---------------------------------------------------------------------------- IRAQI AMBASSADOR IS U.S. CITIZEN
By Jack A. Smith
The hand-picked Iraqi Governing Council, evidently acting under instructions from the Bush administration, has selected an ambassador to the United States who just happens to be a naturalized American who left her country some 35 years ago and may not in fact still remain an Iraqi citizen.
This could be the first time in history that a U.S. citizen functioned as an ambassador from a foreign country to Washington.
She is Rend Rahim Francke, 54, who was born in Iraq and went to boarding school and university in Europe and worked abroad until coming to the U.S. in 1981, where she remained until returning to her native land on inspection trips in the wake of Pentagon tanks.
During her years in the U.S. Francke was a businesswoman, financier, author, and director of a group called the Iraq Foundation, which lobbied in Washington on behalf of the Iraqi opposition and for the overthrow of President Saddam Hussein. She launched the foundation, which she still heads, in "anger and frustration" after the U.S. war against Iraq in 1991 left Hussein in power. Throughout the 1990s until the invasion, Francke backed the devastating UN sanctions.
In recent years Francke has written and testified on behalf of U.S. intervention to overthrow Hussein. She seems to share at least some of the Bush administration's vision for "remaking" the Middle East on the basis of invading Iraq and transforming it into a "democratic" society that would influence regional governments. "A free Iraq," she has written, "would unleash new voices and new visions for the people of the Middle East, opening perspectives of freedom that have long been squashed by their autocratic rulers." Omitted from her equation is the obvious fact that Washington's actual objective is to control Iraq as a means of exercising complete hegemony over the Middle East and control over Iraqi oil.
Francke was an early critic of U.S. blunders during the occupation and exponent of the "Iraqization" of the occupation, arguing that Washington's heavy-handed attitude was alienating the Iraqi masses. In the last several months she has urged the Coalition Provisional Authority ‹ the U.S. ruling body in Iraq ‹ to take certain steps that would reduce Iraqi opposition to the presence of foreign troops. She told the French news agency AFP Dec. 1 that "In Washington, there was a great deal of concentration on the conduct of the war, [but] unfortunately it became clear that there was far less focus on the conduct of the postwar period." She evidently approves of the Bush administration's recent changes in occupation policy. Had she not, the White House would hardly allow the puppet Governing Council to name her envoy to Washington.
Writing in IslamOnline.net Dec. 2, Firas Al-Atraqchi, a Canadian journalist of Iraqi heritage, pointed out that "to her credit, Ms. Francke has stressed that the U.S. not act as an occupying force in Iraq. She told a Foreign Relations Committee in August 2002 that [after an invasion] the U.S. should build partnerships with local Iraqis, especially local opposition figures, and work with Iraq¹s police forces. But [she testified] 'that the U.S. will have a decisive role, unprecedented since World War II, to influence the outcome in Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein.' This is racism at its ugliest, saying that the U.S. must influence the outcome in Iraq. Sorry, Ms. Francke, perhaps you have lived too long outside Iraq to realize that it is only the Iraqi people that can decide their own outcome, by their own designs, without the intervention of your bosses, or anyone else for that matter."
Asked by the New York Times whether she was still an Iraqi citizen, the newspaper reported Nov. 22 that "in her mind the answer was yes but that she also expected that the governing council would adopt resolutions affirming citizenship for the many cases like hers." Obtaining duel citizenship will enhance Francke's evident assignment to act in Iraq's interests in Washington while furthering U.S. imperialism's interests in Baghdad and throughout the Middle East.