GIVE PEACE A CHANCE

Talk about “Elvis has left the building”. The American administrator of Iraq, Paul Bremer, symbolically and physically, jumped on a plane and left Iraq within an hour of handing of sovereignty to the new interim Iraqi Government yesterday.

As I mentioned early in my 3AW programme yesterday the “coalition of the willing secretly conspired with the new, fledgling Iraqi Government to get out early. Two days before the June 30 deadline originally imposed by President Bush.

It was a clever move. Symbolic and sensible. As I said to our Canberra Bureau Chief, Alison Carabine, when the rumour first started circulating, it was a clever move to shrink the Handover Ceremony Target for the terrorists and insurgents who have stepped up their grisly campaign of kidnapping and beheadings. Including an American marine overnight.

They surely would have had a plan to unleash a slew of suicide bombers in major cities throughout Iraq around the midnight June 30 ceremony.

By going early the Allies have entrusted the security plans for Iraq to the Iraqis themselves. The insurgents will now be fighting their own people and people of their own faith.

Saddam Hussein is to be turned over to the Iraqi courts (probably next week) and formally charged.

President Bush and Prime Minister Blair were in Turkey for a crucial NATO meeting when the new sovereign state of a democratic Iraq was created.

At the exact minute of the handover George W. Bush glanced at his watch, shook hands with Tony Blair and scrawled on an historic piece of paper: “ Let Freedom Reign”. He probably didn’t even realize how close the quote was to the civil rights leader in his own country, Martin Luther King Jr, who said: Let Freedom Ring.

Critics will still harp that the Americans and the Brits and Australia should never have gone to war in Iraq in the first place. They didn’t find those weapons of mass destruction after all those years of Sadam Hussein defying the United Nations inspectors.

But a tyrant has gone. His evil sons are dead. For twenty five million Iraqis there is a chance for a better life.

Their new president said: “This is a historic day, a happy day, a day that all Iraqis have been looking forward to. This is the time when we take the country back into the international community”.

It won’t be easy. More bombs and deaths and televised executions will follow.

Maybe after the Americans captured Saddam Hussein they could have just said “ we won” and gone home.

It is obviously more complicated than that and American and British and Australian troops will have to stay there longer than the reckless, feckless, impulsive Christmas deadline set by Mark Latham.

But at least it will, as John Lennon once sang, give peace a chance.

Tuesday, June 29, 2004

©Copyright Derryn Hinch 2004