powerclown

*I agree, and not only you and me, but many, many countries around the world also understand that a stable Iraq is in the best interests of everyone, as the below story illustrates. (I watched Control Room last night btw...good movie, too many broadcasts of injured iraqi children, imo. We all know war is hell. Interesting to hear the al-Jazeera producer mention the need for all media outlets to 'propagandize' their coverage. I don't disagree.)
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Iraqi Army Col. Thear, commander of the 2nd Battalion, 2nd Iraqi Army Brigade briefs his troops during training on
the armored personnel carriers at the Diyala Regional Training Facility on Forward Operating Base Normandy, Iraq
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France, Other Nations Help Train Iraqi Forces
Europe quietly aids reconstruction effort


Elizabeth Bryant, Chronicle Foreign Service
Saturday, May 21, 2005

The six men seated around the white classroom table -- including the pudgy Foreign Ministry attache, the former army captain, the man with the sad, brown eyes who introduced himself vaguely as a "director general" -- were the unlikely vanguard of Iraq's bold new experiment in democracy.

"What's most important are the principles," said Jean-Pierre Massias, the head of this University of Auvergne training program for senior Iraqi officials. "The rule of law. Checks and balances. Compromise. How local governments can be a tool to prevent conflicts. How to administer a country."

After bitterly dividing over the war, Europe is uniting to help reconstruct Iraq, and these civics lessons in central France are part of that effort. Plans are in the works to coach about 750 Iraqi judges and prison guards on Western law and to hold an international conference in Brussels. European programs to train Iraqi security forces are mostly taking place outside the turmoil-torn country. The same stipulation is tied to a French offer to drill 1,500 Iraqi troops and police.

These efforts -- and more on the drawing board -- are taking place as the newly seated Iraqi government struggles to get under way amid the continuing carnage that appears to target the same kinds of people the Europeans are training.

"Europeans aren't going to ratchet up their military commitment in Iraq - - they're going in the opposite direction," said Richard Whitman, a European expert at Chatham House, a London-based policy institute, referring to the decision by several EU members to pull their troops from Baghdad. "But they will contribute to the development and administration of Iraq, especially out of the country -- that's where their comfort zone lies."

Before leaving his Paris post, former U.S. Ambassador Howard Leach chided France for not doing more to secure a shaky peace.

"They can offer to train more people. They can contribute funds for the reconstruction of Iraq," said Leach, who departed for his part-time home in San Francisco last month. "French companies can become more involved in rebuilding the economic strength of Iraq."

French Foreign Minister Michel Barnier suggested that Paris is willing to offer a more generous hand to a country where France once was a powerful economic player. "We're willing to go fairly far when it comes to matters of civilian, administrative and economic cooperation," he told reporters recently.

The course held last month at Cleremont-Ferrand included lectures on federalism and decentralization, the composition of local governments and budgeting. While the Iraqis here describe themselves as fierce opponents of deposed President Saddam Hussein, they take France's stand on the U.S.-led war in stride.

"France was against the Iraq war for humanitarian reasons," said Audey Abed Awn, 33, an official in the Foreign Affairs Ministry. "Now, France is opening its doors to Iraqis."

From the first day -- when the students turned out to be lower-level bureaucrats rather than the eight governors who had been expected -- it has been an exercise in flexibility. "We're not absolutely certain who all these people are," Massias said. "We have no idea who's Sunni and who's Shiite. We don't know their professional backgrounds. ... The one thing I know is that they're interested. They're curious. They ask a lot of questions."

At a morning lecture on decentralization, for example, 51-year-old Talib Al-Mhana pressed for more information about French laws. "How are they publicized?" Al-Mhana asked in Arabic. "How do French peasants learn about legal changes?"

A former captain in Hussein's army, Al-Mhana fled Iraq in 1981. He joined the Iraqi opposition, he said, moving from Lebanon to Syria and then to the Netherlands. He returned to Iraq in 2003. He heads Iraq's "de-Baathification" committee, aimed, he said, at reintegrating Hussein-era bureaucrats into the new Iraqi government.

Like the rest of the men here, he is learning his new job from scratch --
and weathering the downsides, including two assassination attempts in Baghdad. "It's true, there are attacks against us," said Al-Mhana, whose family remains in the Netherlands. "But we hope democracy will arrive one day."

Ahmad Abd, whose business card reads "press man," was in the anti-Hussein opposition. Today he edits the Al-Zamman newspaper. "There's freedom of expression now," he said, "but it's hard to find out the real truth from the Americans."

Massias, the program head, is not a Middle East specialist, but he has trained dozens of legal and political professionals from ex-communist countries.

"The example of former Soviet states is very interesting for the Iraqis because it's about governments in transition -- from totalitarianism to democracy," he said.

"And also the territorial problems -- Kurdistan for them corresponds to a Chechnya, or a Crimea," he added, naming two restive, former Soviet republics and the northern Iraqi region seeking a degree of autonomy in the new Iraq. "What I think they want to find out is how to give the Kurds a little bit of power, without losing them. It's a country that lives in fear of seeing Kurdistan secede."

But another main message for the Iraqis here, he said, is about burying past grievances.

"I tried to tell them there can't be social revenge against people who were attached to Saddam Hussein," Massias said. "If you make these people afraid, they'll become your enemies and you'll have to pressure them to keep calm.

"And that," he added, "is not democracy."