From the BBC
Jordan is hosting a meeting of Iraq’s neighbours on Thursday to rally support for Iraqi elections on 30 January. It wants all the nations present to issue a "clear message" to Iraqis that they should vote in the poll, Jordanian Foreign Minister Hani Mulki said.
However, Iran’s foreign minister is boycotting the meeting in protest at comments by Jordan’s King Abdullah. The king accused Tehran of meddling in Iraq and trying to create a Shia sphere of influence in the region.
I’m of the belief that Iraqis should participate in the elections. Boycotting the polls won’t do the Iraqis any good, as it will only extend the current state of anarchy! To the Iraqis out there, I say, make your voice heard: Cast your ballots.
I want to ask a few questions. Does the so-called civilized world really believe that the Iraqi resistance hate freedom?
The French Resistance fought the Nazis and their exploits are now legendary. The same for the Dutch Resistance. The Sepoy Mutiny of the mid-19th century redefined the British empire’s relationship with India. Simon Bolivar and his revolutionaries. Even Che Guevara is idolized.
The American revolutionaries are considered the heroic forefathers of the United States.
So, why is the Iraqi resistance ostracised?
Is it because of their tactics? Must we really revisit the tactics of other resistance movements throughout history?
I am always repulsed when I hear of the revulsion in western media when someone working with the occupation forces is executed or beheaded but there seems near glorification each time an F-15 drops its load on a house in Falluja. Or Ramadi. Or Samarra.
Why no revulsion there? Are we to understand that the manner by which people are murdered reduces the criminal act to one of compassion and civility?
Is the wholesale bombing of a civilian district morally sound because it is packaged as a reaction to the killing of some foreign contractors?
Punitive collective punishment of this kind is reminiscent of German Nazi policies during the occupation of France. Take for example the German Nazi response in the French town of Tulle in 1944. History shows that French Resistance had seized the town of Tulle from the German 3rd Battalion and 95th Security Regiment. When the Das Reich Panzer Division retook the town, they found 64 badly-mutilated German bodies. Revenge would come swiftly: The SS-Panzer Aufklarungs Abteilung 2 platoon seized 99 men and promptly executed them, later hanging their bodies as a sign to others. Some 100 civilians who were deported to concentration camps would die in Germany.
To the Germans, the civilians were “insurgents and terrorist sympathizers”; to the rest of the world, they were civilians. For its part, the French resistance fighters were not called terrorists; they were called La Resistance (the resistance) and adopted a near mythical, if not legendary, status in European history.
Such are the fighters of Falluja, Mosul, Ramadi, Baqubah, Hilla, Samarra, Kut and Diwaniya.
Interesting debate? WE know metalordie is Iraqi, but I am curious, Wendy, what are you? I am not sure because you say you are not a tax-paying American and you refer to your Iraqi friends. I am just interested in where you are from and the role you play with rebuilding Iraq. Are you living in Iraq or near it? Please explain.
In rebuilding? What rebuilding? And who are your friends masquerading as Iraqis? Are they Kurds who have not been touched by the insecurity in Iraq and are pining for secession?
They just shook their heads? What no great praise of Allawi? Tsk, tsk, tsk…
Do Iraqis have a role in rebuilding? Did you miss Bremer’s Law 39 which is irrevocable?
Maybe you missed the one about only 818 million of some 19 billion being spent on rebuilding.
Go to Mosul, where families no longer go to work or send their children to school. Ask them about the rebuilding…
Maybe you would like to focus on rebuilding the museums and the national heritage that was stolen from the people of Iraq.
Or did you mean rebuilding Falluja with ICBMs?
Here’s a message to your so-called Iraqi friends. Grow a backbone. Realise that Iraq was targeted because it was Iraq. Not because of Saddam. Not because of WMDs.
Oh and remind them of the dozen or so Shia villages in 1920 who rose up against foreign rule and the appointment of a foreign king and were in return gassed by the RAF. But that’s okay, eh, whats a few more dead ragheads.
Metalordie
What flight of fancy? Suggesting that the people of Iraq have as least as good a chance as the people of Afghanistan? That Iraqis are not capable of governing themselves?
I’m not talking about Bush and his policy. I’m not a tax-paying American. Last I heard, it was your former leader who was responsible for mass graves.
I asked some of my Iraqi friends about your comments.They just shook their heads.
Just out of curiosity, no sarcasm, what’s your role in rebuilding? Do you have a blog?
I owe your friends nothing. In fact, if they adhere to the flights of fantasy you tried pushing here, well they owe 28 million Iraqis an apology.
