Chapter Twenty

Meet Jalal Talabani

The inside story of the first democratically elected president of Iraq

Few Reformers have intrigued or impressed me like Jalal Talabani. The first democratically and constitutionally elected president of Iraq, he is trying to govern a country devoid of any tradition of representative government in more than five thousand years of recorded history.

He is a Kurd in a nation where Kurds make up only about 15 percent of the population. And he is trying to govern a nation of Arabs, who make up some 80 percent of the population and have long ridiculed, hated, and even massacred the Kurds.494

He is a Sunni in a nation where Sunnis comprise only about 35 percent of the population. And he is trying to govern a nation of Shias, who comprise about 60 percent of the population.495

He is a Muslim, yet no national political leader in Iraq has done more to protect Iraqi Christians from both Sunni and Shia Radicals. Nor has any Iraqi leader besides Mithal al-Alusi been so friendly to Jews and particularly to Israelis. It was Talabani who shook the hand of Israeli defense minister Ehud Barak at a conference they both attended in Athens in July of 2008, sparking calls for his resignation from some members of the Iraqi parliament.496

It was also Talabani who said in November of 2007 that Israeli president Shimon Peres was “an individual welcome in Iraqi Kurdistan” because Peres had long supported “the establishment of an independent Kurdish state or independent federal region for the Kurds in the north of Iraq.”497

Looking closer, one finds that Talabani is a former guerrilla leader, yet he is trying to persuade Iraqis to give up sectarian violence as a political tool. He made his name as a Kurdish separatist, yet he is trying to persuade his nation to stick together, create a federal republic, and embrace national unity. He is the founder of a Socialist political party—the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan—yet since the early 1990s he has helped create a real, functioning market economy in the Iraqi Kurdish republics.

What’s more, today he supports Iraq’s flat tax, is doing what he can to attract more foreign direct investment into the country, is committed to U.S.- and British-style democracy, and is trying persuade his fellow Iraqis to embrace market economics and Jeffersonian democracy.

And if all that were not enough, Talabani is in his seventies, yet he is trying to govern a country where the average age is just twenty and nearly four in ten citizens are under the age of fifteen.

The task has been daunting, to say the least. Yet against all odds, it is now clear that Talabani has played a critical role in helping create a new Iraq that is increasingly peaceful and prosperous.

By the fall of 2008 an estimated 90 percent of Iraqi territory was considered safe for travel without much fear of kidnapping, assassination, or terrorist attack. Violence in Baghdad was down some 80 percent from its worst months in 2006. More than 70 percent of combat operations were being led by Iraqi military and security forces, with U.S. assistance, and Iraqi forces were increasingly battle-tested and successful, killing and capturing jihadists in impressive numbers. Iraqi civilians throughout the country were becoming so disgusted by Muslim-on-Muslim violence they were turning against the jihadist leaders, calling the tip lines and helping U.S. and Iraqi forces capture key leaders and huge caches of weapons.

As violence dropped, Iraq’s economy began accelerating. Oil production and exports increased. Scores of foreign companies began arriving. Tens of thousands of Iraqis created their own small businesses. New jobs were created. Housing prices rose. New construction began. Cranes were everywhere, particularly in the north, as new high-rise office buildings and apartments were springing up. By the end of 2008, the Iraqi economy was doing so well that the government actually wound up with a budget surplus of about $80 billion, tangible evidence that the country was finally moving in the right direction.498

There is far more to be done, to be sure. Iraq is by no means out of the woods. But though it is seldom reported in the Western press, many good things have occurred in Iraq since Talabani came to power. The question is, why?

The Rise of “Mam Jalal”

Who is Jalal Talabani? Where did he come from? Where does he want to take Iraq?

To understand the Iraqi president’s remarkable rise to power and the vision he has for his country, several colleagues and I took the opportunity to travel to Iraq twice in 2008, once in February and again in late September. We traveled extensively throughout the Kurdish provinces where Talabani made his name, talking to people who have followed his career for decades and affectionately call him “Mam Jalal,” or “Uncle Jalal.” We visited the town where he was born and saw the home he still owns and visits along the shores of Lake Dukan, not far from the border of Iran. We interviewed several of his senior advisors. We also interviewed a number of U.S. diplomatic and military officials in Iraq and Washington who have known Talabani over the years.

Here is what we learned.

Talabani was born on November 12, 1933, during a time of tumultuous political change in Iraq. Just one year earlier, Iraq had gained its independence from British control after being carved out of the Ottoman Empire as a modern country by the League of Nations on November 11, 1920.

