Iraq After the U.S. Withdrawal

Will the American withdrawal from Iraq be as bad as the occupation? Not necessarily, because that depends on many factors like the Iraqi people and the governmental authorities. Will those authorities forget its Iraqi identity? The prevailing impression is that they are acting more as Kurds or Shiites, ignoring their identity as Iraqis. As a result, Iraq today has transformed into a minority that is about to go extinct.

Where the risk lies is after the American withdrawal. The real question is whether or not the Iraqi people are able to restore their nationality and identity as citizens of Iraq! Being fully occupied with vengeance, sectarian racism and other stuff that I am not going to mention explains the trifled feeling of belonging to Iraq and also explains the hit-and-run way of thinking.

Iraq’s problem does not lie in its security and military forces. Iraq is a great country with a respectable league of scientists, qualified youngsters and land blessed with massive natural resources. There is nothing that stands before the prosperity and settlement of this great nation except for memory and forgetfulness. But the question is this: what should we forget and what should we remember?

To that end, we are the ones who forget and the ones who remember. What is the unifying script that sums up all the Iraqi people under one unified frame?

Of course, Iraq has already got such a script but for simple reasons it cannot be mentioned in this context. Such scripts tend to plant seeds of hatred among people and result in massacres and innocent deaths, tending to focus on the present, forgetting the future and the past.

What do the Iraqi people want for their future? What do they want to be? How do they view themselves and where were they before? Why do they insist on forgetting their own national army? Why insist on believing the fact that Iraq doesn’t have a 100-year-old national army that is one of the best in the world? Why do some people believe that Iraq is a planet that was only discovered on March 20th, 2009? Why insist that it was not a country before in which there were people, human beings, armies, authorities, universities, scientists, nations, agriculture, industry, tradition, Baghdad, Kazem al-Saher (a famous singer) and al-Forat?

Shiite and Kurds will only protect their Iraq by considering themselves Iraqis. Their behavior is based on panic and the hysterical suspicion of others. They seek peace of mind only by making potential opponents disappear and changing the geography and traditions of Iraq by dividing it into three different sections. This absurd behavior is against the laws of nature and against Iraq’s history and geography.

The panic from America’s allies has led America to change its agenda in Iraq, according to Paul Bremer during the first year of the occupation. Bremer also confessed that all of America’s activities in Iraq, from destroying its infrastructure to ruining its universities and educational systems, were only meant to satisfy their Kurdish and Shiite allies. However, despite all of America’s efforts to fulfill its allies’ greedy desire, they still sought peace of mind. America’s allies were under constant fear of the previous Iraqi government returning even after the execution of Saddam Hussein and his sons. According to Bremer, the Kurds and Shiite were still working underground for Iran, while London thought they were still a resistance force.

America will most definitely withdraw its troops from Iraq regardless of the oil there. But what will Iraq do with its oil resources?

It is true that Iraq longs to sell the oil at a decent price. However, the fear does not lie in Iraq or in any country that has plenty of oil: the fear lies in those countries that might stop buying! The real question becomes this: What if the United States of America refrained from buying oil?