Sunday, November 23, 2003
Current head of the Iraq Governing Council, Jalal Talabani, gives what may amount to a sort of "pep talk" tot he American public in today's Opinion Journal. We need to hear more voices like this - more of Iraq's own voices, and not just in the "conservative" press like the Journal and on the blogosphere, but also in other papers like the Times (NY and LA) and the Washington Post. More please (and it's aobut time for another Administration Op-Ed from Rumsfeld or the like, as well). This stuff cannot be over-done.
Tip O'Neil once said that he learned a great lesson from the one election he lost. He said that in all his campaigning, he forgot to do the simplest thing - ask the people to vote for him. If Iraqis want the American public to support them, we need to hear it from them, in their own words. The American people are a generous people, just ask, and we are unlikely to turn away, especially using the voice in this article - not asking for charity, but simply the opportunity to help themselves.
OpinionJournal - The Way Forward - We Iraqis must bear the brunt of the fighting.
The enemies of Iraqi freedom are not "resistance," a word that evokes the heroism of Poles in the Second World War, nobly battling their occupiers. Nor can those who murder our American liberators, Red Cross workers, U.N. officials and Italian policemen be termed "guerrillas." Rather, they are terrorists. They are the thugs and torturers who repressed their fellow Iraqis for 35 years, the perpetrators of genocide, men who butchered hundreds of thousands of Kurds, Marsh Arabs and Shiite Arabs. The creation of an antidemocratic fascist counterrevolution of Baathists and foreign Islamic volunteers, some of whom are from al Qaeda and Ansar al-Islam, is a classic unholy Middle Eastern alliance. These people have more support among the Arab media and in the studios of al-Jazeera than they do in Iraq.
The significance of this wave of terrorism is not military but political. On the battlefield the terrorists are losing. But the terrorists have grasped something that too few in the U.S. will admit: that Iraq is now the central front both in the war against terrorism and the struggle for a better Middle East. The terrorists will not stop fighting if the U.S. troops are withdrawn, rather they will become emboldened to believe that they can win this conflict...