As a child, Talabani was raised in the village of Koya, near Lake Dukan, in the heart of Iraqi Kurdistan. Koya is surrounded by beautiful countryside whose geography reminded me of New Mexico or Arizona in the American Southwest—rugged mountains, arid deserts, and vast, painted skies that are particularly moving when the sun rises and sets. It is known by many Kurds to be a “progressive” center, home of many well-known Kurdish poets, singers, and intellectuals.

As he grew older, Talabani went to high school in Erbil, a more modern and prosperous Kurdish city that today boasts a population of more than one million and is the official political and administrative capital of Iraqi Kurdistan.499 It was there that Talabani became politically active, founding his own secret Kurdish student group at the age of thirteen and officially joining the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP)—headed up by Mustafa Barzani, the legendary Kurdish resistance leader—at the age of fourteen. Just four years later, Talabani had so impressed his elders with his intelligence and political savvy that he was actually elected to the KDP’s central committee, helping shape future policy and strategy.

“Upon finishing his secondary education, he sought admission to medical school but was denied it by authorities of the then ruling Hashemite monarchy owing to his political activities,” notes his official biography. “In 1953 he was allowed to enter law school but was obliged to go into hiding in 1956 to escape arrest for his activities as founder and secretary general of the Kurdistan Student Union. Following the July 1958 overthrow of the Hashemite monarchy, Mr. Talabani returned to law school, at the same time pursuing a career as a journalist and editor. . . . After graduating in 1959, Mr. Talabani performed national service in the Iraqi army, where he served in artillery and armor units and served as a commander of a tank unit.”500

Ironically, it was in the Iraqi military that Talabani received the training in weapons, military strategy, and combat tactics that enabled him in 1961 to join Mustafa Barzani as one of the leaders of the “first Kurdish revolution,” an armed and violent insurgency against the Iraqi government.

Talabani and Barzani’s dream was to create a free Kurdistan, independent from Baghdad’s control. Their plan was to recruit, train, mobilize, and deploy young Kurdish men to attack Iraqi military units and installations until Baghdad relented and recognized the Kurds’ right of self-determination. Their chief allies were Iran, the U.S., and Israel.

Talabani and Barzani shrewdly exploited the Iranians’ long-standing hatred for the Iraqi Arabs and successfully petitioned the shah to partially fund their rebellion against Baghdad. They also persuaded Washington and Jerusalem that in the spirit of the old Arab proverb “the enemy of my enemy is my friend,” financially supporting the Kurds against the anti-America, anti-Israel government in Iraq and working in concert with the pro-Kurd shah was a wise investment. The CIA and the Mossad, therefore, became quite active in Kurdistan during this time.

A House Divided

By the early 1970s, the Kurdish insurgents had inflicted significant damage and casualties against the Iraqi central government, but serious cracks were growing within the resistance movement.

When the Ba’ath Party offered the Kurds a peace agreement and partial autonomy, the KDP under Barzani was inclined to accept the deal. Many Kurds were exhausted from years of armed struggle. Talabani, however, fiercely opposed anything short of full independence.

By 1974, the KDP’s negotiations with Baghdad had collapsed, but the strains between Barzani and Talabani were pronounced. The two men had developed two very different strategies to achieve their common goals. At the same time, they each had amassed a large and growing following of deeply devoted Kurdish supporters. A split was coming, and the events of 1975 became the turning point.

In March of 1975, Baghdad and Tehran signed what became known as the “Algiers Agreement.” The accord—negotiated in secret in Algeria by Saddam Hussein, then Iraq’s vice president—was designed to settle long-standing disputes over land and border demarcations between the two countries. As part of the deal, Saddam demanded that the shah cut off aid to the Kurdish rebellion against Baghdad.

The shah agreed. Funds stopped flowing from Tehran almost instantly. Saddam returned to Iraq, quickly marshaled his forces, and launched a massive counterattack against the Kurdish forces. Barzani was forced to flee for his life into exile, eventually ending up in Washington, D.C.

Talabani sensed his moment to seize the mantle of leadership. He broke with the KDP and formed his own political party, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, or PUK. And then, on June 1, 1976—after working feverishly to procure sufficient foreign money and weapons—Talabani launched a “second Kurdish revolution” against Saddam and the Iraqi government.

