Footnote:
Includes bibliographical references and index
Description:
"Today, Hamid al-Bayati serves as Iraqi ambassador to the United Nations. But for many years he lived in exile in London, where he worked with other opponents of Saddam Hussein's regime to make a democratic and pluralistic Iraq a reality. As former Western spokesman for the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), and as a member of the executive council of the Iraqi National Congress, two of the main groups opposing Saddam's regime, he led campaigns to alert the world to human rights violations in Iraq and win support from the international community for the removal of Saddam. An important Iraqi diplomat and member of Iraq's majority Shia community, he offers firsthand accounts of the meetings and discussions he and other Iraqi opponents to Saddam held with American and British diplomats from 1991 to 2004. Drawn from his personal archives of meeting minutes and correspondence, From Dictatorship to Democracy takes readers through the history of the opposition. We learn the views and actions of principal figures, such as SCIRI head Sayyid Mohammed Baqir Al-Hakim and the other leaders of the Iraqi National Congress, Ahmed Chalabi and his Kurdish counterparts, Massoud Barzani and Jalal Talabani. Al-Bayati vividly captures their struggle to unify in the face of not only Saddam's harsh and bloody repression but also an unresponsive and unmotivated international community. Al-Bayati's efforts in the months before and after the U.S. invasion also put him in direct contact with key U.S. figures such as Zalmay Khalilzad and L. Paul Bremer and at the center of the debates over returning Iraq to self-government quickly and creating the foundation for a secure and stable state. Al-Bayati was both eyewitness to and actor in the dramatic struggle to remove Saddam from power. In this unique historical document, he provides detailed recollections of his work on behalf of a democratic Iraq that reflect the hopes and frustrations of the Iraqi people."
Contents -- Foreword Peter Galbraith vii -- Introduction 1 -- Chapter 1: The Birth of the Iraqi Opposition 17 -- Chapter 2: The Journey from Salah al-Din to Washington 44 -- Chapter 3: Failed Coups and U.S. Policy Shifts 62 -- Chapter 4: A Strategic Shift: From Containment to Liberation 98 -- Chapter 5: Uniting the Opposition 129 -- Chapter 6: War and Occupation 181 -- Chapter 7: Dealing with Bremer 206 -- Chapter 8: Negotiating the Transition 247 -- Chapter 9: Self-Rule 289 --Conclusion: The New Iraq 310 -- Notes 315 -- Index 323