PRESENTED BY:
AHMAD CHALABI
President of the Executive Council of the Iraqi National Congress, presented to the JINSA Spring Board Meeting in Washington, D.C. on June 2, 1997. The speech discusses the situation that currently exists in Iraq and explains possible steps to bring a democratic government.

JINSA SPRING BOARD MEETING
WASHINGTON, D.C.
JUNE 2, 1997
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Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen of JINSA,
I am pleased to be here.
The title of my talk today - Creating a Post Saddam
Iraq - was suggested to me by your executive
director, Tom Neumann. I have spent my life
fighting Saddam and I am most grateful to him for
the optimism and eventual success implied by the
choice. Tom, the JINSA Board, and JINSA
generally have been strong supporters of our struggle.
As a representative of the oppressed Iraqi people, I
offer my heartfelt thanks.
Iraq, despite the efforts of some to ignore its current
realities, is a country of enormous strategic impor-tance.
Iraq is blessed with a talented and industrious
population. She borders on six countries and the Gulf
and may fairly be described as the western world’s
gateway to the non-Arab Muslim East. More
importantly, Iraq is the only Middle Eastern country
with both water and oil - a lot of oil - in fact, the
world’s largest oil reserves. As Bruce Riedel,
Special Assistant to President Clinton, said last week,
“the last barrel of oil produced in the world will
almost certainly come from Iraq.”
I can only hope that there is an Iraq, a Middle East,
and a world so far in the future; certainly this
outcome is in doubt as long as Saddam remains in
power. For as long as Saddam remains in power,
Iraq remains a threat to regional and world security.
In 1990, the late, distinguished Professor Albert
Wohlstetter strongly advised that the U.S. could not
eliminate Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction
without eliminating Saddam himself. Wohlstetter has
been more than vindicated. Saddam Hussein retain
significant and dangerous unconventional weapons
capabilities - chemical, biological, and, even in the
extreme, possibly nuclear. As Ambassador Ekeus,
in charge of the UN Commission to disarm Saddam
has reported, Saddam has tons of stable nerve gas
and an operational missile force with a range easily
able to target Jeddah or Tel Aviv. Iraq in the wrong
hands is a worldwide threat; a fact well known to
the 750,000 U.S. service men and women who fought
in the Gulf just over six years ago.
It can be different. The Iraqi National Congress’
vision of a future Iraqi government is that of a
parliamentary democracy which renounces both
external aggression and internal repression and is at
peace with its neighbors and with its people. We
envision an Iraq free of weapons of mass destruction
and with a purely defensive military. We see an Iraq
of free markets and free trade proudly resuming her
role as a vital economic power.
Unfortunately, the brutal power struggles within Iraq
and in the region over the last half century have
greatly complicated this hoped for transition of Iraq
into a politically modern and internationally legiti-mate
state. After the Second World War, both Iraq
and the region were left in a precarious position.
Nationalist ideologies and a social structure slow to
adapt to the rising expectations of an educated middle
class combined in a politically explosive mixture.
Inept military rule led to perpetual internal upheaval
culminating in the rise to power of the most brutal
and extreme factions.
Of these, the Iraqi Ba’ath party was the most cruel
and, through their cruelty, they eventually gained
control of the country in 1968. While most of the
world was preoccupied, the Ba’ath launched their
rule with an orgy of killing and repression.
Not coincidentally, the Ba’ath’s first target was the
Iraqi Jewish community. Prominent Jews were
arrested, tortured and publicly executed in a calcu-lated
message to the rest of the Iraqi population. If
these prominent Jews, ostensibly protected by a
recently victorious Israel, were so easily destroyed
at no cost to the Ba’ath, clearly any other Iraqi could
suffer the same fate. And hundreds of thousands did.
The Ba’ath systematically destroyed Iraqi society;
eliminating or suborning all independent social
structures: schools, unions, mosques, churches,
synagogues newspapers, publishers, artists -everything
which offered an independent outlet for
Iraqi civil society.
