Ali Allawi, Senior Adviser to Iraqi Prime Minister Al-Maliki, Delivers Remarks at the National Press Club On the War in Iraq

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Ali Allawi, Senior Adviser to Iraqi Prime Minister Al-Maliki, Delivers Remarks at the National Press Club On the War in Iraq

ALI ALLAWI DELIVERS REMARKS AT THE NATIONAL PRESS CLUB ON THE WAR IN IRAQ

APRIL 9, 2007

SPEAKER: ALI ALLAWI, SENIOR ADVISER TO IRAQI PRIME MINISTER AL-MALIKI

[*] ALLAWI: Thank you very much for this kind introduction.

And good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. The book that I wrote was really not in the works, as it were, when I first went to Baghdad. The intention was not to collect data to write a book. The book emerged primarily as my -- the results of my own experiences and my own sense of initially perplexity and then anger at the way that events turned out in Iraq.

When I first went back to Baghdad, shortly after the overthrow of the regime, I decided to keep a diary, mainly to record my own thoughts and my own experiences and my own reaction to events, both of an important nature and of less consequential nature.

And as a result, I did have a record, when I look back at it, of the changing moods and the changing environment in which I found myself.

I began to seriously think about writing a book some time after the end of the first phase of the occupation of Iraq, which was the phase of the CPA.

And why I think Iraq continued to be in occupation even after there was a notional transfer of power back to a so-called sovereign government was because the elements of an occupation were in place. The limited capacity of a central government to act, its nearly entire dependence on foreign military power, the intrusiveness of the administrative and support mechanisms that were left behind by the CPA in terms of the day-to-day management and policy-making in Iraq all really pointed to a continuation of the unusual conditions that Iraq found itself after the overthrow of the regime.

So the title, "The Occupation of Iraq," may seem to have only covered the first phase of the war and the postwar environment and ended in June, but I think in reality it continues to a very large extent to present times.

Not the classic form of occupation, not the one in which sovereignty is denied, where a foreign external power assumes direct authority over a country. But more, it's a different kind of limited sovereignty, one in which the ce...

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