By 1979, the Kurds were fully reengaged in their bloody struggle with Baghdad, but rarely had they felt more isolated. The Ayatollah Khomeini—who for years had lived in exile in Iraq—now seized full control of the government of Iran. Saddam Hussein seized full control of the government of Iraq. The Carter administration cut off funding for the Kurdish rebels. And Mustafa Barzani died in Washington on March 1, 1979. His son, Massoud Barzani, picked up where his father left off, but tensions between the Talabanis and Barzanis continued unabated, and the Kurdish people entered the 1980s with little hope of achieving the freedoms for which they had fought so hard and so long.

Crimes against Humanity

It is difficult to adequately describe the evils that Saddam Hussein and his regime inflicted upon the Kurdish people in the 1980s, but even a brief description helps explain why Talabani fought so hard to free his people from Saddam’s reign of terror.

From 1986 to 1989, Saddam launched Operation Anfal, a military campaign designed to neutralize Kurdish opposition to him once and for all. Heading up the operation was Saddam’s first cousin, a man named Ali Hassan al-Majid, who eventually became known as “Chemical Ali” because of his use of chemical weapons of mass destruction against the Kurds. After the fall of Saddam’s regime in 2003, both Saddam and Chemical Ali were tried in an Iraqi court, convicted, sentenced to death, and hanged for crimes against humanity. Part of the charges against them: killing at least 180,000 Kurds using poison gas and mass executions.

“I smelled something dirty and strange,” a fifty-six-year-old Kurdish woman testified during the trial, her voice cracking with emotion as she recalled with horror the events of June 5, 1987, the day that Iraqi forces dropped bombs filled with poison gas on her town. “People were falling to the ground. They vomited and their eyes were blinded. We couldn’t see anything. We were all afraid.”501

“I saw dozens of women and children walking with their eyes red; many were vomiting blood,” a Kurdish doctor told the court. “Everything in the village was dead—the birds, the animals, the sheep. . . . I treated a man whose entire body was full of chemical bubbles, but he died a few days later.”502

During the trial, which began on August 21, 2006, the court “heard more than seventy witnesses who described chemical air attacks, villages being burned, and Kurds being rounded up and tortured,” the Reuters news service reported. The prosecution also presented the court with official Iraqi government documents authorizing the attacks.

“The first document was a 1987 memo from Iraq’s military intelligence seeking permission from the president’s office to use mustard gas and the nerve agent sarin against Kurds.”503 A second document proved that “Saddam had ordered military intelligence to study the possibility of a ‘sudden strike’ using such weapons against Iranian and Kurdish forces.” A third document—an internal memo written by an Iraqi military intelligence officer—confirmed that Iraqi intelligence “had received approval from the president’s office for a strike using ‘special ammunition’ and emphasized that no strike would be launched without first informing the president.”504

Betrayal

On August 2, 1990, Saddam ordered Iraqi forces to invade Kuwait, claiming Iraq was the rightful owner of Kuwait’s territory and oil. This, in turn, triggered President George H. W. Bush (“Bush 41”) to marshal an international coalition to protect Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf states from Iraqi aggression and to drive the Iraqis out of Kuwait. The president ordered U.S. forces to war on January 16, 1991. Operation Desert Storm turned out to be a dazzling success, but there were unintended consequences for the Kurds.

On February 16, as U.S. and Coalition forces augmented a punishing air campaign against Iraqi forces in Kuwait with a stunningly effective ground campaign, Bush 41 publicly called upon “the Iraqi military and the Iraqi people to take matters into their own hands, to force Saddam Hussein, the dictator, to step aside.”505 The theory in Washington was that while the U.N. Security Council had not authorized a U.S. overthrow of Saddam’s regime during the liberation of Kuwait, perhaps the U.S. could inspire a successful coup in Baghdad anyway.

Talabani and Massoud Barzani saw their moment to achieve liberation with U.S. assistance. They immediately ordered their Kurdish paramilitary forces in northern Iraq into action against Saddam’s forces, even as the leaders of Shia paramilitary groups in southern Iraq did the same. But when Saddam counterattacked and began killing Kurdish and Shia guerrillas and civilians in large numbers, the U.S. refused to come to their aid.

“I made very clear that we did not intend to go into Iraq,” Bush 41 said at the time. “I condemn Saddam Hussein’s brutality against his own people. But I do not want to see U.S. forces who have performed with such skill and dedication sucked into a civil war in Iraq.”506

Kurdish leaders were stunned by what they saw as an American betrayal. They implored Washington to protect their civilians from another Saddam-driven genocide. But at first, the White House turned a deaf ear to their pleas.

