While the press seems to be suffering its own brand of shock and awe over the lawlessness and disorder following the liberation of Iraq, I came across this item published by MEMRI way back in November. It's a collection of excerpts from an article by Gen. Najib al-Salhi, who served, among other things, as a commander of Saddam's Republican Guard tank brigade before his defection in 1995. Any of this sound accurate?
"The regime of the despot Saddam Hussein is nearing its end and, for the first time, since the establishment of the modern Iraq state in 1921, there are signs of a new order that would replace the pits of crime and the abyss of disasters the Iraqi people [have] suffered from."
"The removal of the Saddam regime will not usher the season of spring immediately. Saddam's legacy would fall as a heavy burden on the incoming regime in terms of a destroyed infrastructure and a country ridden with economic, political, social, cultural, financial, and legal problems. Add to this a quasi-disjointed social environment - men and women exhausted by coercive despotism, state police, the drums of war, suffocating sanctions and a legacy of arbitrariness, injustice, and corruption."
"The social and political map of Iraq comprises a variety of groups-Arabs, Kurds, Turkomans, Assyrians, Muslims, Christians, and Yazidies ready to pounce for revenge, each looking for a lost right or a stolen identity. The danger for internal security could be profound if the security apparatus would be forced to escape from people's fury and from its own crime-ridden past."
"Here are a people emerging from a frightful prison, seeking freedom without boundaries. This will be one of the significant scenes in the days and weeks that will follow the collapse of the ancient regime and the rise of a new one. This will raise a number of critical questions: What will be the nature of the new regime? What will be its strategy for putting the country on the right course? What are its abilities to provide a sense of social, psychological, and political stability? The failure to address these issues early on will place a question mark on Iraq's ability to survive as a unified political entity."
Sounds almost prescient to me. More likely, though, it sounds like someone who simply knew of what he spoke. And I especially appreciate this suggestion.
"The Iraqi women ought to be liberated and their legitimate rights restored. There is a need for legislation that would protect the rights of women and children after years of Saddamist abuses. It is important to underline the constitutional rights of women in terms of equality in education, work, culture, and politics. It is a fiction, and absurd, to rebuild a destroyed country with half of its people paralyzed or unemployed."
And this one.
"We have to seek political, economic and cultural relations with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the Gulf countries, Syria, and Jordan. Iraq will take into consideration the attitudes of countries which helped liberate it from Saddam's despotic rule. These countries will be accorded priority in political, economic and technological cooperation."
Although I do hope he wasn't expecting the countries he named to be among those "which helped liberate it [Iraq] from Saddam's despotic rule." Heh. Yes, the liberators should be accorded all those priorities. And the weasels (remember them?) should be accorded squat.
