This Occupation is a Disaster. The US Must Leave - and Fast
'Along with humiliation over defeat and anger at the postwar chaos, resentment over colonization is on the rise. People point to the fact that the oil ministry was the only government office in Baghdad that the US did not bomb and protected from looters by planting a ring of troops around it on day one of "liberation". Episodes like the massacre in Mosul when on two consecutive days last week US troops fired into crowds of protesters have classic imperial overtones and feel like the foretaste of greater repression to come.

'In the vacuum of power the mosques are emerging as the main source of resistance. The good news is that far from confronting each other, Sunni and Shia clerics and worshippers are uniting behind a common agenda. Many are fundamentalists but Iraq's progressive secular forces say this is not the primary issue at this stage. "What we're faced with today is not a choice between secularism and religion. We're facing an invasion and foreign rule. We have to work together to end it," says Dr Wamid Omar Nadmi, a leading political scientist at Baghdad university.'

This Occupation is a Disaster. The US Must Leave - and Fast
'Along with humiliation over defeat and anger at the postwar chaos, resentment over colonization is on the rise. People point to the fact that the oil ministry was the only government office in Baghdad that the US did not bomb and protected from looters by planting a ring of troops around it on day one of "liberation". Episodes like the massacre in Mosul when on two consecutive days last week US troops fired into crowds of protesters have classic imperial overtones and feel like the foretaste of greater repression to come.

'In the vacuum of power the mosques are emerging as the main source of resistance. The good news is that far from confronting each other, Sunni and Shia clerics and worshippers are uniting behind a common agenda. Many are fundamentalists but Iraq's progressive secular forces say this is not the primary issue at this stage. "What we're faced with today is not a choice between secularism and religion. We're facing an invasion and foreign rule. We have to work together to end it," says Dr Wamid Omar Nadmi, a leading political scientist at Baghdad university.'