Insurgent JG

University of Alberta is a part of new United Nations project designed to help rebuild education system of war torn Iraq. Programme participant, a chemistry professor says that “While years of war and violence have emptied most classrooms of books and basic equipment, students keep coming to her to learn. It isn’t easy, we are suffering. But despite of all these things, the people they come,”

People of Iraq like everybody else in the world want to live and to study for prosperous future generations. In an attempt to help rebuild her country’s devastated educational system, UNESCO, the United Nations’ culture agency, has sent Prof. Al-Salihi and 13 other Iraqi professors to the University of Alberta on a twenty three day long course to learn from the school’s education experts and to return to Iraq to teach other teachers. Teacher Training Network for Iraq is partly funded by the Iraqi government. Programme focuses on numerous teaching skills apart from teaching techniques it also includes how to design instructional packages and modernize their outdated curriculums. Northern Iraq is more stable as compared to the central and southern parts of the country. War trodden country lacks buildings, books, and equipments such as chemicals and microscopes. War on terror isn’t the only hurdle, country is facing ongoing deadly violence fuelled by sectarian an ethnic conflicts. Iraq has one of the worst records for school attacks in the world. Since the U.S. lead invasion begun in 2003, more than 200 university professors have been killed. Dozens more are either kidnapped or fled the country. Apart from the U.S. invasion many militants view university campuses as centres of non-Islamic thought and routinely target them, which makes these institutions even more vulnerable to violence.

Two most interesting news items about US involvement in Iraq is the Congressional Democrats’ “flagship proposal” and a ’strategic partnership’ being proposed by Iraq. Both the news cause one to shake one’s head in wonder about the ideas Bush & the congress has about the future of the country in concern.

Flagship proposal will allow up to 70,000 US soldiers to remain in Iraq for years to come. Their main duty of action will be Counterterrorism, training Iraqi security forces and protecting US assets. This threefold mission of US military will be no different from what the forces are doing now in their camps now. Mr. Bush’s reason to attack and invade the sovereign country was to stop terrorism. Off course time proved that Iraq was not the hotbed of terrorism.

US government claimed that once Saddam Hussein will be disposed off and when Iraqi security forces be trained completely, US involvement in Iraq will come to an end. But why the Bush administration is not being able to oversee the flawed thinking that training Iraqi forces against their own people is a goal impossible to achieve. Their only want is to expel the foreign occupiers from their soil. The goal of whole training negates their nationalistic desires.

At the time of the murderous inhumane attack there were few US assets in the country. Now one can imagine the importance of US soldiers’ presence in the country. They will be putting their lives on the line to protect U.S. oil rigs and refineries and other related businesses to rip off Iraq’s natural resources.

Strategic Partnership offers U.S. a long term presence in Iraq in exchange of U.S. security guarantees. The associate press has summed up the strategic partnership efficiently; ‘Preferential treatment for U.S. investors could provide a huge windfall if Iraq can achieve enough stability to exploit its vast oil resources.” So dedicated U.S. soldiers will ensure the necessary stability to provide U.S. investors with a ‘huge windfall. Iraqi administration is apprehensive about internal resistance which they refer as a “foreign threat”. It is interesting to note that realization of foreign threat is what has brought this country a chaotic civil war killing more than 1,000,000 civilians and at least 3,000,000 &more to become displaced. Strategic partnership is best way to rule this new U.S. new colony, where the U.S. investors will be able to funnel Iraqi oil into American SUVs on cost of more then 4000 U.S. soldiers and innumerable citizens dead.

This article is rephrased version of Robert Fantina’s article “The future of Iraq”