Informed Comment Homepage

Thoughts on the Middle East, History and Religion

Header Right

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Google+
  • Email
  • RSS
  • Featured
  • US politics
  • Middle East
  • Environment
  • US Foreign Policy
  • Energy
  • Economy
  • Politics
  • About
  • Archives
  • Submissions

© 2023 Informed Comment

  • Skip to content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
Iraq War

Rumsfeld on the Future of Iraq

Juan Cole 01/21/2003

Tweet2
Share
Reddit
Email
2 Shares

From Juan Cole’s private archives.

From ???@??? Tue Jan 21 02:57:47 2003
To: infoco@yahoogroups.com
From: Juan Cole
Delivered-To: mailing list infoco@yahoogroups.com
Date: Tue, 21 Jan 2003 02:56:21 -0500
Subject: [infoco] Rumsfeld on the future of Iraq
Reply-To: infoco-owner@yahoogroups.com
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Status:

US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld today sketched out his vision of a
post-Saddam Iraq. He said it would be a country that was not attempting to
acquire weapons of mass destruction. And, he said it would have a
government that tended toward what we would think of as a democracy, but
that neither a US or a British template would be imposed on it. It would be
authentically Iraqi. He gave the example of the Loya Jirga (tribal council)
in Afghanistan that made Hamid Karzai president of that country last summer.

I find all this extremely dismaying. First of all, either Iraq is going to
have a representative, parliamentary government, or it is not. The UK *is*
the template for that. Its parliament is not called the “mother of
parliaments” for nothing. When we say India is a democracy or Australia is
a democracy, it is because they have a parliamentary template! There is no
indigenous “Iraqi” form of “democracy” that would pass muster in today’s
world. I am afraid that if Rumsfeld is talking this way, what the Defense
Department really intends to impose on Iraq is some form of authoritarian
rule that has enough trappings of public consent that it can be fobbed off
on the rest of us as vaguely democratic.

His choice of Afghanistan as an example was particularly inept. The Loya
Jirga turns out to have been a mugging. The warlords and the secret police
ran that thing and ensured a pre-ordained outcome. The “delegates” hadn’t
been elected by the people. In its aftermath, Karzai has gotten to be mayor
of Kabul, with powerful warlords running Herat and Mazar, etc. There
continues to be faction-fighting and Taliban-like oppression of women. The
country is fragmented. If this is what Rumsfeld foresees for Iraq, then he
is taking us into a huge catastrophe.

www.juancole.com

To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
infoco-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com

Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/

Filed Under: Iraq War, US Foreign Policy

About the Author

Juan Cole is the founder and chief editor of Informed Comment. He is Richard P. Mitchell Professor of History at the University of Michigan He is author of, among many other books, Muhammad: Prophet of Peace amid the Clash of Empires and The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. Follow him on Twitter at @jricole or the Informed Comment Facebook Page

Primary Sidebar

Donate

Help keep independent journalism alive and donate online, or make checks payable to:
"Juan Cole"
P. O. Box 4218,
Ann Arbor, MI 48104-2548
(No parcels, please)

STAY INFORMED

Join our newsletter and have sharp analysis delivered to your inbox every day.

Twitter

Follow Juan Cole @jricole or Informed Comment @infcomment on Twitter

Facebook



Sign up for our newsletter

Informed Comment © 2023 All Rights Reserved

Posting....