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COMMENTARY
June 2, 2004
A sovereign Iraq
Yesterday in defiance of all pessimists Iraq resumed its life as a sovereign country in a manner no one outside Iraq has the right to gainsay. We have a secular Shia prime minister (Iyad Alawi) and a ceremonial Sunni President (Ghazi al-Yawar). Both are acceptable to all reasonable parties including the United States. We have a ministry of all the talents such as they are: with every available regional ethnic and religious affiliation. The formal transfer of power from Paul Bremer's occupation authority to the new Iraqi government waits till the end of the month but with the self-dissolution of the interim Iraqi Governing Council we have witnessed an effective transfer. From now on American advisers won't be running Iraqi ministries -- won't dare try -- and allied troops on the ground will be consulting Iraqis before launching new raids on assorted bad guys. Best of all the region's governments including nefarious Iran and Syria (up to their eyeballs fomenting trouble within Iraq) will know it's too late to sabotage the hand-off -- because it has already occurred by surprise ahead of deadline. No one else will say this so I will. The Bush administration has handled the transfer of power in Iraq more cleverly than anyone expected including me. The summoning of the U.N. envoy Lakhdar Brahimi looked like very bad news (a poisonous old Arab League chauvinist who brokered the sell-out of Lebanon to Syria in 1982). In grim moments I believed the Bush people were cynically using him to wash their hands of Iraq and as it were dump the quagmire back in the swamp of the U.N. Instead they froze the ground beneath Brahimi's feet and skated rings around him haggling behind his back with Iraq's new political heavyweights to leave him endorsing a fait accompli. If it were not vulgar I would say the Bushies suckered the U.N. into signing on to the New Iraq through Brahimi. A sovereign free Iraq which will incidentally have a few things to say about the U.N.'s $100-billion "oil-for-food" scam in due course. Will this new Iraq be plausibly democratic? Too soon to count chickens. An Iraqi government that includes all non-violent factions with or without elections is already better than that for which we could have plausibly hoped. Elections on top of this will be gravy. That self-dissolved Governing Council seems to have served its purpose as a public incubator of a new Iraqi political class wonderfully unlike those in adjoining countries. The Americans have moreover done a superb job of playing politics intra-Iraqis: a job of horse-trading beyond anything achieved by British imperialists in the past. I didn't agree with all the dirty tricks (and especially not with the CIA's unconscionable settling of accounts with Ahmed Chalabi getting the Iraqis to raid his headquarters to bring him down to size) but we have a presentably benign government at the end of the day. Real praise ought to be showered on the Iraqis. This new political class -- consisting of returned Sunni and Shia exiles Kurds tribal lords Shia clerical henchmen and the odd semi-halal Baath-party "technocrat" has proved capable of forming workable coalitions whenever something has had to be achieved. If you read your history of American constitutional wranglings in the 18th-century you will appreciate how far they came in how little time. Can they stand up to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's Wahabi terrorists and Muqtada al-Sadr's Shia blackshirts? Yes with continuing American help. These are every bit as much America's enemies as Saddam Hussein was and I daresay the U.S. Marines will continue to oblige. They have done a magnificent job of reducing the numbers of psychopaths loose in Fallujah Najaf Kufa and elsewhere for much too little praise. On the ground in Iraq it is obvious from the range of sources the Western media do not bother with that things are still going exceedingly well. There are more than 8 000 municipalities in Iraq and serious violence in only five or six. Free elections for local governments have taken place or probably will in most of the others. The foreign troops are already out of sight and out of mind in much of the country where crops are growing generators are humming and people are going about their lives. My philosophy is we do not know what tomorrow will bring so let us celebrate today. Iraqis Americans allies and all men of goodwill have reason to be happy about what has been accomplished in Iraq. Pray pray it continues. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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