Savvy Jalal Talabani, current president of the Iraq Governing Council and secretary-general of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, says Iraqis want the ball.
It has been my privilege to preside over the Iraqi Governing Council during a month of momentous events. We now have an agreement for the transfer of authority between the coalition, the liberators, and the council, the representatives of the liberated Iraqis. President Bush has outlined an inspiring vision for a free and democratic Middle East. Our American friends are resolutely striking back at the vicious remnants of Saddam Hussein's regime and damaging the network of Baathists and foreign Islamists attempting to destroy the Iraqi experiment in democracy. Yet these gains could easily be forfeited if we Iraqis do not bear the brunt of the fighting.The enemies of Iraqi freedom are not "resistance," a word that evokes the heroism of Poles in the Second World War, nobly battling their occupiers. Nor can those who murder our American liberators, Red Cross workers, U.N. officials and Italian policemen be termed "guerrillas." Rather, they are terrorists. They are the thugs and torturers who repressed their fellow Iraqis for 35 years, the perpetrators of genocide, men who butchered hundreds of thousands of Kurds, Marsh Arabs and Shiite Arabs. The creation of an antidemocratic fascist counterrevolution of Baathists and foreign Islamic volunteers, some of whom are from al Qaeda and Ansar al-Islam, is a classic unholy Middle Eastern alliance. These people have more support among the Arab media and in the studios of al-Jazeera than they do in Iraq.
The significance of this wave of terrorism is not military but political. On the battlefield the terrorists are losing. But the terrorists have grasped something that too few in the U.S. will admit: that Iraq is now the central front both in the war against terrorism and the struggle for a better Middle East. The terrorists will not stop fighting if the U.S. troops are withdrawn, rather they will become emboldened to believe that they can win this conflict.
The terrorists want our bid for democracy to fail, just as the same terrorists attempted in recent years to undermine self-rule in Iraqi Kurdistan. The courage of the U.S. and Britain in liberating Iraq was a blow to the negative forces in the Middle East, to the Arab chauvinism and Islamist radicalism that so murderously combined to commit the atrocity of September 11. These terrorists know that if they are defeated in Iraq, then they will be defeated everywhere, but that if they can make the U.S. stumble or lose its nerve in Iraq, then their cause is not yet lost. It is for Iraqis to prove them wrong.
via WSJ's OpinionJournal
Tip via Healing Iraq
Talabani and his colleagues are following up their rhetoric with actions.
Iraq's political factions have agreed to establish what they are calling an "antiterror front" to confront the anti-U.S. insurgency, with an organizing committee to meet before the end of this month. Plans for the force were detailed in a telephone interview with Jalal Talabani, the Kurdish leader who currently is president of the Iraqi Governing Council.Members of the antiterror front, which would take over some duties from coalition forces but not immediately replace them, "will come from both inside and outside" the political parties and factions that make up the Governing Council, Mr. Talabani said.
He said a "security committee," which will meet by the end of November, would choose both fighting men and intelligence officers, who would be drawn from existing militias such as his own Kurdish pershmerga, the Iraqi National Council's militia and the Shi'ite Badr Brigade.
The 60,000 pershmerga guerrillas would not be deployed in Arab areas as peacekeepers, but could be used to guard facilities and patrol the borders, he said. That would free up Sunni and other forces for operations in the Sunni Triangle.
via the Washington Times
Czech President Vaclev Klaus, no stranger to fighting the efforts of totalitarianism to hang on to power, sounds like he would sympathize with the Iraqis' desire to lead the way.
"My concern was always what to do after the end of the war because I know something about the transition from a totalitarian regime to a free society," he said. "This cannot be done by soldiers, or by foreigners.Posted by Alan at November 25, 2003 07:54 AM"After we won back our freedom at the end of the Cold War, there was a proposal to bring back Czechs who had escaped to Western countries and make up a new government of those people who had been living in free countries.
"Those who had lived the tragic communist experience said no to the idea of foreigners organizing our transition back to freedom. We said we had to do this ourselves without outside influence dictating what we should do."
via the Washington Times