[Peace-discuss] Iraq after war

[Dlind49 at aol.com]

How a US blueprint for post-Saddam government quashed the hopes of democratic 
Iraqis.     
        
                Kanan Makiya
Sunday    February  16, 2003
<A HREF="http://www.observer.co.uk">The Observer</A>        
        
              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. 
&#183; Kanan Makiya is professor of Middle East studies at Brandeis 
University, Massachusetts