Saddam took control of this apparatus of destruction
in 1979 and immediately expanded upon it with a
bloody purge of the Ba’ath Party itself - arresting,
torturing and executing thousands of his former
colleagues and allies.
But not content with the slaughter of even more
Iraqis, Saddam looked beyond Iraq’s borders for
victims. Without provocation, Saddam attacked
Iran - a nation five times the size and with three times
the population of Iraq.
In this homicidal folly, Saddam was aided by the west
and the Soviets alike. The cold war powers
competed to provide Saddam with coventional weap-ons
and to transfer to him the technologies and means
to produce deliverable weapons of mass destruction.
And deliver them he did. Throughout the eight-year
war, which left at least a million dead, Saddam
indiscriminately slaughtered both the Iranians and
his internal opposition with the chemical weapons
thus acquired.
Since Saddam assumed absolute power in Iraq there
has been no period without internal or external
conflict. The eight year carnage against Iran, the
war against Kuwait, the suppression of the post-war
popular uprising and the ongoing slaughter of the
Shi’ite and Kurdish populations are Saddam’s
continuous legacy of death and destruction.
And those in the wider world have not been immune
to this destruction. Since 1979, Saddam has
conducted terrorist activities against or within Egypt,
Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the UAE, Bahrain, Iran, Syria,
Lebanon, Israel, Turkey, Britain, France, Germany,
Austria, Pakistan, the Philippines, Indonesia, Malay-sia,
and the U.S. to offer just a partial list. Even
while specifically prohibited from terrorist activities
under UNSC resolution 687 - the Gulf War
cease-fire resolution - Saddam has attempted to
murder the former President of the United States and
may well be behind the bombings of Dhahran and
the World Trade Center.
And yet, despite this horrific litany of death and
destruction, the Iraqi people have fought against
Saddam and the Ba’ath from the first days until
today. The Kurdish north revolted in 1968, coups
were attempted in 1970 and 1973, the north rebelled
again in 1974, and coups failed in 1979. In 1980
Mohammed Baqr Sader was executed for his role in
internal dissent. In 1990, the Jibouri coup was sup-pressed.
In 1991, 70% of the population rose in open
rebellion. There have been five coup attempts in the
last five years. And this fall, Saddam invaded the
north to suppress the democratic opposition.
For twenty years, the Iraqi people have resisted
Saddam in the only way available to them - through
conspiratorial violence. And there can be no doubt
that they will continue to do so.
However, in the aftermath of the Gulf War, there arose
in the Iraqi body politic a new consensus, a new
conviction, that in order to defeat Saddam a more
comprehensive political platform was needed.
Coups, conspiracies and regional rebellions cannot
succeed against Saddam’s pitiless and limitless
terror. All opposition parties came to see that only a
broad-based popular movement committed to repre-sentative
government and to the protection of the
human rights of all Iraqis offers the moral and
practical power necessary for Saddam’s defeat.
The Iraqi National Congress is the practical
expression of this historic consensus.
The Iraqi National Congress unites all elements of
the democratic opposition to Saddam in a political
platform dedicated to his overthrow and to the
replacement of the Ba’ath dictatorship by a demo-cratic
parliamentary system which constitutionally
guarantees individual human rights. Despite the
ethnic and religious complexity of Iraqi society,
parties representing all facets are united in this
democratic goal.
Now is the time to make it happen.
The steps required are simple. First, we must
consider the realities of Saddam’s dictatorship. On
the most basic level it is important to realize that
Saddam enjoys almost no popular support within
Iraq. The evidence is overwhelming. In 1991, when
then President Bush called upon the Iraqi people to
rise up against Saddam, over 70% of them did. 14
out of Iraq’s 18 governorates were in open rebellion.
The United States government’s refusal to support
this rebellion - in fact, its complicity in the suppres-sion
of this popular movement - is a sad chapter in
your nation’s moral history. However, despite this
disaster in which hundreds of thousands of Iraqis
were slaughtered by Saddam’s henchmen within sight
of the coalition forces, opposition to Saddam has
increased in the past six years. The army will not
fight for him and the people remain desperate for an
alternative.
