In Shades of the Old Iraq, the NY Times is already comparing Iraqi Prime Minister Allawi to other Arab dictators in the Middle East. Why? Because he dares to threaten armed insurgents, acting to bring down his government, with martial law.
Multiple violent insurgencies are now raging in Iraq, but the fledging Iraqi forces Dr. Allawi controls are currently too weak and unreliable to bring them under control.
So then martial law shouldn't be a problem, right? It would be ineffective anyway.
Restoring law and order should not require wholesale suspensions of legal rights.
Somehow, I don't think the U.S. gave a lot of legal rights to the hundreds of insurgents it has killed in the last few months. When you're in a war for the survival of the country, legal niceties are a luxury. Iraq is not under some imagined threat like the "red scare" of the 1950's in the U.S. There are real people (not all from Iraq) with real guns and bombs assassinating Iraqi officials and hundreds of innocent Iraqis alike.
After falling violently afoul of Saddam Hussein in the late 1970's, Dr. Allawi severed his Baathist Party ties and later began working with disgruntled Baathist generals to organize a military coup in Iraq. He has never made a secret of any of this.
This is the best part. The Times has the balls to suggest that Allawi was the "violent" troublemaker when it was Saddam who supposedly attempted to assassinate Allawi in 1978 while he was exiled in the U.K. The "later" they refer to was almost 15 years later after the first Gulf War in 1991 when the U.S. was looking for ways to overthrow Saddam itself.
The Times acts like Allawi should be embarrassed that he wanted to force Saddam Hussein from power - and as if there would have been any other way but through violence!
Part of the problem is that the Times treats the insurgents as potential partners in an Iraqi democracy instead of the religious/anarchist fanatics that they are.
2 comments:
I posted something you might find interesting on Ritu's blog a few days ago which addressed this very topic. Here's the text:
It was in response to this post:
Bah! [Part 2]
Meet the new jihad
Indeed, the nature of the insurgency in Iraq is fundamentally changing. Their goal now, say the militants interviewed, is broader than simply forcing the U.S. to leave. They want to transform Iraq into what Afghanistan was in the 1980s: a training ground for young jihadists who will form the next wave of recruits for al-Qaeda and like-minded groups.
Mission accomplished, eh?My answer:
These same people were given a free ride by Saddam Hussein and their status hasn't changed much now, except that they perhaps have more freedom to act and be heard. In fact, this is exactly what giving the Iraqis self-determination and democracy means: every Iraqi's voice will be heard.
As democracy takes hold in any country it is natural that extremists will take advantage of their newfound ability to reach the masses and increase their numbers. The new Iraqi government will need to learn to deal with the extremist portions of their populations by either integrating them or shunning them as outlaws. All democracies do this -- it is one of the costs (or benefits, depending on your pov) of maintaining a free society.
Ironically, the freedom the Iraqis are currently enjoying would never have been possible under Hussein's tyranny.
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What do you think?
There is a huge difference between legitimate dissent within a democracy and having an aim to destroy the system.
If the insurgents and fundamentalists believed they were the majority, the would sit tight, wait until national elections were held and then run the country fairly within the guidelines of the Iraqi constitution, which I'm assuming could always be altered, even as ours has been. However, knowing that they are in the minority, they instead have opted for armed struggle in an effort not just to change some laws, but to destroy the current system of government altogether.
I know that throughout Iraq there have been numerous elections of local councils and various parties have been formed. I have also read stories of religious parties being defeated in most areas. I have not read stories of fundamentalists not being allowed to particpate in these processes.
An analogy - here in the U.S. we could never ban the Communist Party - it would have been illegal. However, if the Party was ever to take up arms with the stated goal of not only overthrowing the government, but changing the system of government, they would be considered enemies of the state and treated as such. (For the ACLU that means they would all be assigned comfortable lodgings and lawyers until their cases could be heard).
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