By that logic, the United States government, or any other government with a powerful military for that matter, can destroy any functional state, create a mess, become a belligerent occupier, and continue the occupation on the pretext that now there is no functional state because it destroyed it.
In any case, no one but Iraqis themselves is capable of unifying the nation of Iraq and building a new state that enjoys legitimacy in the eyes of the majority of the Iraqi people. The process of nation-building and state-building will not be pretty -- the United States itself, before creating a functioning republican government not controlled by slave-owners, had to fight two bloody wars: the American Revolution and the Civil War, the wars held up by many Americans as shining examples of noble struggles for liberty, rather than as arguments in favor of the British Empire's hold on North America. -- Yoshie
* Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> * Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>