A Creative and Satirical version of an Iraqi Declaration of Independence based off the American Declaration of Independence written in 1776. It was drafted and pieced together by Kabobfest friend, Carlos

But first, a clip from six years ago that we’re all very familiar with:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkOCIfNQXP0]

إعلان الاستقلال العراقي
The Iraqi Declaration of Independence

IN MAJLIS, MARCH 19th 2009

The Ultimate Proclamation of the united provinces of Iraq

بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم
In the Name of God, the Most Merciful, the Especially Merciful

When the sands of time are swept forth by the cleansing winds of change that inevitably must come upon the entire face of the earth, and it is no longer deemed to be in the best of interests for one nation to align and associate itself with another, it is the right, nay, the responsibility of those desiring such a disengagement to decree it before Allah and before the eyes and ears of those who will and will not hear, why their sense of duty impels them towards such a change in the established order of things, and thus bring to pass their much yearned for separation in such a manner that guarantees that the aforementioned entanglement between the two will no longer distress nor endanger the future progress and stability of those who aspire to such a disconnection and separation.

We believe and hold fast to the truths sent down to us by الله سبحان و تعالى that all men stand before Him as equals, and that as His creatures, without any regards for color, race, language, or creed, all men and women are entitled to the same basic rights and privileges which no man should ever nor can ever take away, namely: Life, Agency, and Accountability; that الله سبحان و تعالى has entrusted rulers and leaders of nations to guarantee these undeniable rights to every soul whose consultation and endorsement they have obtained. It is therefore the responsibility of the people to support and to uphold those whom they have granted this right to rule, however unjust and cruel in their exercise of power, for it is الله سبحان و تعالى who is the Master of the day of Recompense and He alone, may Allah be praised. But when domestic or foreign entities, seize the reins of this power in a hostile and destructive manner, without the consultation of those whom they intend to govern, and in addition, invade, occupy and threaten to destroy and deprive any or all citizens of any nation from their fundamentally established rights, it is the right of the Citizen and of the Nation to fight and to eradicate such, and to thus establish new means of law and order, based on the principles of consultation with the will of the people.

Recent chapters in the tome of mankind’s history have shown that the removal of destructive and oppressive rulers has been welcomed with open arms, namely the long established rule of Saddam Hussein; but when the liberators, into whose hands the right of rule had suddenly been placed, slowly became the tyrants and the persecutors, a bitter record of violence, cruelty, and chaos came forth and called for the Citizen to take responsibility and to throw off the yoke of such oppression and anarchy. الله سبحان و تعالى tells us in the most noble Book that patience is set above all other virtues with the exceptional promise that those who patiently persevere will truly receive a reward without measure (صدق الله العظيم); but the recent events of our history have demonstrated that patience often wears thin, especially when those to whom allegiance is partially due, fail to protect and to serve their subjects and their unalienable liberties. It is then that the people, in exercising their rights and their responsibilities, are perfectly justified in abolishing such rule of law and then in establishing new laws and a new order that will secure, protect and guarantee their rights and interests. Such has been the patient toiling of these united Iraqi provinces and such is the declaration that we now make, calling for such drastic changes in our ties to the resented American presence on our lands; a foreign entity which restricts the full expression of a much desired free and wholeheartedly independent Iraq. This is the message that we now send forth, that we may confirm how our laws in our land will now be handled and why they will be handled as such. The actions of the present American occupation are a narrative of broken promises, unfulfilled commitments and the cruel usurpation of power over our Iraq; an occupation whose sole purpose is to continue an uninvited and imposed military-backed regime of suffering and destruction that was initiated with their predecessor and is now prolonged with their unwelcome company.

Thus we present the truth of these events before the judgment seat of the world in a fair-minded and forthright manner that all may be witnesses to the reality of our situation:

• The American Occupation has destabilized very heart Middle Eastern lands and has given rise both politically, religiously and militarily to its greatest and to some extent, our greatest threat as a country, namely Iran, whose ambitions lie not only in hurting the West, through unconventional and economic warfare, but also in hurting its allies in the region and causing an even greater destabilization in the region with their manifest possession of Weapons of Mass Destruction.

