Inside the Revolution by Joel C. Rosenberg

Author:Joel C. Rosenberg
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: RELIGION / Christian Life / Social Issues, POLITICAL SCIENCE / Political Freedom & Security / Terrorism
ISBN: 9781414363981
Publisher: Tyndale House Publishers, Inc.
Published: 2011-03-01T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty

Meet Jalal Talabani

The inside story of the first democratically elected president of Iraq

Few Reformers have intrigued or impressed me like Jalal Talabani. The first democratically and constitutionally elected president of Iraq, he is trying to govern a country devoid of any tradition of representative government in more than five thousand years of recorded history.

He is a Kurd in a nation where Kurds make up only about 15 percent of the population. And he is trying to govern a nation of Arabs, who make up some 80 percent of the population and have long ridiculed, hated, and even massacred the Kurds.494

He is a Sunni in a nation where Sunnis comprise only about 35 percent of the population. And he is trying to govern a nation of Shias, who comprise about 60 percent of the population.495

He is a Muslim, yet no national political leader in Iraq has done more to protect Iraqi Christians from both Sunni and Shia Radicals. Nor has any Iraqi leader besides Mithal al-Alusi been so friendly to Jews and particularly to Israelis. It was Talabani who shook the hand of Israeli defense minister Ehud Barak at a conference they both attended in Athens in July of 2008, sparking calls for his resignation from some members of the Iraqi parliament.496

It was also Talabani who said in November of 2007 that Israeli president Shimon Peres was “an individual welcome in Iraqi Kurdistan” because Peres had long supported “the establishment of an independent Kurdish state or independent federal region for the Kurds in the north of Iraq.”497

Looking closer, one finds that Talabani is a former guerrilla leader, yet he is trying to persuade Iraqis to give up sectarian violence as a political tool. He made his name as a Kurdish separatist, yet he is trying to persuade his nation to stick together, create a federal republic, and embrace national unity. He is the founder of a Socialist political party—the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan—yet since the early 1990s he has helped create a real, functioning market economy in the Iraqi Kurdish republics.

What’s more, today he supports Iraq’s flat tax, is doing what he can to attract more foreign direct investment into the country, is committed to U.S.- and British-style democracy, and is trying persuade his fellow Iraqis to embrace market economics and Jeffersonian democracy.

And if all that were not enough, Talabani is in his seventies, yet he is trying to govern a country where the average age is just twenty and nearly four in ten citizens are under the age of fifteen.

The task has been daunting, to say the least. Yet against all odds, it is now clear that Talabani has played a critical role in helping create a new Iraq that is increasingly peaceful and prosperous.

By the fall of 2008 an estimated 90 percent of Iraqi territory was considered safe for travel without much fear of kidnapping, assassination, or terrorist attack. Violence in Baghdad was down some 80 percent from its worst months in 2006. More than 70 percent of combat operations were being led by Iraqi military and security forces, with U.

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