Iyad Allawi, the newly installed prime minister of Iraq, was the perfect choice for the Bush administration: connected enough to be a puppet, detested enough to be a scapegoat.

A CIA and MI6 informant for the past 25 years, Allawi was responsible for British Prime Minister Tony Blair's main selling point in his charge to war - that Saddam Hussein could launch an attack with weapons of mass destruction in under 45 minutes.

Of course, no such weapons were to be found in Iraq. Then again, neither was Allawi - he spent most of his adult life loafing as a doctor in London.

When Iraqis were polled in May for their opinions on 17 prominent political figures, Allawi was the second-least popular of the group. More than 40 percent of the now-"sovereign" people of Iraq said they had grave doubts about his ability to run the country, primarily because of his long-term fidelity to the U.S.

The only person to rank lower than Allawi is Ghazi al-Yawer, who was appointed president of Iraq on the same day.

In fact, had the person the U.S. and U.N. agreed would have final say over the selection process - U.N. special envoy Lakhdar Brahimi - even been at the secret meeting in which U.S. officials crowned Allawi, he wouldn't have been appointed at all - Brahimi opposed selecting someone who had been hand-picked by the U.S. to sit on its interim governing council.

But at least we're now finally free to leave the boggy battlefield, right? Well, yes - if "we" means "high-ranking U.S. officials," as the Bush administration seems to think.

The 140,000 U.S. servicemen and women still in Iraq will have to remain there indefinitely, long after their terms of service have expired.

In fact, with the number of U.S. troops in the country steadily increasing, the Bush administration has taken the dramatic step of calling up recently discharged and retired soldiers.

It seems that the "great hope" Bush referred to on the day of the transfer of power was nothing more than another empty promise.

As we reflect this week on our nation's own independence and the values we pay tribute to with fireworks and flags, we must also reflect on the brand of "freedom" we have brought to Iraq.

It is not, as FDR so famously emphasized in his wartime plea to Congress, freedom from want or freedom from fear. Nor is it freedom from arbitrary arrest, brutal torture, unprovoked attack, collateral slaughter or occupation.

It is not even, as evidenced by Allawi's selection, the freedom to choose one's leaders or have a voice in the way one's country is governed.

The sad state of the world today is that the only people who have the power to create have been bombed, brainwashed or otherwise bridled by those who have only the power to destroy.

And as the poor here are shipped overseas to fight the poor of the world in wars of conquest, the great country we pay tribute to - America, the beautiful - suffers.