Building a nation is not easy. In most cases when building a nation you must first educate the populace of that future nation in order to have a foundation on which to build. Case in point, Iraq. In the western world of incredibly short attention spans, sound bites, video clips, little knowledge of history and less understanding of political science it is much easier to grab hold of that one bite, clip or fact that resonates and build an entire opinion of something very complex on that one datum. Every once in a while the news media manages, if only momentarily, to raise above itself and provide some truly enlightening and useful information.
This article gives us a brief glimpse into the difficulties involved in building a new government and in fact a new nation in Iraq. This article talks about the struggle of the Sunnis but the fact of the matter is that all of the various political groups in Iraq are going to need to learn a new way of doing politics. The king of the hill style of politics that has been going on in Iraq for at least 40 years is not a sound foundation for a stable government that is ready to participate as a responsible member of the world community.
From this article we can also extrapolate the difficulties that are occurring in other arenas as well. Serving in the Iraqi military, now called the Self Defense Force, is entirely different than serving in the military under Saddam Hussein. Voting in Iraq today means something very different than it did a couple years ago when Iraq supposedly voted 99.8% in support of Saddam Hussein. The people of Iraq like the idea of being freed from tyranny. We saw that when Saddam was first toppled. The people of Iraq are excited about having their own country, an Iraq for Iraqis. We saw that in the celebrations across the country when the Coalition turned over control of the country to the interim government. The people of Iraq like the idea of a freely elected, democracy government. We saw that with the high turn out rates at the first election in Iraq. However, there are a lot of details to be worked out in order for a secular, representative government to be successfully implemented in Iraq. Details take time.
Free Iraq for Iraqis. I think that the US could be proud of having participated in establishing a Free Iraq for Iraqis.
Aloha