“I made clear from the very beginning that it was not an objective of the Coalition or the United States to overthrow Saddam Hussein,” Bush 41 insisted. “So I don’t think the Shiites in the south, those who are unhappy with Saddam in Baghdad, or the Kurds in the north ever felt that the United States would come to their assistance to overthrow this man. . . . I have not misled anybody about the intentions of the United States of America, or has any other coalition partner, all of whom to my knowledge agree with me in this position.”507

It was winter and bitterly cold in the mountains of northern Iraq. But as Kurdish casualties mounted rapidly due to Iraqi air strikes, several million Kurdish civilians decided to brave the elements and flee into southern Turkey. Few of the refugees had food, water, tents, or warm enough clothing for themselves or their children.

News coverage of the mushrooming humanitarian crisis and the fervent and unrelenting pleas of the Kurdish leadership eventually moved the U.S. and the U.N. into action. The U.S. launched Operation Provide Comfort, creating a no-fly zone over the Kurdish provinces of Iraq—enforced by American fighter jets—to keep Saddam’s air force from bombing the Kurds any longer. It also created an airlift operation to bring seventeen thousand tons of desperately needed humanitarian relief supplies to the Kurds in northern Iraq and southern Turkey.

The Silver Lining

By God’s grace, there was a silver lining to the initial (and brief) American inaction on behalf of the Kurdish people. Though the delay was inexcusable, U.S. financial and political support for the Kurds finally did kick in and was a great blessing, saving many lives and eventually convincing the vast majority of the Kurdish refugees to return to their homes. What’s more, the U.S.-designed no-fly zone operation effectively separated Iraqi Kurdistan from the rest of Iraq. No longer was Saddam Hussein able to attack the Kurdish people. Thus, in effect, Kurdish autonomy was established.

Talabani and Barzani wasted no time. Though there was no love lost between the two men, they knew they now had widespread international moral and political support. They also knew they had to leverage that support to create an independent enclave as quickly as they possibly could.

Their own internal tensions notwithstanding, they and their advisors soon created the Kurdistan Regional Government. They formed a parliament. They drafted a democratic constitution. They organized free and reasonably fair elections for the first time in Kurdish history. They began to encourage within Kurdistan everything that had not been possible when Saddam ruled them—freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of worship, a free press. They also began building diplomatic ties with the rest of the world and trying to attract financial aid and direct foreign investment.

Was it messy? Yes, it was. Was it fractious? Yes, that too. But it was happening. With (belated) U.S. assistance, a new and real democracy was being born in the heart of the Muslim world.

Regime Change

Twelve years later, when President George W. Bush (“Bush 43”) decided to liberate the rest of the Iraqi people and overthrow Saddam Hussein’s regime, Talabani was ready to assist his American friends in every way he possibly could. He provided much-needed intelligence to U.S. military commanders. He provided political advice to CIA operatives trying to identify tribal leaders throughout Iraq who would be willing to help overthrow Saddam, neutralize the Iraqi military, and then govern the country in a post-Saddam world.

On March 20, 2003, Operation Iraqi Freedom commenced on the orders of Bush 43. U.S. ground forces entered Baghdad on April 5. Four days later the city was initially secure, and Iraqi citizens—with U.S. military assistance—tore down the statue of Saddam Hussein in the heart of the capital. As TV cameras beamed the remarkable images live around the world, ordinary Iraqis immediately leaped on the toppled icon of twenty-five dark and murderous years. They stomped on the statue’s head and face. They cursed it, and the man in whose image it was created. They chanted, “Death to Saddam! Death to Saddam!”

“Mam Jalal was in Suly when Saddam’s regime fell,” Talabani’s spokesman, Mala Bakhtyar, told me during an exclusive eighty-minute interview in one of the president’s offices in Sulymania (aka “Suly”). “It was a very dramatic moment for him, for all of us. He had tried for years to persuade Saddam to respect Kurdish rights and embrace democracy, but Saddam wouldn’t listen.”508

Bakhtyar revealed that Saddam had actually sent a private message to Talabani just weeks before the U.S. and Coalition forces arrived to liberate the country. The Iraqi leader was trying to buy off all of the opposition groups in an effort to keep them from working with the Americans. “Saddam wanted Mam Jalal to know that he was granting amnesty to all of the opposition groups in Iraq, except Talabani.” Talabani sent a message back to Saddam saying, “History will not grant amnesty to you. History will remember that you used chemical weapons against your own people.”

