Friday, July 02, 2004

More Khalidi, and an analysis
Professor Juan Cole directs us to a [slightly] abridged transcript of Rashid Khalidi's talk in UCLA. It's in a lot of ways similar to the Commonwealth Club speech, a bit of which I transcribed here, but with some substantive differences which are worth taking in. And the transcript doesn't do justice to his speaking style, which is engaging, pointed and fiery without being bombastic. But ... It's here for your reference. Aiming to get his book soon.

Professor Cole's analysis on the Iraq handover earlier this week is available here. In it, he argues that the new provisional government, is actually the erstwhile IGC redux. And why is IGC II a bad thing?

First, its members are not elected by the Iraqi public. Second, they are not fully representative of the major political forces on the ground in Iraq. Paul Bremer, acting on instructions from the Defense Department neocons, completely excluded former Baath party members from society, firing them from their jobs and prohibiting them from playing any political role. He dissolved the Iraqi army and sent 400,000 armed troops home without a job. The Sunni Arabs, who had been the WASPs of Iraq, grew alarmed that their power and assets would be expropriated by American-installed Shiite ayatollahs and Kurdish warlords. Bremer thus helped deepen and prolong the insurgency mounted by Sunni guerrillas in the center-north of the country. Only recently has Bremer begun reversing the extreme policies that had alienated so many Sunnis.

posted by claudine |Added at 12:31 PM| | iraq, politics