These are some snippets from
Barham Salih’s speech yesterday (as prepared). The official transcript (including Q&A) of the event should come along soon:
As an Iraqi and Kurdish democrat, as somebody who has devoted his life to the overthrow of the fascist tyranny of the Ba’ath Party, I understand Iraq in its true context: a society traumatized by 35 years of state terrorism, a state that was designed to fail, a state that was a prison of its people, a state of imposition and repression.
No perspective is more false, no analysis more shallow than that of viewing Iraq within the context of the last three and a half years alone. Iraqi history did not begin in 2003, but if Saddam Hussein had had his way, it would have ended with him and his sons.
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Iraq is a fundamentally diverse country and we need to find a balance that protects that diversity and encourages a voluntary, democratic, federal national unity. It is a diversity that those responsible for the violence hate and reject. Our enemies are not freedom fighters, but fascists. I do not use that word lightly, because I refuse to trivialize or deny the crimes that scarred the twentieth century. We are under assault from Ba’athists, and nobody familiar with the theory and practice of Ba’athism can claim that it is not a fascist ideology. The Ba’athists and some of their allies advocate a supremacist ideology similar to the chauvinism that the apartheid regime in South Africa was built upon. Like racists elsewhere, they yearn for the restoration of the status quo ante in which they were dominant.
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By killing Zarqawi we have wounded Al-Qaeda in Iraq, but we have not eliminated it. The alliance between the Ba’athists and jihadists which sustains Al-Qaeda in Iraq is not new, contrary to what you may have been told. I know this at first hand. Some of my friends were murdered by jihadists, by Al-Qaeda affiliated operatives who had been sheltered and assisted by Saddam’s regime. Under UN resolution 687 of 1991, Saddam was not only supposed to verifiably disarm, which he did not do, his regime was supposed to stop supporting international terrorism and to “renounce all acts, methods and practices of terrorism.”
This Ba’athist-jihadist terrorist axis rejects the notion of a balanced process because it wants supremacy and theocracy. Another force that creates instability is majoritarianism. Those who have suffered discrimination and exclusion, when their numbers are finally acknowledged can easily, and understandably, seek to secure their position with majoritarianism. This is an issue not just for Iraq as a whole, but also for its regions, because those who are a majority in one part of Iraq are a minority in other areas. To prevent any such tyranny of the majority, Iraq now has a Bill of Rights which needs not just legal but practical political enforcement.
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Our security forces are increasingly capable. Arguably we should have stressed quality over quantity far earlier, but had we done so we would have heard complaints that we were not doing enough. Allow me to cite, in evidence of the pure increase in numbers the very useful figures in the Brookings Iraq index, which state that in August 2006 the Iraqi security forces were 294,100 strong, an increase of 61% on August 2005. More of these security force members are fully trained and more units are capable of autonomous operations than was the case in the past.
By the end of this year, nearly half of Iraq’s provinces will be under the control of Iraqi security forces. The command of Iraqi forces has now formally moved from the Multi- National Force-Iraq, the Coalition forces that are present with United Nations’ backing, to the Iraqi government.
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A consequence of being of the Middle East is that we are buffeted by the cross currents of the region, and in particular, by its main storm—international terrorism. Just as you have to understand our transition in terms of our history, so you must see what is happening in Iraq in terms of the dramatic changes in the Middle East and the Muslim world. There is a sea change happening. The challenge ahead of us is not to cling to the past, but to advance into the battle for the future to shape the new order. It is hard labor, slow and sometimes seemingly without reward, but we are paying off an accumulated debt from the mistakes of Western and Middle Eastern policy in the pre-9/11 era—the folly of engaging the region through its dictatorial superstructure, the contempt of the governing elites and ruling castes for their subjects.
The terrorism that we are facing is therefore not an aberration caused by the liberation of Iraq; it is not an expression of a legitimate grievance. It is the failure of the political culture that is the warped offspring of the old order, the result of decades of inequality, intolerance, injustice and officially-sponsored fanaticism.
Every day Iraq is battered by this tornado of terrorism. Every day the terrorists attempt to provoke a full-scale sectarian civil war in Iraq, the implementation of the evil plan that Zarqawi outlined in his poisonous letter of 2004. Every day, we fight back.
We are your allies in the global war against Al-Qaeda, which for the United States and Iraq is a success. Thousands of Iraqis have voluntarily joined the new Iraqi security forces, formations that depend upon volunteers, not enslavement and coercion, knowing that they fight our shared enemies.
How many other societies could come through the test that we face every day? In some ways, what is remarkable in Iraq is how much restraint so many still show in the face of appalling provocation.
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What matters is that we have to end this violence not just for our own sakes but also for the region. If Iraq plunges into a full blown civil war, then so will the rest of the Middle East. The borders will not matter, because each of Iraq’s communities is part of a larger whole that stretches across the region. Iraq’s security is not Iraq’s alone. Our security is a matter of regional, and so given the importance of our region, of global security. This is not a theory, it is a fact that our wiser neighbors comprehend. They see that borders will dissolve if Iraqi democracy is overwhelmed by the terrorists. For Iraq to revert to being a failed state would be to export horror to the region again, as Iraq did so frequently under the tyranny of Saddam Hussein.
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Resolved to deal with these challenges, we announced the plan for an “International Compact with Iraq” in collaboration with the United Nations. I have just arrived from a productive meeting to prepare for this International Compact in the United Arab Emirates. With the assistance of the United Nations we sat down with other interested parties to develop the International Compact. Three years after the bitter international divisions over the liberation of Iraq, the international community should begin coalescing behind the new Iraq.
The international compact involves a road map for Iraq to attain financial self-sufficiency in a 4 to 5 year time-frame. We understand that there cannot be genuine economic regeneration unless there is political stability and security. But in a nation weaned on war, where political violence has been the rule not the exception, we need to give the bored young men of Iraq a form of employment and pride that comes from hard work, not the easy swagger of the gunman.
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Moreover, we are promising clear targets for economic restructuring accompanied by mechanisms for intelligence cooperation and security coordination. For the Middle East, such an approach, with broad international support, is an innovation and, we hope, a harbinger of a Middle East based on cooperation and not conflict.