So does every single tax-paying American. I would suggest y’all start by visiting every destroyed home in Falluja and stopping off at the mass burial grounds for all the women and children butchered by the wheels of democracy.
And I hope your future includes a country where you can say whatever you want in whatever manner you choose. We all know what happens when someone decries a Bush policy – they get fired, get visited by the FBI, on and on. You can’t even wear an anti-Bush shirt in high school.
You can’t even question the WH gospel. Phil Donahue tried…he got fired…
Metalordie, I apologize for offending you. But you obviously haven’t been the places where my voice has been heard.I WAS there.
I won’t bore you with trying to validate my relationship to Iraq and I don’t care about being ‘right’. Your views are set and I know they are not “the unadulterated voice of Iraq”. My views on Iraq come from Iraqis who have never seen the US, not the US government nor whoever Douglas Feith is.
You DO owe my friends an apology, however sarcastic. Nonetheless, I hope your future includes a country where you can say whatever you want in whatever manner you choose.
Oh Wendy!!
AM SO SO SO SORRY. I sincerely apologise to your dear, dear friends in Baghdad, Basra, Mosul and Arbeil (I thought it was Arbil) if I offended them.
Really. To all the Iraqis who are Wendy’s pals and lapdogs, I so humbly apologise, except for one thing:
I AM IRAQI, Wendyo! See, it’s not the NYT times you have to worry about, but the true, unadulterated voice of Iraq. The Iraq that was around 7,000 years ago while your ancestors were still picking lice off one another.
Don’t talk to me about patronising. You just can’t stand to be told you had it wrong. AND STILL HAVE IT WRONG.
Newsflash, Wendyo. The entire Iraq war, concoted by your dear friends Douglas Feith, Rummy, and the Chalabis of Tel Aviv, was based on a lie which you swallowed hook, line and sinker.
Where was your voice when the WMD scenario was proven a lie?
Where was it when it turned out Iraq had NO connections with bin Laden, his mom, his nanny or his mistress?
Where was it when Iraqis cried out from 13 years of the most punitive sanctions regimen ever imposed on any country, carried out by the US and imposed by the international community of cowards?
Where were you when Madeline Albright was asked whether the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children due to malnutrition and disease – as a direct result of the sanctions – was worth containing Saddam?
And when she answered it was worth it? Why didn’t you contact your dear friends in Basra then?
Shall I go on with this impromptu history lesson, or should I let you make a fool of yourself.
Here is one more tidbit, leave Iraq to the Iraqis. Not the ones born and raised in W’s back yard, the ones they paraded on CNN who called Iraq EYERACK, but the real Iraqis who are sticking it out day after day after disastrous day.
God bless the Iraqi resistance.
How’s that for patronising. Sheesh, some wannabe telling an Iraqi what to think.
Metalordie, maybe let’s examine what happened in Afghanistan.
I personally think Iraqis have a lot more going for them than Afghanis did. Dear friends of ours in Baghdad, Basra, Mosul, Arbeil and acquaintances in other cities would certainly take offense at your patronizing attitude taken straight from the editorial pages of the NYT.
Maybe it would be better to examine what the Iraqis themselves say.
WHAT?! SHOU?! COMO?!
Let’s examine what history has to say. Never in modern history has a nation voted for a list of candidates who were utterly unknown to the electorate. The electoral commission refuses to release the names of the candidates on these lists.
The way the Iraqi elections are set up is as follows: A leading cleric or party leader is atop a list of followers, sympathisers, or strategic allies. Who they are remains unknown. Only his name is known.
Therefore, Iraqis will be voting blindly for people they do not even know of.
Furthermore, what kind of elections is it when Iranian-born, non-Arabic speaking Ayatollah Ali Al-Sistani issues a fatwa saying, in no misleading terms, vote for the Shia list or you will burn in the fires of hell.
What kind of elections is it when the electoral ‘lists’ have no pronounced platform. Why are they running, one should ask? Only at the behest of seizing power? If so, then we have entered a Machiavellian nightmare which, if Nicolo knew anything of politics, will certainly end in a bloodbath.
And under occupation? No, don’t point to Japan or Germany. In Japan, the God-head Emperor Hirohito ordered the Japs to work with the Americans. And Germany, yeah, can you say Berlin Wall?
So, Iraqis go to vote for someone they have never heard of or know running on an undeclared agenda under the watchful eye of an Abrams tank.
This isn’t an election, its a farce.
Why have anything half-baked?
To say there is no choice but to vote is in itself undemocratic.
The Shia community are not voting, they are affirming the political wills of their Imams and Ayatollahs to ascend to power. Nothing else.