On April 22, 2003, just after arriving in Iraq to begin working on reconstruction and assembling a new government, the first two people U.S. Lieutenant General Jay Garner went to see were Jalal Talabani and Massoud Barzani. Talabani told Garner the Coalition needed to form an “advisory group” made up of leading Iraqi dissidents against the Saddam regime who could help lay the foundation of a new democracy.

Talabani laid out who the members of the group should be, who should not be included at the beginning, what religious backgrounds the members would need to have to make it truly representative, what their roles should be, and how they should interact with Garner and his team. He also insisted that the new Iraqi government have a federal structure that would give significant freedom and autonomy to the Kurdish people, given all that they had been through over the years.

Garner was impressed.

“If this works, I’ll make you a provisional government,” he told Talabani and Barzani. “You’ll still work for me, but I’ll make you a provisional government.”509

Garner then started going through his own to-do list.

“What are we going to do about a constitution?” he asked.

“We already thought about that,” Talabani replied. “We’ll have a big tent meeting, and we’ll bring in somewhere between 200 and 300 people. Jay, this will be a mosaic of Iraq. It will be all the ethnic groups, all the religions, all the professions . . . the genders, [and together] we’ll write this constitution.”

“How quick can you do this?” Garner asked.

Talabani smiled and proposed the week of July 4.

A New Iraqi Leadership Emerges

Garner did not make it to July 4.

He was replaced by a far more experienced and savvy diplomat, Ambassador L. Paul “Jerry” Bremer III, who served as the presidential envoy to Iraq from May 2003 to June 2004.

It was Bremer who would turn Talabani and Barzani’s suggestions into reality, creating an initial advisory group of seven Iraqi prodemocracy leaders he dubbed the “G-7.”510 It was Bremer who would eventually turn the G-7 into the Iraqi Governing Council (IGC) with twenty-five senior Iraqi prodemocracy leaders, including both Talabani and Barzani. It was Bremer who created a rotating presidency so that each month a different member of IGC would preside over the group, minimizing tensions and preventing any one member from gaining too much power too quickly. It was also Bremer who over the course of the next twelve months helped the IGC make a series of essential decisions—from creating cabinet positions and filling them with the right people to laying the groundwork for an Iraqi parliament, an Iraqi constitution, and the country’s first truly free and fair elections.

By the spring of 2004, the contours of the new Iraqi government were taking shape, and Talabani had his eye on the presidency, even traveling to Washington in an effort to rally support in Congress and among top Bush administration officials. But by early May of that year, the Coalition plan formulated by Bremer and approved by the White House, the State Department, and U.N. envoy Lakhdar Brahimi was to offer the presidency not to a Kurd but to a Sunni Arab. The role of prime minister was going to be offered to a Shia Arab, and Bremer strongly believed the Coalition needed to balance tensions between the two religious groups and give Sunnis a significant stake in the political process.

On Sunday, May 16, Bremer pulled Talabani aside and tried to let him down gently. “For too long they [Arab Sunnis] have felt underrepresented in the new Iraq, Mr. Talabani,” Bremer explained. “We have to use this government as an opportunity to broaden Iraq’s political base.”511

Searching for a President

Bremer’s leading choice for the presidency was Adnan Pachachi, an eighty-one-year-old secular Sunni from a prominent Iraqi Sunni family. Educated in Egypt, Pachachi had served as Iraq’s ambassador to the United Nations in the late 1950s and again in the late 1960s, while later serving as Iraq’s foreign minister. During the Saddam Hussein years, he lived in exile in Abu Dhabi, returning to Iraq for the first time after the 2003 liberation, though he had actually opposed the U.S. invasion. Widely respected by U.S. officials, Pachachi was invited to serve as a member of the IGC upon liberation. He helped develop the Transitional Administrative Law—essentially a draft constitution—and served a rotation as president of the IGC.

To Bremer and his colleagues, Pachachi seemed like a perfect caretaker for the fledgling democracy until national elections could be held the following January and the first freely elected Iraqi president could emerge.

But when word leaked out that Pachachi was likely to be named president, sharp criticisms began throughout Baghdad. Religious Sunnis objected to Pachachi’s secularism. And some leading Shias objected in principle to a Sunni Arab receiving so lofty a position. They could see a Sunni in the role of vice president, perhaps, but certainly not the presidency itself. Other members of the IGC simply didn’t trust Pachachi to be a strong enough leader. He had, after all, opposed the liberation of Iraq from the outset. Why should he now run the country?

