BEIRUT, Lebanon — The terror attacks in London and Egypt and Condoleezza Rice’s visit to the Arab region last week slightly diverted focus from events in Iraq. Nonetheless, Iraq remains the place to watch if you want to see all the key problems and opportunities that define the whole Middle East. How Iraqis resolve their major fault lines and national challenges will have a huge impact on trends throughout the region.
This is why it is so important for Iraq to move as fast as possible towards stability, security, sovereignty and viable statehood, which can only happen with a coherent withdrawal of American, British and other foreign forces that occupy, administer, and try to reshape the country. But a unilateral withdrawal of Anglo-American forces seems unlikely to happen soon, because of both issues of honor and practical impact. Leaving in the face of the current sustained resistance and terror attacks throughout the country would be an Anglo-American admission of defeat.
Defeat through withdrawal is not within the realm of the possible in the Blair-Bush world, where Marlboro Man marries Thomas Jefferson and John Locke, and a Divine, eternal wind disperses their children throughout the world to spread freedom and democracy — even if the kids sometimes have to move around the globe in F-16 bombers and Humvee troop carriers.
Such are the bizarre rules of the violent game that is played by democratically elected leaders in lands of liberty, where foreign policy in the Middle East particularly — unconstrained by the noble rules of the domestic realm — is fuelled by a tragic combination of arrogance, ignorance and ordnance. Iraq today is the result.
It is critically important for all concerned to grow up, and act like adults. The moment is treacherous for Iraq, the entire Middle East and much of the Western world. Contemporary Iraq and its consequences — both the vile despotism of the former Baath regime and the intellectual and political gangsterism of the Anglo-American-led war and its consequent spiral of random violence — are not restricted to the land of ancient Mesopotamia. Instability, fear, terror, uncertainty, disinvestments, and stagnation plague us all.
How to bring Iraq back to normalcy and decency, for its own people above all, is not mainly an issue of ensuring security or promoting democracy, as the cartoon-like mainstream of Anglo-American foreign policy and mass media would have it. Beyond the needed security, Iraq reflects ugly but urgent Arab realities. The removal of Iraq’s “bad guy” Baathist regime in 2003 suddenly exposed underlying fault lines, tensions and fractures that plague all other Arab societies, where they remain shamefully unaddressed.
Iraq and this whole region are challenged to deal with a series of dichotomies that must be defined, and balances that must be agreed upon, by the local population, whether those people see themselves as citizens of a sovereign state, members of a tribe, adherents of a faith, carriers of a certain ethnicity, or just residents of a neighborhood or region.
Some of the key unanswered questions and undefined balances that must be resolved by all Arabs, not by foreign viceroys or colonels, are the following:
* the balance between:
* secularism and religiosity;
* democracy and stability;
* Arabism and other ethnicities;
* central state power in the capital and the self-rule demands of outlying
provinces;
* Sunni and Shi’a Islams;
* Islam and other faiths;
* state authority and individual citizen rights;
* indigenous sovereignty and the interests of foreign military powers;
* self-contained national Iraqi interests and the parallel, related interests
of neighboring powers;
* the rights of men and women as prescribed by religion, tribalism, local
tradition and constitutionalism;
* a commitment to Arab national issues and responding to Israeli-Zionist
demands;
* collective security and personal freedoms;
* the forces of the free market and the guiding hand of the state;
* corrupt officials and transparent, accountable governance;
* the force of local militia, friendly thugs and institutionalized political
gangs, and the rule of law; and,
* the citizen as the source of authority and the citizen as passive
subject.
In the current circumstances of foreign military control, Iraqis cannot realistically hope to address any of these vital issues. The critical first step needed now is to figure out how to end the foreign military presence without plunging the country into further chaos, criminality and violence. I think a way is possible: an Anglo-American-Iraqi agreement to announce that foreign troops will start leaving Iraq on August 30, without necessarily naming the final date of total departure right away.
This would immediately trigger those imperative developments that have proved so elusive to date: a legitimate and truly sovereign Iraqi political system and leadership, faster agreement among all Iraqis on their national political configuration and power-sharing structures, more assertive and effective security services, and collective actions by the state and ordinary citizens to end the insurgency, resistance and terror.
Neither Washington’s marketing hucksters from Madison Avenue nor the children of James Madison himself are needed to teach Iraqis about democracy and freedom in this context. For democracy and freedom — noble as they are — are not the most immediate priority issues, nor even the medium-term urgencies, for most people in this region, whose states are fractured, societies are violent, regimes are distant and corrupt, rights are ravaged, and future prospects are dim and grim. Those priorities, rather, focus on sovereignty and dignity first, which cannot happen under foreign guns.
The U.S. and U.K. should quickly agree with the current semi-legitimate Iraqi government on the start date for withdrawing foreign troops, adding that the complete withdrawal will be negotiated with the Iraqi government that will be elected in the next six months, after the new Iraqi constitution is written. Such a move would radically change the entire equation and prospects in Iraq, give Iraqis compelling incentives to agree to the constitution and hold meaningful elections for a new governance system, and propel a brisk shift away from foreign rule to national dignity.
It would cut short the killings and suffering of this ugly neocolonial, neoconservative Anglo-American foreign adventure. It would finally give the Iraqi people the incentive to be legitimately sovereign and in control of their own fate, and, yes and yes again, to be free — especially free of the intemperate, malignant violence of foreign armies.
Rami G. Khouri is editor-at-large of the Beirut-based Daily Star newspaper, published throughout the Middle East with the International Herald Tribune.
Copyright © 2005 Rami G. Khouri / Agence Global
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Released: 27 July 2005
Word Count: 1,055
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