"I made my way to my office in the Republican Palace and set about the first task I had been given: writing a new policy for the Iraqi police on pregnant officers. To be clear, I was 26 and knew nothing about policing, nor about pregnancy, nor, for that matter, about Iraq, but I was part of the Coalition Provisional Authority the American government that had been imposed after the war and this policy, I was told, was what Iraq needed."
"Five years later, I found myself sitting in a plush hotel suite in Jerusalem, as Tony Blair one of the architects of the Iraq war, but now the quartet special envoy for the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, waxed lyrical on the economic growth that was occurring in the Palestinian city of Jenin. Having spent a significant amount of time the day before negotiating the myriad of Israeli military checkpoints"
"Self-determination is not just a right under the UN Charter it is a fundamental desire of all peoples to shape their own affairs, and to build their own societies. The imposition of governance from the outside a colonialist venture with a long history premised on the extraction of wealth through the repression of freedom is simply not a sustainable path to a stable politics, because it is by nature lacking in popular support or buy-in, and incapable of an accurate and sufficiently nuanced unders"
A 26-year-old Coalition Provisional Authority appointee in Baghdad was assigned to write a policy for pregnant Iraqi police officers despite lacking experience in policing, pregnancy, or local context. Five years later, visits to Jerusalem and Jenin revealed a gulf between proclaimed economic growth and realities shaped by Israeli checkpoints and constrained movement. Western occupational governance repeatedly relies on external imposition rather than local legitimacy. Self-determination remains a legal right and a fundamental desire for people to shape and build their societies. Colonial-style governance premised on wealth extraction and repression lacks popular support. Such externally imposed systems are unsustainable and unable to grasp nuanced local needs.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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