• It has created a mass exodus of more than three million Iraqi refugees, the majority of our skilled workers and intelligentsia, and the underbelly of our country’s entire infrastructure.

• It has caused more than six hundred thousand Iraqi civilian deaths, more death and destruction than when Saddam Hussein and his merciless regime strangled our lives and oppressed us with the rule of an iron-clad fist.

• Our beloved capital, Baghdad, a city of six million, is now a smoking heap of rubble and disorder with no running water, poorly controlled sewage facilities, and massive power outages. It has also forced upon us an 8 p.m. curfew for the past two years, a move that makes us prisoners within our own homes, within our own capital, within our own country.

• In the month that immediately followed the fall of Baghdad, the Warmongers failed to enact Martial Law, an act permitted under the Fourth Geneva Convention and by failing to do so, created a state of lawlessness, chaos, looting, killing, militia control, free-for-all-ing, and the lamentable loss of our country’s records, our history, and countless artifacts of early human civilization; all this simply because they were ordered not to “police nor patrol” the streets by the former Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld. It comes and destroys our country, because it does nothing to protect anything, except the Iraqi Ministry of Oil.

• The Forces of the Occupation breaks into our homes, without warrant and without probable cause, arresting at whim; apprehends our fathers and our brothers as “terrorist” suspects without disclosing the location of their detention, and while in custody they suffer unnecessary rape, violent beatings, torture of the most severe nature and undergo a process of deep-seeded humiliation and dehumanization.

• It stopped the formation of an interim Iraqi government at a moment when its inception was of the most vital and crucial import for the stability of our country and the assurance of our country’s new future.

• Its decision to De-Ba’athify the government barred more than fifty thousand Iraqi citizens from ever working in our country again, many of us who had joined and affiliated with the Ba’ath part simply in order to have a job and the means to provide for our families.

• They entered our country with fewer troops than necessary after strong recommendations from top
generals that more troops would be necessary and then removed the generals who said more troops would be necessary.

• It disbanded the Iraqi Army, the Republican Guard, the Special Republican Guard, and the Secret Police, rendering half a million of us (not including our families) unemployed and without any means of sustenance. It thus created an infuriated, vengeful insurgency of men without jobs and without money; who then turned to armed conflict with the Invaders and Occupiers of our land by storming the largely unguarded weapons storage dumps; these men knew where they were, they knew how to get to those weapons, they knew how to use them and their insurgency still haunts the coalition “Liberators” till this very day.

• In attempting to rebuild our nation, the Neo-Imperialists forces marginalized us, the very people of the land and gave preferential work contracts to Americans and Foreigners and not us, the Iraqis, keeping us further unemployed and impoverished to a far greater extent.

• It has humiliated us as a nation and as a people by first conquering us, taking away our means of sustenance, and then destroying our country one person, one family, one city at a time.

• Its Fabricators convinced the American people that the occupation of our ancestral lands was necessary because Saddam Hussein was an apparent threat, because of his “alleged” link to 9/11, because “[they] [didn’t] want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud,” because of “Al-Qaeda,” because of Osama Bin Laden, because of terrorism, to “liberate Iraq,” to “spread freedom,” to spread democracy, to keep Iraq’s oil out of the hands of potential “terrorist controlled states.”

• Its Architects claimed that its forces would be greeted as “liberators with flowers”; that as “[we] stood up, [they] would stand down”; that they would “stay the course,” that they would never stay the course; that “the enemy was Al-Qaeda, was Ba’athists, was Foreigners, was Terrorists.”

• Its Media reported turning points in the occupation: “the fall of Baghdad, the death of Uday and Qusay Hussein, the capture of Saddam, a interim government, the trial of Saddam, a charter, a constitution, an Iraqi government, elections, purple fingers, a new government, the death of Saddam,” a drop in the levels of violence, the “success” of the Surge; In the destruction of our country, we came to learn that America had prevailed, that it was “Mission Accomplished,” and that “the resistance was in its last throes.”
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CFijzDyJnVE]

• Its Authors scared the American people into action with inconclusive truths of WMDs, Mobile Labs, Secret Sources, “Aluminum tubing,” and “Yellow Cake.”