Bremer needed to move forward. At the end of the month, he would be handing full sovereignty back to the people of Iraq and leaving the country for good. Iraq needed to have a new government in place and an orderly transition. So with the blessing of the White House, Bremer offered Pachachi the role in spite of the growing criticisms against him and scheduled a press conference for Tuesday, June 1, 2004, to announce Pachachi as Iraq’s new president and Ayad Allawi as the new Iraqi prime minister.

But that morning, Bremer’s military aide handed him a cell phone. It was Lakhdar Brahimi, the U.N. envoy.

“Astonishing news,” Brahimi began. “Pachachi has declined the position. I’m dumbfounded and don’t know what got into him. What do we do now?”512

Bremer was equally stunned. He and Brahimi considered delaying the press conference for several days, but in the end decided that would be a mistake, fearing internal rivalries on the Iraqi Governing Council would only intensify over time.

“We’ve got to close the whole deal”—the new prime minister and the new president—“or it will all unravel,” Bremer concluded.

Emerging from the Shadows

In that moment of crisis, Bremer turned not to Talabani but to Sheikh Ghazi al-Yawer, who was serving as the IGC’s president-of-the-month and had been actively pursuing the post.

Though he was the youngest member of the IGC—barely half Pachachi’s age—Ghazi in every other way fit the image Bremer wanted for the first sovereign president of Iraq. He had been born in Mosul, the heart of Sunni Islamic fervency in Iraq. He was religiously devout but politically moderate. He had been educated in Saudi Arabia (the birthplace of Sunni Islam) as well as the U.S. (the birthplace of democracy) and held a master’s degree in civil engineering from Georgetown University. His English was excellent, and he had a gift for television interviews. He was tech-savvy, having run a successful telecom business in the Saudi kingdom before returning to Iraq after liberation.

What’s more, he had strongly supported the U.S. war of liberation. Despite his youth—or perhaps because of it—he was widely respected on the IGC as a passionate young Reformer.

Ghazi gratefully accepted the appointment. When Bremer officially transferred full sovereignty back to the Iraqi people on Monday, June 28, 2004, it was Sheikh Ghazi al-Yawer who became the president of Iraq’s interim government.

His tenure was impressive. He was well liked and well trusted, and he was not afraid to speak his mind. He publicly denounced Sunni Radicals—such as Al Qaeda in Iraq, for example—as the “armies of darkness” trying to trigger a civil war in Iraq. What’s more, he insisted these were not real Sunni Muslims, because they were killing Muslims when the Qur’an forbade such actions. The so-called Sunni Radicals were actually secular people with “sick minds.” These insurgents were more like a “mafia” than a religious movement, he argued, power-obsessed fanatics with a deep-seated “hatred of democracy.” Many, he noted, were not even Iraqis but had infiltrated from other countries. “This is not a battle between Iraqis,” he said. “This is a battle between evil and good.”513

On April 6, 2005, the first-ever free and fair elections in Iraq’s history were finally held. And when the 275-member Iraqi National Assembly (parliament) was seated, it was Jalal Talabani who was chosen as president.

The following year, on April 22, 2006, after Iraq’s constitution was completed and approved, Talabani earned the distinction of being Iraq’s first democratically and constitutionally elected president.

Why? It was not complicated. Over more than seventy years, Talabani had earned the trust of the Iraqi people. He had devoted his life to opposing Saddam Hussein. He had been willing to die if necessary to fight for the liberation of his people. Everyone knew he was a real Reformer.

And he was certainly no Johnny-come-lately, just trying to grab power for power’s sake or get his name in the papers. Over the decades, Talabani had built alliances all over the world with leaders and nations willing to help the Iraqi people gain their freedom, and he had impressed Iraqis with his diplomatic skills along the way. Moreover, he not only talked about building the first true democracy in the Muslim world; he was one of only a handful of leaders in Iraq that had actually helped create and run a true, healthy, functional, operational democracy—the Kurdistan Regional Government—comprising three of Iraq’s eighteen provinces (Erbil, Sulymania, and Dohuk), 4 million people, and forty thousand square kilometers of territory, an area four times larger than Lebanon.

“We will spare no effort to present Iraq as a model of democracy,” Talabani said upon taking office. “We hope to consolidate national unity . . . regardless of religious and sectarian backgrounds. . . . [And we will ensure that] all Iraqis are equal before the law. It means that there [will be] no discrimination [and] that all Arabs, Kurds, and other nationalities have the same rights.”514