Meanwhile, back in our splendid little war
Pen and Sword wrote something about the Coward in Chief's aggressive war against Iraq this morning, primarily about how it's dumber than rocks to assume that beefing up the regular army would do, well, anything to make the situation better. The lede to this article was a snippet from a NYTimes article describing payroll problems for the mercenary army that the B*sh junta hired to operate the Baghdad airport. Apparently, they've not been paid for a while. Six months worth of a while, to be precise.
So, they did what you'd expect any heavily armed mercenary army would do in this situation: they shut down the airport. It's only the Baghdad airport, so it's not as if they were cutting off any civilian flights, but there are still military supply flights coming into the airport because it's only about 10 miles away from the Imperial compound in downtown Baghdad. But that's not the interesting part of the article. No, the interesting part of the article is
...The shutdown on Friday nearly led to a standoff between American military forces and Iraqi soldiers when United States forces rushed to the airport to prevent Iraqi troops from taking it over, according to Iraqi officials and the security company....
Remember, Iraq is supposed to have a sovereign government. So if Iraqi troops show up at an airport owned by the Iraqi government, you'd naturally assume that if they wanted the airport they'd get the airport. But, no, the US military comes to the aid of the mercenaries instead.
If it was a satire, it would be pretty funny, but it's the real world. Apparently the "sovereign" Iraqi government is legitimate enough to strip essential civil liberties from half of the people of Iraq (via the so-called Islamic sharia laws), but it's not legitimate enough to be allowed into ports.