Independent Views

For the sake of peace and stability Iraqis must be free to determine their own future

By Adil Allawi

As published in the Financial Times on 6 March 2004

I am an Iraqi who has been in the UK for nearly all my life yet I feel as outraged and as personally affected by the latest massacre of civilians as I would have had I grown up in Iraq.

I feel that speculation on the reasons that motivated the bombers and to a certain extent who they are are all but irrelevant. The point is that this has happened and that this can go on happening. Unless the US is willing to send in an army of one million troops into Iraq there will always be instability. Even when an all-Iraqi security force will be given control of large parts of Iraq after the official end of the occupation there will still be chaos. The new police and army will still be tainted by the fact that they are also there as the front line of defense for the 100,000 troops that the US plans to keep in Iraq for the foreseeable future.

For the sake of peace and stability Iraqis must be free to determine their own future and be governed and policed by those whose motivation are exclusively for the interests of Iraq. Yet the US is still trying to create a government in Iraq after the June 30th deadline with the right to sign binding agreements that will affect the country for generations to come. Such agreements as the mortgaging of Iraqi oil and the status of US troops to remain in Iraq immune from prosecution under Iraqi law.

If anything, the recent events have woken up Iraqis to the fact that the root cause of this anarchy is presence of US troops and the control that the US exerts through this presence. The US has singularly failed to bring order to Iraq because its presence is simply not viewed as legitimate by the majority of Iraqis. Ordinary Iraqis will now see the poor security situation as not just critical but as something that must be urgently resolved.

If anything positive can be taken form the bombings it is that, from what I have seen, Iraqis are uniting together rather than falling back on sectarian differences. However, unless the US commits to withdrawing its military and stops its gerrymandering with Iraqi politics, to create a government that is artificially cooperative to its interests, I can only foresee that it will face an uprising from all sections of the Iraqi population together with a repeat of all the tragedy of the past year and the problems for regional stability that will ensue.