National Review: Bush’s Challenge

[Barrett808]

Bush’s Challenge
Will Iraqis “rise to the responsibilities of a free people”?
By John F. Cullinan

In his Sunday evening address on postwar Iraq, President Bush set three overall objectives: establishing security; enlisting broader international support; and "helping Iraqis assume responsibility for their own defense and their own future."

Whether or not any further international support for U.S. forces will be forthcoming on acceptable terms — or even prove helpful in that unlikely event — remains anyone's guess. But the ongoing violence in Iraq — and the mixed responses of Iraqi leaders — make clear that the president's other two aims can only be pursued in tandem and at once.

Hence President Bush's challenge to the Iraqi people and their leaders: "Now they must rise to the responsibilities of a free people and secure the blessings of their own liberty."

Nowhere was this challenge — and the uncertain response — more evident than in the aftermath of the horrific August 29 terrorist bombing in Najaf that killed at least 100 worshipers at Shiite Islam's holiest shrine. This attack was a deliberate strike at Iraq's fragile political center of gravity: its long-oppressed Shiite majority — roughly two-thirds of Iraq's 25 million citizens — and their mainstream clerical leadership. Its principal target was Ayatollah Mohammed Bakir Hakim, whose combined religious standing, political influence, and increasingly pragmatic views made him a pivotal figure among Iraq's most senior Shiite clerics, or mujtahids.

Hakim's assassination has left a vacuum in Iraqi religious and political life, especially since the only functioning Iraqi institutions — the U.S.-appointed Iraqi Governing Council (IGC) and the senior Shiite clerical establishment — have plainly failed to assume responsibility for coming to grips with the ongoing crisis that threatens to make Iraq ungovernable.

Within hours of the Najaf atrocity, several IGC members reflexively blamed U.S. forces for not protecting a site from which they had been explicitly — and quite publicly — barred by the city's most-senior Shiite clerics. Some even held U.S. forces, rather than the perpetrators, responsible for all such violence: "They are responsible for all blood that is shed everywhere in Iraq." Another IGC member had this to say: "I think someone is writing up a statement, somebody, I'm not sure. We don't have a satellite, you know, that's one of the problems. The Americans should give us a satellite." The Americans should give us a satellite.

(more)

http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/comment-cullinan090903.asp

[ixion]

1. a free people?

with a hostile occupation force in their midst? *sigh* I tell ya, this repuke spin really frustrates me.

[Cocoa]

2. blaming the governing council!

what a bad joke that is!

I mean one member of that council was the fucking BROTHER of the slain cleric. Instead of fucking blaming them, try listening.

I don't know who this author is, but I bet he's some 25-year-old puke with a bow tie. I wonder if he'd be willing to go to Iraq and share his thoughts in person with the IGC.

[Barrett808]

3. Here's the author's bio

John F. Cullinan, a lawyer, formerly served as a senior foreign-policy adviser to the U.S. Catholic bishops.

For what it's worth.