Dashed expectations

With the official end of their military mission the US have left a country full of dashed hopes, the liberal conservative Neue Zürcher Zeitung writes, pointing to the troubled province of Diyala: "With its population mix of Sunnis and Shiites, Arabs, Kurds and Turkmens, Diyala is a mirror of the religious and ethnic diversity of Iraq, as well as of its murderous conflicts. ... According to the local authorities a third of Diyala's roughly 1.2 million inhabitants have no access to drinking water. The reasons are many for the misery - the war and terror of recent years, a former regime that preferred to invest in weapons rather than in water mains, the prolonged UN embargo, the Americans whose planning was sometimes at odds with the situation on the ground, and a government that loves to present pretty strategies but is hardly able to put them into practice."

» more information (external link, German)
More from the press review on the subject » Security Policy / Crises / War, » Domestic Policy, » U.S., » Iraq