| Opinion Editorials, May 2004, To see today's opinion articles, click here: ww.aljazeerah.info Home News Archive ... Cities, localities, and tourist attractions Too bad to be true Octavius Pinkard Jordan Times, Friday, May 28, 2004 In an October 2002 publication titled Iraq Backgrounder: What Lies Beneath, the Brussels-based International Crisis Group (ICG) offered sound advice for those considering action in Iraq: The country does not divide up as neatly as people often assume, with a Shiite south, a Sunni centre and a Kurdish north, and the Iraqi people do not necessarily feel represented by the ethnically or religiously based organisations that seek to speak on their behalf. Instead, there are tribal, ideological, and class rivalries that given Iraq's lack of familiarity with genuine democracy and its surplus of experience with force as a means of effectuating political change could produce violent confrontations and a continued militarisation of politics. Finding acceptable and representative leaders will in all likelihood be complicated, not a matter simply of importing the exiled opposition. If only Bush and his advisers had read that report, or bothered to listen to the scores of scholars and Arab heads of state who warned that Iraq would be a far more complex undertaking than Washington cared to admit. | |
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