Coup, countercoup
April 20, 2006News & Politics
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From the Asia Times:
Amid all the political confusion in Iraq, Baghdad is swirling with rumors that former prime minister Iyad Allawi is planning a military coup to end the gridlock over the choice of Ibrahim al-Jaafari as prime minister-designate.
Allawi's group currently has 25 seats in the 275-seat parliament - not enough to realize the former prime minister's ambitions through democratic and legal means, justifying, perhaps, a military coup to achieve them by force. ...
Allawi has naturally denied rumors of a coup. In an interview with the London-based Al-Hayat newspaper on Wednesday he said, "I never had faith in coups, which brought nothing but catastrophes to our people (in reference to the military coups that have rocked Iraq since the revolution of 1958)."
He dropped a confusing remark, however, saying that although he would not support a military putsch, he nevertheless did not believe that pure democracy was compatible with Iraqi politics. Allawi noted, "One cannot bring American democracy to a country that is occupied like Iraq, and whose infrastructure, as well as military and governmental institutions, have been destroyed."Well, that's disastrous. The article I pulled these quotes from is ambiguous about whether or not this is a good idea, a pretty strange position in its own right, but I haven't quite read an analysis like this elsewhere.
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