Posted on 05/31/2003 1:33:44 PM PDT by freeforall
2003-05-28 Free Iraqis speak at last
SALIM MANSUR, For the London Free Press
The familiar voices in Canada, routinely cynical about the United States, have begun vilifying the nature of Iraq's liberation within the less than two months since the fall of Baghdad.
A recent example is Jeffrey Simpson's column in the Globe and Mail Friday, in which he places quotation marks around the word liberation.
Simpson writes, "Iraq is chaotic to the point of street-level anarchy, weapons of mass destruction cannot be found, terrorism is on the rise, and the United States is stuck in Iraq."
Another example of vilification is Michele Landsberg's column of May 11 in the Toronto Star. Landsberg swallows without reservation the most outrageous concoctions of conspiracy theory behind 9/11 that would have us believe rogues in the American government hatched the plot and carried it out against its own innocent citizens.
Such writings,, which indicate the sort of polite and insidious anti-Americanism festering in our political realm, feed the imaginings of those who do not know better about our tradition of respectful partnership with our worthy neighbour, and give credence to the politics of those among us who revel in their private and public animus towards the United States.
I wrote in this space two weeks before the Iraq war began that the absence of Iraqi voices at the time could be explained "by the paradox of inverse relationship between geography and politics." Those most distant from Iraq, such as the many people engaged in antiwar demonstrations in Canada, were concerned more with opposing American power out of anti-Americanism than with thinking about the condition of Iraqis under tyranny.
Now Iraqi voices are slowly beginning to be heard as details of the hell that Iraq had been turned into by Saddam Hussein are disclosed.
Hamid Ali Alkifaey is an Iraqi writer who fled to England as a young man soon after Saddam seized power in 1979. He returned home after Iraq's liberation and wrote a long piece for the Guardian published May 16.
After recounting the horrors his family and friends had suffered, Alkifaey concluded, "However, looking on the bright side of life, Iraq is now a free country thanks to the courage of (U.S. President) George Bush and (British Prime Minister) Tony Blair, and the U.S. and British people who backed them."
Simpson may note Alkifaey places no quotation marks around the word free.
And mass graves are now being discovered, such as the one in Mussayib, 24 kilometres southwest of Baghdad, and in Hilla near the ancient ruins of Babylon, where 3,000 skeletons were unearthed one afternoon soon after the war for Iraq's freedom ended.
Awad Nasir is an Iraqi poet, and his letter addressed to Americans was published in the Wall Street Journal on May 8.
Nasir wrote, "the mullahs of Tehran and their Islamic Revolutionary Guards" did not liberate "the Iraqi Shiites . . . . Amr Mousa, the Arab League's secretary-general, and the corrupt regimes he speaks for, did not liberate Iraqi Arab nationalists." Nor did French President Jacques Chirac, or "the European left liberate Iraq's communists, now free to resume their activities inside Iraq."
Iraq's liberation was brought about, Nasir wrote with deep gratitude, "by young men and women who came from the other side of the world -- from California and Wyoming, from New York, Glasgow, London, Sydney and Gdansk to risk their lives, and for some to die, so that my people can live in dignity."
Nasir ended his letter, "In the meantime Jacques Chirac, (Russian President) Vladimir Putin, (UN Secretary-General) Kofi Annan and others have no authority to speak on behalf of my people."
Nasir could have added, neither does Canada's Jean Chretien, nor the many Jeffrey Simpsons and Michele Landsbergs in the Canadian media who instead cast aspersions on Iraqi freedom won by the sacrifice of Americans and their allies.
Lastly, in the spirit of Nasir's letter, it might well be said that the least worthy to speak for Iraqis are Arab-Muslim community leaders, wherever they abide, since their hypocrisy is as thick as the stench of death in Saddam's killing fields in Iraq.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Salim Mansur is a professor of political science at the University of Western Ontario. His column appears alternate Wednesdays.
Copyright © The London Free Press 2001,2002,2003
Staying Above the Soil - Hamid Ali Alkifaey
Thank You - Awad Nasir
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