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The Hanoudi Letter: A letter to the American People |
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Saturday, 31 December 2005 |
I am writing this letter on the eve of the New Year. I am not very happy or in a celebratory mood, but praying and hoping that the New Year would be better and bring peace and happiness to the whole world and mainly to you and to my own people. 2005 was a terrible year, the death and destruction it has brought are very difficult to describe in this short piece which is not intended to be a record of the miseries and pain the major disasters that happened during that year has brought about. The expired year is already in the annals of history and I am going to leave it there. I am not going to talk about the major catastrophes that struck various parts of the world like the Indian Ocean Tsunami, Katrina and the recent Asian earthquake, these are manifestations of a very angry and furious nature they are usually very hard to predict and control, but man should at least be able to deal reasonably with their terrible aftermaths something which seems to have not been the case in most of these instances. I am going to talk about one special case which resulted from mistakes and blunders by men in both our countries, politicians and ideologues who were interested only in their narrow personal interests and agendas that has resulted in an unusual suffering in our two countries.
When the Bush administration were planning their adventure in Iraq which they called Operation Iraqi Freedom they were claiming that when they have ended the rule of Saddam they will immediately start a massive program of reconstruction of Iraq something akin to the Marshall plan to help the Iraqi people revitalize their country's moribund institutions and the much needed rejuvenation of its infrastructure. But nothing has happened, what actually happened after finishing with Saddam and his regime were a series of broken promises and constant changes in their policies and their rationales for the war. In the beginning, the Bush administration was stressing the need to promote human rights and democracy and for a while these ideas became the defining causes of the war, but meanwhile the armed opposition to their occupation of the country growing bolder, more serious and lethal, the Bush administration was using it as the central justification for the continued presence of the American forces in the country they were saying now that these forces were fighting terrorism and refusing to talk even about a timetable for their removal from Iraq.
The Bush administration failed to honor its promises to the Iraqis, in the beginning they established an organization which they called ORHA (The Office of Rehabilitation and Humanitarian Assistance) and put on top of it Jay Garner an ex-army general who has been doing similar work in the north of the country following the Kurdish uprising against Saddam after the end of the Kuwait war, but ORHA was called a failure after only a three weeks on the job and was replaced by the CPA (Coalition Provisional Authority), which was a coalition authority in name only, it was a 100% American and imposed an obscure ex-State Department official Paul Bremer as administrator of “liberated” Iraq with the title of Presidential Envoy on the 6th of May 2003 with unlimited powers. If ORHA was a failure the CPA was a catastrophe, it was inefficient inexperienced and totally ignorant of the problems of post Saddam Iraq, its history or its ethnic and religious diversity and tainted with a lot of scandals the most famous of which is the disappearance during Bremer’s months on the job of a 9.9 million US dollars which is still unaccounted for. The presidential envoy himself was behaving like the old British viceroys in India when it was part of the British Empire; he was dictatorial, self centered, overconfident and secure in his knowledge that he had only one authority to report to, the White House and to the vice president personally.
Paul Bremer imposed a very strict script with hard and fast deadlines for drafting a permanent constitution and forming a government a script which has culminated in the last elections for a permanent parliament, a script for the running of the affairs of occupied Iraq which has come from the White House itself and to which the president himself has stuck to doggedly despite the qualms of some of the senior members of his administration and staff and the relentless violence on the ground and disaffection of the country’s third main component, the Sunni Arabs. All of this had nothing to do with their earlier promises, nothing of importance was achieved during Bremer’s tenure, he seems to have preferred the company of nice looking women rather than the local politicians who were themselves neophytes and extremely suspicious of their American counterparts these have materialized from among the ranks of the exiles based in various parts of the world including Britain and the United States or from the more enclosed world of local clerics. Bremer transferred sovereignty to the Iraqi authorities in June of 2004 and left thereafter. The script that Bremer brought to Iraq stipulated that on January 30, 2005, a general election should be held to elect a national assembly which would have the task of selecting a 75 member committee from amongst its ranks to prepare a draft of a permanent constitution which should then be presented to the Iraqi people in a referendum on October 15, 2005 for ratification which is to be followed by a general election on the December 15, 2005 to elect a parliament with a 4-year mandate. This script was achieved with varying degrees of adherence to the timetable and according to the rules of what was known as the transitional administrative law. But the latest elections were conducted under the provisions of the recently ratified permanent constitution some of whose most sensitive parts has not been agreed upon for the time being, the role of Islam in legislation, federalism, the distribution of the national revenue and the future of Kirkuk these are to be settled during the first four months of the next parliament.
The December 15, 2005 elections started at 7:00 AM as scheduled, balloting was very brisk in more than 2,000 polling centers all over the country, and the process has started two days earlier in 50 cities in 15 countries in 4 continents from Australia to the United States. More than 200 lists representing various political groupings and personalities were competing but the main contenders were 4, the Shiite list, the Kurds, the secular and the Sunnis who were at last participating in the nation building processes after a long period of hostility and boycotting, security was very strict there were around 14 million Iraqis who were eligible to vote, 10 million of them actually participated with a high percentage of women amongst them. I voted few minutes before the closure of my own center in the Mansoor District were my old house is located. The mood was very good people were hoping that the four years of parliament whose election was under way would at last bring to Iraq and its anguished people the peace and security which has been denied for the last 3 years now that all the major components of the Iraqi people were participating and very actively.
Two days after the end of balloting one of the election committee’s spokesmen which was conducting the elections said that the final results of the balloting could be known declared in two weeks or a little more, but two days later another member of the commission was giving what was supposed to be very preliminary results the results of counting only a small fraction of the hundreds thousands of the votes cast. The man was giving the figures as if they were the final results and conclusive and was hinting very strongly that the Shiite list has won the elections and overwhelmingly. Hell broke loose and the other groups mainly the Sunnis and the secular immediately rejected the conclusions and accused their rivals with cheating and fraud and doubting the integrity and fairness of the electoral commission, but both stuck to their guns the Shiites started to talk about forming the new government and the commission insisted on their transparency and impartiality. The damage has already been done, the country returned to absolute polarization with the general situation in the country deteriorating very rapidly and dangerously and once again the country was plunged in a very serious crisis the results of which are very difficult to predict or imagine.
I am writing this letter in spite of my bitterness and frustrations as a happy New Year message to the American people to whom I have the greatest respect and admiration who have been terribly pained and anguished with us by the blunders and mistaken policies of their leaders and politicians and by those of our own leaders and politicians.
Najeeb Hanoudi
Saturday, December 31, 2005
Amman, Jordan
Email:
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