Is It Really Coming Right?

摘要

It should be momentous. In Baghdad in the middle of this week, after fierce debate, an overnight delay and protests on the streets, Iraq's fractious parliament at last voted to approve a withdrawal agreement with the United States, under which all American troops will leave the country by the end of 2011. And yet the mood of this exhausted country is far from jubilant.rnIn Mosul, 320km (200 miles) north of Baghdad up the Tigris river, the governor of Nineveh province, Doraid Kashmoula, furrows his brow, fiddles with his worry-beads in one hand, stubs out yet another cigarette with the other and reels off a litany of woe in his dankly curtained office. The scion of a prominent Sunni Arab family, he took the job two years ago after his predecessor, his cousin, was assassinated.