• In pushing for and prosecuting their plans of a successful take-over and Pro-American transition, the occupation’s Top Promoters passed on chances to capture their main enemy targets, namely Osama Bin Laden and the Taliban in remotely located Afghanistan.

• They short-changed the training of our own troops and failed in their attempts to prevent rampant and pervasive looting and the explosion of sectarian violence.

• Its Designers said that the war would pay for itself: that it would cost 1.7 Billion dollars; $100 Billion; $250 Billion; half a trillion; $1 trillion!

• It has given rise to the most violent of human reactions among brothers and countrymen; it has brought brutal, cruel and disheartening civil war to our very thresholds, and has discarded all careful and detailed planning for a successful post-war reconstruction onto a place that holds twenty percent of the world’s oil supply.

We welcomed the American presence onto our land because we saw in them the hopes of a new life in their desire to remove Saddam from power and to bring him to justice for the crimes he committed. But as the days turned into months, the evident realization was that we removed a dictator to get a dictator’s army to control our lives and to strip us from our much aspired independence and yearning dreams of true freedom. We never invited the Americans to come into Iraq; they came and powerless to stop them, we allowed them to take over our country, hoping that they would present it back to us and allow us to determine our own fate; we thought Occupation had a plan to back it up, an ace up the sleeve, but they had nothing; they had no plans for Post-Saddam Iraq and what little planning we tried to execute in the beginning was deemed as “unworkable,” “undo-able,” and “not in line” with “[their] desires for [us].” Was it not George Bush Senior who after the first Gulf war made it publicly known that “there [was] another way for the bloodshed to stop”? And that it was “for [us] the Iraqi military and [us] the Iraqi people to take matters into [our] own hands” to bring about change in Iraq? We have tried waiting for things to get better, we have waited long and hard; we have struggled during Saddam’s time, and we continue to struggle now with the once-welcomed, now-resented and hated American occupation.

Which is why we, on this day, March 19th 2009, as we contemplate these past six years of destruction and anarchy under the banner of “Iraqi Freedom,” we as a united assembly of Iraqi patriots, avow the dissolution of any and all ties with this American presence and rule over us and with الله سبحان و تعالى as our witness and our ally, and before the eyes of ears of all that are within the reach of this declaration, we say: Out! Out with the American Occupiers! Out with the American Imperialists who have brought nothing but war and destruction to our country; who have implemented the Machine of War and of Death on the foundation of lies, speculation, profiteering interests, and lack of solid, concrete intelligence. How many more innocent Iraqis or Americans must be sacrificed until we see a “victory” in Iraq? God willing, very few and in much the same way that his Majesty, King George gave our former president and his sons an ultimatum of forty eight hours at the grim beginning of this quagmire in March of 2003, so we give you an ultimatum: Leave and Live or Stay and Die; for we will not leave our homes, our land, our families, our religion and our God. We will stay and fight until the last of these foreign agents of destruction are eradicated from our lands. Peace is what we deserve; Liberty is what we need; Blood may be the price to pay, because Freedom is among the greatest of all the gifts of الله سبحان و تعالى. We would rather “die on our feet than to live the rest of lives crawling on our knees!” And as we now absolve all allegiance and ties to this tyrannical American regime set up to further increase our pain and suffering, we place our trust in الله سبحان و تعالى to be our Strength and our Protector as we mutually consecrate our time, our talents, and our blessings as Iraqi brothers and countrymen, standing firm with one language, as one people, and as believers in one God.
لا إلهَ إلا الله و مُحَمَّدٌ رَسولُ اللهِ . . . إن يَنـْصُرْكـُم اللهُ فـَلا غَالِبَ لكـَمْ

أسعد أبو خاطر عبد الرحمن
إيمان أيوب آل الأمين
كريم صلاح الجندي
فاطمة جميل الزكاة
مالك طاهر عبدالله
جميل فروك علاوي
أية الله علي سيستاني
مهدي المودن
فؤاد علي البصري
نصرالدين الفيصل
نادية سعيد البورّاسي
أحمد علي البغدادي
نوري المالكي
جلال طالباني
بشار الحمّاد
زكريا الفرابي

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