For example, in March of 1995, I led an attack on
Saddam’s forces in northern Iraq. In less than a
month, suffering almost no casualties, INC forces
were able defeat two Iraqi divisions and recruit over
1000 Iraqi officers and soldiers to the cause of
freedom. Only a lack of funds and the last-minute
withdrawal of U.S. political support prevented our
capture of several key Iraqi cities.
Even Saddam’s invasion of the north this fall with a
death-force of 400 tanks and 40,000 soldiers has been
unable to suppress our popular support. We are
rebuilding our bases, facilities and forces with the
strong support of the Iraqi people. Last week, we
held a political rally in Suleymania, in northeast Iraq,
and attracted over 10,000 Iraqis eager to confront
the regime.
Second, it is important to note the physical weak-ness
of the regime. In order to invade the north,
Saddam had to cannibalize almost his entire
effective armored force and its supporting infantry.
Of those, almost none could be expected to remain
loyal in the face of a properly armed resistance. But
because the population and democratic opposition
based in the north had relied on the United States’
categorical assurances - from the highest level, to
use the Washington phrase - that the U.S. would
protect the north from armored incursion, this resis-tance
was not available. This time, we plan to
organize ourselves differently.
The INC plan for Saddam’s overthrow is simple.
From our base in the north, we intend to confront
and attract Saddam’s army on several fronts. Our
experience has shown that the principal difficulty we
will face is the care and feeding of the deserting Iraqi
Army. In this effort we will require support from
the U.S. but only political and logistical support.
Secretary Albright’s strong speech in March is a good
first step towards the type of political support we
need. Her flat refusal to negotiate with Saddam, her
embrace of the opposition and her willingness to
outline concrete steps which could be taken to
rehabilitate a post-Saddam Iraq offer us a strong
foundation on which to build.
The next step is an open U.S. commitment to
Saddam’s overthrow and its practical expression in
serious support of the democratic opposition. We
need U.S. support to consolidate and expand our base
in the north after last fall’s setback. This support
must include the maintenance of the no-fly zones,
a position already taken by the U.S. and the means
to feed, house and otherwise provide for the Iraqi
Army as it abandons Saddam. Intelligence, training
and limited support equipment such as communica-tion
and transport would also be useful.
What we don’t need are U.S. troops or high technol-ogy
weapons. We are prepared to fight for our
country and are convinced that only an Iraqi Army
can remove Saddam. The weaponry needed is
minimal and widely available in the region if U.S.
political support for Saddam’s overthrow is given.
The recent weakening of support for the Gulf War
coalition, which has been noted by many commen-tators,
is a consequence of the U.S.’s perceived lack
of resolve against Saddam. If this perception is
reversed, and Secretary Albright’s speech was a good
first step in this reversal, the Iraqi opposition can
expect and, in fact, has been promised strong regional
assistance. With U.S. political backing and regional
support for a process of gradual encirclement,
Saddam can be driven into hiding in Takrit and
eventually removed.
Of course, much of the U.S. concern about this plan
in the past has centered on the successor regime. It
is difficult to imagine a situation in Iraq less suitable
to U.S. interests than a resurgent Saddam but we
recognize that there is at least some comfort in
confronting the devil you know. For this reason, the
INC has been at great pains to develop a program for
the transition to a democratic, stable and peaceful
government. Key elements of this transition would
include a general amnesty to all but the most
culpable of Ba’ath officials, a governing transitional
council of all religious, political, and ethnic leader-ship
and an explicit commitment to Iraq’s unity and
territorial integrity.
I am here today to ask for your help. For those
interested in more military details, I would be glad
to provide them. For those who are interested in other
areas, such as our relationship with neighboring
countries or our internal Iraqi media campaign, I will
describe them to you. We want to fight Saddam. We
want to fight Saddam openly with U.S. and interna-tional
political support. Help us defeat Saddam. A
democratic and peaceful Iraq is in the interest of the
U.S., the region and the world. Thank you.
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DONE !!!!
NOW CHALABI IS WONDERING IRAG , AS US WATCH DOG