Arrogance of a superpower

What Ike Skelton is really proposing is that the Iraqi people pay for the cost of rebuilding what has been destroyed by the United States. We're not meant to flinch when politicians talk of making Iraqis pay for their own enslavement. On the contrary, we're supposed to get indignant over the fact that the Iraqis aren't cooperating.

The response of Abdul Basit, the head of Iraq's independent auditing organization, was entirely appropriate. "America has hardly even begun to repay its debt to Iraq," Basit said. "This is an immoral request because we didn't ask them to come to Iraq, and before they came in 2003, we didn't have all these needs."