Politics & Power Quote by Jalal Talabani

The line reads like a mission statement, but its real work is political triage: reassure, unify, and pre-empt suspicion in a country where every promise is heard through the echo of recent violence. Talabani stacks three goals in a single breath - fight terrorism, deliver security, draft a democratic constitution quickly - because in post-invasion Iraq those aims were being treated as mutually exclusive. Security hawks argued you couldnt liberalize until you pacified; democratizers feared security talk was a blank check for coercion. Talabani tries to collapse the debate by making each step sound like the logical prerequisite for the next.

The subtext is aimed at multiple audiences at once. To Iraqis exhausted by insurgency, "security for the country" signals competence and protection, not ideology. To rival factions, "help draft" is a careful verb: it promises participation without admitting any single group will dominate. To international backers, "democratic constitution as soon as possible" is a reassurance that the new order will be legitimized by institutions, not just by force. The urgency is not merely procedural; its a race against fragmentation, militia rule, and the perception that democracy is an imported costume.

Talabani, a Kurdish leader navigating Arab-Kurd tensions and sectarian mistrust, uses a deliberately inclusive "our plan" to manufacture a collective subject where one barely existed. It is aspirational governance language, but also a survival tactic: if security and democracy arent narrated as the same project, someone else will narrate them as enemies.