“Holiday in Iraq”
Hitchens thoughts on the state of Kurdish-Iraqi affairs
following his “vacation” in Kurdistan. He visited Kurdistan after seeing a
series of commercials on American TV urging people to got there for a holiday.
He went with his son who Hitchens tells us, of course, is a “Greek-speaking
classicist.” His main point is that “…Kurdistan continues to demonstrate how
things could have been different” in Iraq as a whole.
His supporting arguments are: (1) Kurdistan has transformed
from a Saddam Hussein created wasteland to a thriving democratic, safe economic
zone, (2) the difference between how Kurdistan has recovered from the wars to
the rest of Iraq is stark, (3) the Kurds have not only reconstructed their
northern provinces but have driven the move to democracy in the rest of Iraq
including a Kurd as Iraq’s first and current President under the new
constitution. Jalal Talabani, (4) if things don’t work out for the Kurds as
part of greater Iraq, they have a Plan B to operate as a separate nation
because, as Hitchens quotes from Dr. Mohammad Sadik, “The state of Iraq is not
sacred…It was not created by God…It was created by Winston Churchill.”
Link to the Kurd vacation site:
New Learning: Kurdistan has a memorial of gratitude for
fallen American soldiers.
Land donated for the "Olive Branch Memorial" in Kurdistan:
New Word: peshmerga
= Kurdish for “those who face death” (a term for Kurdish Militiamen)
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