From: adario (adario_at_thingsburnup.com)
Date: 2003-02-19 16:48:00
sorry for the off-topic post but this article truly confirms bush's
sincerity,
aaron dario
http://www.observer.co.uk/iraq/story/0,12239,896611,00.html
Our Hopes Betrayed
How a US blueprint for post-Saddam government quashed the hopes of
democratic Iraqis.
Kanan Makiya
http://www.augustana.edu/leadership/makiyabio.html
Sunday February 16, 2003
The Observer
The United States is on the verge of committing itself to a post-Saddam plan
for a military government in Baghdad with Americans appointed to head Iraqi
ministries, and American soldiers to patrol the streets of Iraqi cities.
The plan, as dictated to the Iraqi opposition in Ankara last week by a
United States-led delegation, further envisages the appointment by the US of
an unknown number of Iraqi quislings palatable to the Arab countries of the
Gulf and Saudi Arabia as a council of advisers to this military government.
The plan reverses a decade-long moral and financial commitment by the US to
the Iraqi opposition, and is guaranteed to turn that opposition from the
close ally it has always been during the 1990s into an opponent of the
United States on the streets of Baghdad the day after liberation.
The bureaucrats responsible for this plan are drawn from those parts of the
administration that have always been hostile to the idea of a US-assisted
democratic transformation of Iraq, a transformation that necessarily
includes such radical departures for the region as the de-Baathification of
Iraq (along the lines of the de-Nazification of post-war Germany), and the
redesign of the Iraqi state as a non-ethnically based federal and democratic
entity.
The plan is the brainchild of the would-be coup-makers of the CIA and their
allies in the Department of State, who now wish to achieve through direct
American control over the people of Iraq what they so dismally failed to
achieve on the ground since 1991.
Its driving force is appeasement of the existing bankrupt Arab order, and
ultimately the retention under a different guise of the repressive
institutions of the Baath and the army. Hence its point of departure is, and
has got to be, use of direct military rule to deny Iraqis their legitimate
right to self-determine their future. In particular it is a plan designed to
humiliate the Kurdish people of Iraq and their experiment of self-rule in
northern Iraq of the last 10 years, an experiment made possible by the
protection granted to the Kurds by the United States itself. That protection
is about to be lifted with the entry into northern Iraq of much-feared
Turkish troops (apparently not under American command), infamous throughout
the region for their decades-long hostility to Kurdish aspirations.
All of this is very likely to turn into an unmitigated disaster for a
healthy long-term and necessarily special relationship between the United
States and post-Saddam Iraq, something that virtually every Iraqi not
complicit in the existing Baathist order wants.
I write as someone personally committed to that relationship. Every word
that I have committed to paper in the last quarter of a century is, in one
way or another, an application of the universal values that I have absorbed
from many years of living and working in the West to the very particular
conditions of Iraq. The government of the United States is about to betray,
as it has done so many times in the past, those core human values of
self-determination and individual liberty.
We Iraqis hoped and said to our Arab and Middle Eastern brethren, over and
over again, that American mistakes of the past did not have to be repeated
in the future. Were we wrong? Are the enemies of a democratic Iraq, the
'anti-imperialists' and 'anti-Zionists' of the Arab world, the supporters of
'armed struggle', and the upholders of the politics of blaming everything on
the US who are dictating the agenda of the anti-war movement in Europe and
the US, are all of these people to be proved right?
Is the President who so graciously invited me to his Oval Office only a few
weeks ago to discuss democracy, about to have his wishes subverted by
advisers who owe their careers to those mistakes?
We, the democratic Iraqi opposition, are the natural friends and allies of
the United States. We share its values and long-term goals of peace,
stability, freedom and democracy for Iraq. We are here in Iraqi Kurdistan 40
miles from Saddam's troops and a few days away from a conference to plan our
next move, a conference that some key administration officials have done
everything in their power to postpone.
None the less, after weeks of effort in Tehran and northern Iraq, we have
prevailed. The meeting will take place. It will discuss a detailed plan for
the creation of an Iraqi leadership, one that is in a position to assume
power at the appropriate time and in the appropriate place. We will be
opposed no doubt by an American delegation if it chooses to attend. Whether
or not they do join us in the coming few days in northern Iraq, we will
fight their attempts to marginalise and shunt aside the men and women who
have invested whole lifetimes, and suffered greatly, fighting Saddam
Hussein.
To the President who so clearly wants to see a democratic Iraq, and to the
American public that put its trust in him, I say: support us.
Kanan Makiya is professor of Middle East studies at Brandeis University,
Massachusetts