.Bulletin de liaison et d'information - Institut kurde de Paris

Revue de Presse-Press Review-Berhevoka Çapê-Rivista Sfampa-Dentro de la Prensa-Baszn Özeti
~ Our hopes betrayed
~ How a US blueprint for post -Saddam government quashed
~ the hopes of democratic Iraqis
GoI
't
~
.~ :Kanan Makiya
~
THE UNITED STATES is on the verge of
committing itselfto 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 oppo- ,
sition 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.
A Kurdish
fighter guards
Iraqi refugees
south of Erbil in
'northern Iraq.
Kanan Makiya
calls the opposition
'natural
allies ofthe US' .
Photographby
Abdullah
.ZaheeriJddin/
Getty
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 ' KananMakiya
American control over the people of Iraq isprofessorof
what they so dismally failed to achieve MiddleEast
on the groUnd since 1991.
studiesat Bran-
Its driving foree is appeasement of the d
existing bankrupt Arab order, and uiti- eis University,
, Massachusetts
Dlatelythe r~t_eEtion tinder a diffe!ent
guise of the repressiv'e ins,titutions of the
Baath and the army. Hence its point of .
depart~re is, and ha!l~got to' be, I,1seof
direct mili.~ary rule ~ri;(teriyIr9-Qis'theit:
legitimatë' righttöself-determine their
future. In partiCl,Ùarit is a plan designed
to hu1Îliiiate the Kurdish people oflraq about'to betray, as it häs done so many
and their experiment of self-rule in hmes in the past, those core human valnorthern
Iraq of the last 10 years, an ues of self-determination and individual
experi.ment made possible by the protec- liberty.
tion granted to the Kurds by the United We Iraqis hoped and said to our Arab
States itself. That protection is about to and Middle Eastern brethren, over and
b\'llifted with the entry into northernover again, that American mistakeS of
Iraq of much-fearedTurkish troops the past did not have to be repeated in
(apparently,not under American com-the future. Were we wrong? Are the enemand),
infamous throughout the region mies of a democratic Iraq, the 'anti-impef~r
thei~ de~ades-Iong hostility to Kur-
' riaJtsts' and 'anti-Zionists'
dISh aspIratIOns. . of lhe Arab world the
Al~~fthis is .very likely to turn into an supporters of 'a;med
unmltigated disast~r for a ~ealthy l?llg- ~truggle'. ~nd the upholdte~
and necessan~y specIal relatlOn- ers ofthe politics ofblamshrp
between ~heUmted States and post- ing everything on the US
Saddain Iiaq, something niat virtually who are dictating the
every Iraqi not complicit in the existing agenda of the anti-war
, Baathist order wants. movement in Europe and
, I write as someone personally com- ,the US, are all of these
'mttted to that relationship, Every word people to be proved right?
that I have committed to paper in the Is the President who so
last quarter of a century is, inone way or' '
graCiously invited me to
another, an application ofthe universal
his OvalOffice only a few
values that I have absorbed from many weeks ago to discuss
years ofliving and working in the West
democracy; about to have
to the very particular conditions ofIraq. his wishes subverted by
The government ofthe United States is
'.
advisers who owe their
careers to those mistakes?
48