Politics & Power Quote by Ali A. Saleh

“May” is doing a lot of work here. Saleh’s sentence is built like a cautious blueprint, not a prophecy: peace and stability are framed as conditional outcomes, achievable only if Iraq’s sovereignty is genuinely restored and if politics expands beyond winner-take-all rule. The intent is pragmatic persuasion. He’s not selling a utopia; he’s laying down terms, almost like a checklist for legitimacy.

The subtext is a rebuke of two failures that have defined Iraq’s recent history: external tutelage and internal sectarian capture. “Restoring its sovereignty” signals more than flags and formalities; it gestures at the post-2003 reality of occupation, proxy influence, and state institutions weakened by foreign leverage. Then he pivots to “participation of all Iraqi factions and sectarian groups,” a phrase that reads like an inoculation against exclusion. In Iraq, being left out isn’t just an insult; it’s often the seed of insurgency, militias, or permanent obstruction.

What makes the line work is its balancing act. It speaks the language of national unity without pretending unity is natural. By naming “factions and sectarian groups,” Saleh acknowledges the fracture as a political fact, then tries to convert it into a democratic mechanism: representation as disarmament. “Rebuild” implies the state has been broken, not merely bruised, and “new democratic, free and independent Iraq” is a triad that quietly ranks priorities: democracy requires freedom from coercion, and both require independence from external and domestic strongmen.

Even the clunky phrasing carries context: this is a writer reaching for an inclusive national narrative in a landscape where every adjective has been contested.