimson.

The latest US-authored regime-change in Iraq was a political charade designed to soothe uneasy American voters who are increasingly alarmed by the aimlessness, mounting casualties, and $186 billion cost - as much as the Vietnam War at its height - of the Iraq misadventure.

The White House dreads the oncoming national uproar when the number of American soldiers killed in Iraq hits 1,000. It desperately needs to show some light at the end of the Iraq tunnel before November elections.

So it arm-twisted the UN's dismayingly weak Secretary General Kofi Annan into allowing his organization to be crudely misused to legitimize continuing US-British occupation of Iraq by supposedly selecting candidates for the new "sovereign" regime. In the end, Washington chose its own men and simply ignored the UN after it provided the required fig leaf.

The result: Iraq's new regime, installed under the guns of US tanks, makes the former Soviet Union's Eastern European satellite states look like paragons of unfettered independence.

Off-the-shelf CIA "asset", Iyad Allawi, was made strongman-prime minister - just like Afghanistan's US-installed figurehead Hamid Karzai, another CIA old boy. Iraq's defence and interior ministries will also be run by other US "assets".

Some 160 US senior American "advisors" will supervise all key ministries, notably defence, police, finance, communications and a new, CIA-trained secret police. All the US billions currently funding Iraq, and overall control of oil revenues, will be managed by a special US "advisory and monitoring board." France long ran its nominally independent West African colonies in a similar manner.

By comparison, after the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979, they left the newly installed regime considerably more independence of action than the US is giving its Iraqi satraps.

The supreme law of the Arab World: the men with the guns make the law. Iraq's new puppet regime has no soldiers, only some useless police. Real power will of course be held by 140,000 US troops who will stay on, Washington says, to "guarantee security" and "fight terrorism."

The Bush administration suggests its troops will be withdrawn in 2006, unless the next US-engineered Iraqi regime, due to be "elected" next year, "invites" them to stay on. Meanwhile, the Pentagon is building from six to 14 permanent military bases in Iraq, while major US firms are being encouraged to buy up Iraqi industrial assets on the cheap.

Next year's Iraq elections, if held, will hardly reflect the nation's will Islamic, pro-Iranian, Nasserite, and Baathist parties will be banned. Only pro-US groups need apply.

This means that today's bunch of collaborating exiles, political nobodies, and Kurds are likely to form Iraq's next "elected" regime. In short, a shadow regime whose independence and sovereignty may be limited to garbage collection and dog catching - the same bantustan-type formula Israel offered Palestinians.

The big decisions - military, internal security, oil, banking, industry, foreign relations, bases - will be decided by the real government, the US Embassy and Iraq's American "advisors."

Some members of Iraq's new, American-engineered regime will eventually seek more independence from US control. But they will vividly recall how the last puppet rulers of British-controlled Iraq, King Feisal and strongman Nuri as-Said, were overthrown in 1958, and hanged from lampposts.

The moment members of Iraq's current US-installed regime begins showing too much independence, they will be quietly replaced, or threatened by denial of US security protection, leaving them to facing their hostile, angry people.

Two acid tests will determine whether any Iraqi regime is truly sovereign and independent of US control: the ability to order all US forces out of Iraq; and reaffirmation of Iraq's active support of the Palestinian cause.

Anything less means Iraq remains an American colony, all the Bush administration's fancy doubletalk notwithstanding.

-Copyright Eric S. Margolis 2004.