Wednesday, January 23, 2008
Settling on the flag: Is Iraq edging toward political reconciliation?
Iraq's parliament has reached a deal on the design of its national flag:
Iraqi lawmakers adopted a modified version of the national flag on Tuesday, removing three stars that symbolized the Baathist ideals of unity, freedom and socialism, and Saddam Hussein’s handwritten calligraphy of the Koranic incantation “Allahu akbar.”...
Members of Parliament voted 110 to 50 for the flag, which was introduced in 2004 and bears the red, white and black stripes of Iraq’s original banner. The design preserves a sense of continuous national identity, while purging the flag of Baathist allusions, supporters say.
Kurdish politicians, many of whom survived the genocidal gas bombings by Hussein forces in the Anfal, or spoils of war, campaign of the 1980s, were among the fiercest critics of the old flag. In 2006, Massoud Barzani, president of the semiautonomous Kurdistan Regional Government, refused to fly the flag from government offices, prompting fear of Kurdish separatism.
On Tuesday, however, Kurdish lawmakers pushed for a compromise, dropping their insistence on yellow lettering for the Arabic inscription, for a design without Baathist references.
If your political agenda requires you to ignore all evidence of reconciliation inside Iraq (so that you can continue to claim that the "surge" has failed), you will ridicule this compromise as basically meaningless. If, however, you are open to evidence that Iraq may be pulling together, you will remember what a passionate subject the national flag is even in a well-developed and unified democracy more than a century past its last civil war, such as the United States, and recognize that agreement on a flag might well be a sign that Iraqis are tired of fighting.
2 Comments:
By 
, at
Wed Jan 23, 05:42:00 AM:
Definitely flag is the highest identity of one nation, no country will ready to compromise on it. But we cannot compare Iraq with rest of the countries, because now the situations are totally different over there...
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By , at
Wed Jan 23, 09:28:00 AM:
Congratulations to the Iraqis for their solid efforts to establish a new country. I wish them the very best. Obviously every move they make as a united country to build a national identity that can survive our departure benefits us as much as them.
By the by, if Iraq fades as a campaign issue, and the economy continues to rise, wither the Dhimmicrats on the war? Will it, dare I say, become a "good war" suddenly? One can dream.
