NEWSPAPER COLUMNS
 ¶ Most Recent
¶ Miscellany
|
COMMENTARY
July 16, 2003
State of Iraq
Canadians love a constitutional problem so let me risk losing all my foreign readers while expounding something only a Canadian could enjoy. The foreigners must understand that we love this kind of thing so intensely that it simply has to be indulged. But I shall try to keep it brief. Iraq this ancient land of Mesopotamia of Sumer Babylonia and Assyria is immortal at least in earthly terms but "states" come and go. Even within the same boundaries that the British drew eight decades ago Iraq has now become a new state with a provisional government. It is necessarily a federation for those boundaries contain all or parts of at least three quite distinct "countries". Countries are invariably older than states: the Kurds for instance occupy a zone that anciently housed Assyrians (who remember this) but also Hittites Lydians Phrygians and many others formerly known to schoolchildren in various combinations coming down from the plateau of Anatolia and the various Turkic Persic Mongolian peoples arriving from the mountains on the other side. The Kurds themselves appear to be the almost lineal descendents of the ancient Medes who started out somewhere to the east. They live today spread over adjacent zones in Turkey and Iran. I mention all this in case anyone with a boundary pen is getting ideas; the racial religious and cultural history of the rest of Iraq is equally complex. Political and historical geography are a fascinating but unloosing tangle; it is as well that we invented "states" with boundaries that cut each Gordian knot. The peoples trapped within the boundaries will make or break their arranged marriage. In the case of Iraq we have yet to see if they can practically live together. Previous tyrannies have prevented us from finding out. Iraq's new 25-member governing council though formally appointed by the American "proconsul" Paul Bremer has really formed itself in a promising way. It contains representatives of all the leading factions both regional and ideological and they negotiated with each other over the composition in Mr. Bremer's helpful presence. Fifteen of the 25 were former exiles a usefully Saddam-free plurality; 13 of the 25 are Shia Muslims; there are three women. Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress the previously exiled umbrella group for Iraqi democrats appears to be in the driver's seat; in my opinion his followers have the clearest idea how to make Iraq work. But all the big names are there -- the principal contenders to future party leaderships -- except the claimant of Iraq's defunct throne. This council has already acted on the primary symbolic questions: domestically by declaring April 9th the day the U.S. troops took Baghdad as the zero-date and thus the U.S. invasion as the "deus ex machina" for the new constitutional order. This established the revolutionary break from the previous regime. Externally the council has also applied to occupy Iraq 's empty U.N. seat which would allow other states to recognize that the Saddam regime is definitively gone; and thus force all foreign state enemies of the new Iraqi regime to formally expose themselves. These are the crucial starting points from which the new constitutional order must be built: "We are here; you are there." Saddam's Iraqi army having been destroyed and a new Iraqi army needing time and care to build for the immediate future the U.S. military must provide the guarantee of this regime's authority and integrity. The authority will build through the creation of a constitutional convention beginning in September and finally be expressed in free elections. But as the world must recognize -- and Canada could take the lead at the U.N. -- this and no other "ruling council" presently speaks for Iraq and its alliance with the U.S. occupation is voluntary. Thus anyone who attacks the U.S. military in Iraq is also attacking the legitimate Iraqi state. The new state has four real enemies: secular Saddamite terrorists Shia Hizbollah terrorists Sunni Wahabi terrorists and dreamers. Their respective centres are in Iraq itself in the ayatollah's Iran (though operating chiefly through Syria) in the Saudi Arabia that begat Al Qaeda and everywhere and anywhere that people oppose the U.S. presence in Iraq without offering a sound and practical alternative. In theory at least the Saddamites are true dead-enders and the Saudis are trying to prevent Wahabi subversion of the new Iraq by fighting Al Qaeda domestically. In practice the latter situation is extremely ambiguous though by small increments the Bush administration believes the House of Saud is indeed coming around to putting its money where its mouth is. One way or another the threat to Iraq and to the world of the terrorism borne of Wahabi fanaticism is being progressively isolated. This leaves Iran where I believe it is now safe to say that the "student's revolution" (or rather counter-revolution against the ayatollahs' "Islamic revolution") has faltered. The reality of a nuclear-armed as well as terrorist-sponsoring Iranian regime is now upon us. The inevitability of mutual subversion between a democratic U.S.-allied Iraq and a theocratic Iran is part of this reality. The two countries were at war through 1980-88 and it is not inconceivable that they will be again. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
|
Top