While American politicians debate who's a maverick willing to take on
the establishment, Iraq's Mithal al-Alusi meets the criteria and pays
the price. In the latest in a series of battles with what he calls the
"fascist" religious parties running the government, Alusi was banned
from parliament for making his third trip to Israel—or, the "Zionist
entity" as it's known in official Iraqi correspondence. He is not
allowed to leave Iraq, could face prosecution and says he is hearing of
threats on his life.
His trip to an anti-terrorism conference near Tel Aviv was his third
public visit to the country that Saddam Hussein fired rockets at during the Gulf War in 1991 and
that bombed Iraq's reactor in 1981. His speech at a 2006 conference
there is on YouTube.
Each time he has faced condemnation from the post-Saddam leaders of the
new Iraq. His two grown sons were killed in an attack in 2005. The
Israel trip was supposedly used to motivate the killers, though they
might have been sent by rival politicians seeking to neutralize their
father, who has formed a small but expanding secular party.
The Iraqi parliament acted with uncharacteristic speed and unity last
month in condemning Alusi. In stripping him of his parliamentary
immunity, they open the door to prosecution on some charge, like
treason or aiding an enemy state.
The problem is that in a country that's been at war with so many
countries in recent decades, it's hard to discern which countries are
still enemies. As Alusi points out, Iraq and Iran fought a long war in
the 1980s but travel between those countries is going on by the
thousands every month. That war ended with a ceasefire that some Iraqis
contended never actually officially ended their hostilities. Of course,
Iraq attacked Kuwait in 1990 but Kuwait now has an ambassador in
Baghdad. And Turkey regularly pounds Iraqi Kurdish rebels with air
strikes and artillery now while Turkish companies compete for
government contracts. Alusi, in an appeal to the Iraqi high court,
contends that travel to Israel is legal. But Israel is still almost as
potent a bogeyman in the new Iraq as it was under Saddam. (The
middle-aged Alusi also opposed Saddam, serving jail time for his part
in the takeover of the Iraqi embassy in Germany to protest against the
dictator.)
Members of the Shiite religious party leading the government appeared
to lead the attack on Alusi. He says it is in part retaliation for his
frequent criticism of them and because they fear his party will siphon
off voters already fed up with fundamentalist politicians. He says
Iranian surrogates have approached him with money to silence him. But
he insists Iraq, Israel and other Iraqi neighbors should band together
to fight terror and their common enemy, Iran.
