IRAQ NEWS, SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 16, 2003 I. KANAN MAKIYA, OUR HOPES BETRAYED, OBSERVER, FEB 16 II. IRAQI OPPOSITION SLAMS US PLAN, OBSERVER, FEB 16
I. KANAN MAKIYA, OUR HOPES BETRAYED Our hopes betrayed How a US blueprint for post-Saddam government quashed the hopes of democratic Iraqis. Kanan Makiya 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 II. IRAQI OPPOSITION SLAMS US PLAN Iraqi opposition slams plan for military governor Luke Harding, Sulaymaniyah, northern Iraq Sunday February 16, 2003 The Observer A leading figure in Iraq's opposition last night rounded on American plans to install a US military governor in Baghdad to rule post-war Iraq, describing the plans as an 'unmitigated disaster', 'deeply stupid' and a 'mess'. In an interview with The Observer, Kanan Makiya, an adviser to Iraq's main opposition group, the Iraqi National Congress, said America now appeared to have dumped its commitment to bring Western-style democracy to Iraq. Instead, under pressure from Saudi Arabia and the Arab Gulf states, Washington was preparing to leave Iraq under the control of President Saddam Hussein's Baath Party. 'This would be an unmitigated disaster for the long-term relationship between the US and the Iraqi people,' he said. 'The Iraqi opposition is going to become anti-American the day after liberation. It is a great irony.' Iraq's democratic opposition parties are meeting this week in Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq to finalise plans for a transitional government. But their vision of a post-Saddam administration is deeply at odds with proposals set out last week by President George Bush's special envoy to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad - and apparently endorsed by the Foreign Office. Under the plan a US military governor would rule post-war Iraq for up to a year. The infrastructure of Saddam's ruling Baath party would remain largely intact, with the top two officials in each Iraqi ministry replaced by US military officers. 'The plan is bizarre. It is Baathism with an American face,' said Makiya, an Iraqi author and professor at Brandeis University in Massachusetts. The country needed to undergo a process of 'de-Baathification' similar to the de-Nazification of post-war Germany, he added. The White House has been badly stung by Makiya's criticism, and urged him last week not to publish a hostile opinion piece, arguing it would be 'counter-productive'. The Observer today prints his article in full. Yesterday the chairman of the Iraqi National Congress, Ahmad Chalabi, who many people had expected to become Iraq's new president, also derided Washington's proposals. 'The vision of having US military officers three deep in every ministry is not workable,' he told The Observer . Chalabi, who lives in London, said demonstrators who attended anti-war protests across Britain yesterday were misguided. 'I would urge them to think again,' he said. 'War is a horrible thing to wish on anyone. But I firmly believe that the Iraqi people want the US to get rid of Saddam. Blair is doing the right thing.' Chalabi was especially scathing of the German government, which he said was led by 'ageing German leftists wishing to absolve their conscience at the expense of the Iraqi people'. It was Germany which had supplied Saddam with chemical weapons in the 1980s, he pointed out. The Pentagon and the vice-president Dick Cheney are broadly in favour of introducing Western-style democracy to Iraq but the State Department under Colin Powell and the CIA believe it could have a destabilising influence on the region. Iraq's neighbours, Saudi Arabia and Turkey, are also vehemently opposed to any federal arrangement that gives power to Iraq's Kurds or Shiites. Chalabi said he was dismayed that the British government apparently endorsed a plan that would leave the minority Sunni elite, which has run Iraq for decades, in power, even though most of Iraq's 23 million inhabitants are Shiite. The Iraqi opposition is also deeply suspicious of an agreement between Washington and Turkey that will see thousands of Turkish troops enter northern Iraq, ostensibly for humanitarian purposes. Turkey, with its own disaffected Kurdish population, wants its military to occupy northern Iraq to prevent Kurdish groups from seizing the oil-rich northern city of Kirkuk and proclaiming an autonomous Kurdish homeland. The two Kurdish parties which have controlled a mountainous enclave of northern Iraq since 1991 insist that they want only a regional government. It now seems that their militias will play virtually no role in liberating Iraq and that, following pressure from Washington, they will leave the job to the American military. An Iraqi opposition conference scheduled for this week has so far been delayed three times, with Washington making it clear it regards the meeting as an unhelpful distraction. Khalilzad has now reluctantly agreed to turn up. Chalabi said opponents in Britain of a US-led war in Iraq preferred to ignore the brutal reality of Saddam's regime. 'There is a strong streak of anti-Americanism in Britain and Europe that blinds them.'
