AP News, June 13th, 2007
Iraq's embattled prime minister compared the fight for order in Iraq to the U.S. Civil War almost 150 years ago, saying the current struggle "is perhaps even more complicated."
Nouri Al-Maliki's comments in an opinion piece in Wednesday's edition of The Wall Street Journal come as his Shiite-led government faces growing pressure at home and from abroad.
U.S. lawmakers, particularly Democrats, have pushed for a timeline for a withdrawal of U.S. forces, arguing that the government in Baghdad is not moving swiftly enough to stop sectarian violence.
The Bush administration has said a timeline would encourage insurgents to simply wait until foreign forces leave Iraq. But administration officials, faced with mounting domestic opposition to the U.S. troop deployment, are pressing the Iraqi government to hurry the pace of reforms.
Al-Maliki described the two countries as fighting for the principles of freedom, in battles that claimed hundreds of thousands of lives.
"Our struggle in Iraq is similar to the great American quest, and is perhaps even more complicated," he wrote.
"A fundamental struggle is being fought on Iraqi soil between those who believe that Iraqis, after a long nightmare, can retrieve their dignity and freedom, and others who think that oppression is the order of things and that Iraqis are doomed to a political culture of terror, prisons and mass graves," al-Maliki said.
He said one key reform, the much-anticipated and much-delayed oil law, is "well on its way" to being approved. The law would divide revenues among provinces based on their share of the total population _ a nod to Sunni Arabs who feared being cut off from the country's main revenue source by the Shiites and Kurds who control Iraq's oil-producing regions.
He added that the national budget this year is the largest in Iraq's history.
"Our path has been made difficult by the saboteurs and the terrorists who target our infrastructure and our people," he said.
On Wednesday, bombers destroyed the two minarets of a revered Shiite shrine, triggering fears of a new burst of sectarian fighting. The Askariya shrine had also been targeted in a 2006 bombing that shattered its golden dome _ an attack that unleashed a wave of retaliatory violence between Shiite and Sunni Muslims.
Al-Maliki also described the difficulties of recovering from the earlier destruction created by the regime of Saddam Hussein.
"Today when I hear the continuous American debate about the struggle raging in Iraq, I can only recall with great sorrow the silence which attended the former dictator's wars," al-Maliki wrote.
But he added that he understands and even admires the current American debate over the war in Iraq. "I harbor no resentment and fully understand that the basic concerns of Americans are the safety of their young people fighting in our country and the national interests of their society."
Stressing his admiration for the importance of liberty in America, he asked for the chance to let Iraq pursue the same, in a struggle to free the country not only from warring militias but from "regional powers that have reached into our affairs."
"We will not permit Iraq to be a battleground for other powers," al-Maliki concluded. "In the contests and ambitions swirling around Iraq, we are neutral and dedicated to our country's right to prosperity and a new life, inspired by a memory of a time when Baghdad was _ as Washington is today _ a beacon on enlightenment on which others gazed with admiration."
