Iraq post-war nation-building 'has totally failed'
Polish Prime Minister Marek Belka said yesterday that post-war nation-building efforts in Iraq have “failed totally", but expressed hope that the country’s different religious groups can work together to build an independent nation.
Belka, speaking at a panel discussion on nation-building at an international forum in Sweden, said the US and its allies made a mistake by basing its post-war plan for Iraq on the same model used for Germany after World War II.
“It failed totally,” Belka said. “Many mistakes, major mistakes, have been committed.”
But there are reasons to be optimistic about Iraq, Belka said, including the success of recent elections.
“The political process is moving on,” Belka said, adding that elected officials in Iraq are “doing what should be done.”
However, the key for creating an independent nation in Iraq is to “reconcile the divergent interests” of the country’s three major groups, the Shiites, Sunni Arabs and Kurds, Belka said.
“There is much more of an Iraqi identity (among the groups) than you might think,” he said. “They all think in terms of Iraq.”
Poland, a staunch US ally, participated in the invasion of Iraq and has commanded a multinational force there since September 2003. Since then, the Polish-led force’s size has shrunk from 9,500 to 4,000 troops.
Former US Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott, who also participated in the round-table discussion, said US President George Bush has put in risk “the peace of the greater Middle East with this venture.”
Talbott urged the US and Great Britain to retain their troops in Iraq to provide sufficient security until the country’s armed forces are able to defend against insurgents by themselves.
But he added that next year’s midterm elections in the US may lead to a premature withdrawal of the troops in Iraq.
“My concern is that American domestic politics are gonna kick in on this issue next year, with midterm elections 2006,” Talbott said, “and that President Bush is going to redefine what ’staying the course’ means, in a way that allows him to increasingly draw down at a schedule that does not begin to leave time for the Iraqi forces to be able to provide security for that country.”
The panel discussion was part of the Tallberg Forum 2005, where more than 400 politicians, business leaders, artists and scholars discussed how people from different cultures and religions can best live together. Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili and Geoff Mulgan, a former policy adviser for British Prime Minister Tony Blair, also took part in the debate.
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