Informed Comment

Kuwaitis Reject Bremer’s Call to Forgive Iraq Reparations

Kuwait’s government rejected any suggestion that it cease demanding reparations from Iraq. CPA head Paul Bremer recently called on Kuwait and other Gulf states to write off loans they had made to Iraq (mostly during the Iran-Iraq war) and in the case of Kuwait, to let Iraq off the hook with regard to continued payment of reparations for invading that country in 1990. The Kuwaiti Information Minister said that the subject was not open for negotiation. Iraq’s external debts may be as high as $200 bn., and Kuwait reparations alone come to $100 bn.. The United States, as the occupying power, has now become legally responsible for those debts (which is why Bremer tried to get them canceled). [I have heard that Bremer himself admitted US responsibility for the debts as long as it occupies Iraq, which I presume implies that the occupying power is technically liable for payment of debt servicing. Since Bremer's administration is broke, I doubt it is doing any debt servicing, which puts the US in the wrong.] (-al-Sharq al-Awsat)

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Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics

Two recent opinion polls, one done by the Zogby group looking at 600 residents from four Iraqi cities, and another done of 1200 residents of Baghdad, have been trumpeted by Bush administration officials and by Rightwing rags like the National Review as containing good news for the US. The officials and rightwing journalists’ use of these polls, however, has been sloppy and inaccurate, and a glance at the actual results does not suggest a rosy picture, according to Walter Pincus of the Washington Post. Pincus notes, “countrywide, only 33 percent thought they were better off than they were before the invasion and 47 percent said they were worse off. And 94 percent said that Baghdad was a more dangerous place for them to live, a finding the administration officials did not discuss. The poll also found that 29 percent of Baghdad residents had a favorable view of the United States, while 44 percent had a negative view. By comparison, 55 percent had a favorable view of France.”

The situation is even worse than Pincus suggests. For instance, on Sept. 14 on Meet the Press, US Vice President Dick Cheney alleged that Iraqis “including the Shia population” reject an Islamic government by a two-to-one margin. This finding was based on the four-city poll. But only one of the four cities was largely Shiite (Basra), which in my view skewed the results. (Basra has a relatively secular political tradition). The 2 or 3 million poor, relatively theocratic Shiites of East Baghdad were left out of the picture altogether, along with pious Shiites in Najaf and Karbala. If you add them in, the support for an Islamic Republic would go way up. And, it is not clear if the pollsters made the distinction between implementing Islamic law and rule by Muslim clerics. Probably only a third of Iraqis would want the latter. But a lot more probably want Islamic law. Pincus notes that 50% of Iraqis think US-style democracy would not work very well. The US administration shouldn’t become convinced by this kind of shaky data that Iraqis are happy with the US occupation or want the kind of government that the US intends to impose.

See

wp-dyn/articles/A14545-2003Sep28.html

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al-Zawahiri: Overthow Musharraf!

The deputy head of al-Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahir, issued a videotape in which he called on Pakistanis to rise up and overthrow President Pervez Musharraf. He also condemned the recent visit of Israeli officials to New Delhi, decrying an Indian/Israeli/United States axis, which they allege keeps the Palestinians down. Al-Zawarihi also warned that Musharraf intended to send Pakistani troops to Iraq, and called for nation-wide demonstrations if that happened. The Jamaat-i Islami in Pakistan has already called for country-wide strikes and demonstrations if Musharraf sends troops to Iraq.

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Bush’s Bad News Blues

For Bill Berkowitz’s fine piece, “Bush’s bad news blues

Administration cooks up new campaign ‘to shine light on progress made in Iraq’” in Working for Change/ Working Assets (which quotes this ephemeral servant), see

article.cfm?itemid=15703

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Extent of Saddam’s Atrocities?

John Laughland questions UK PM Tony Blair’s assertion that Saddam put 300,000 Iraqis into mass graves. The figure 290,000 victims of Saddam, he says, comes from Human Rights Watch and they admit it is soft in many ways (i.e. not based on actual body counts, which are so far relatively small). I’ve seen 60,000 deaths alleged in the 1987-88 chemical attacks on the Kurds. [An informed reader writes to say that the chemical attacks probably killed 8,000, but another 100,000 were made to disappear Feb.-Dec. 1988, which doubles what I misremembered as the estimate on Kurdish deaths in that period to 108,000 or so.] And another estimated 60,000 dead in the 1991 uprising (though I myself would not be surprised if that total were rather higher). There were other campaigns against the Shiites later in the 1990s. I suspect one is talking of at least 180,000 civilians dead at Saddam’s hands. That is surely bad enough? What other country of 24 million has killed 180,000 of its own civilians in the past 15 years? There have been other massacres even worse, as in Rwanda. Bosnia was probably a bigger killing field if one looks at proportion of population murdered. But Saddam was one of the world’s most egregious butchers of his own people.

See

rep/laughland18.html

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Two US Soldiers Killed

On late Thursday, guerrillas fired a rocket propelled grenade at military vehicles near Kirkuk, killing a soldier from the 173rd Airborne Brigade and injuring two others. In Tikrit, a US soldier, from the 4th ID was killed by a fire in an abandoned building, and another was wounded.

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Sadrist Militia interferes with Burial Rites for Aqila al-Hashimi

Aqila al-Hashimi, a Shiite member of the Interim Governing Council, was buried in Najaf on Friday after having been assassinated, probably by Baathist goons. Ordinarily the body would have been carried to the shrine of Imam Musa al-Kazim at al-Kazimiya, a suburb of Baghdad, for prayers before being taken to Najaf. The way was blocked, however, by an armed Sadrist militia (the Army of the Mahdi), who had been allowed to carry arms because the young radical Shiite leader Muqtada al-Sadr was visiting the area. Initially the American troops accompanying the funeral procession in tanks and armored cars arrested four of the Sadrist militiamen. Then a Sadrist crowd gathered, shouting, “Absolutely no, absolutely no to America! Yes, yes to Islam!” and demanding the release of the four gunmen. The US authorities decided to avoid a confrontation. They let the four go. (al-Sharq al-Awsat)

But then it was decided that the militiamen constituted a security threat to the funeral procession, which included high Iraqi officials appointed by the American administration, and so the prayers at the shrine were abandoned. The procession went straight to Najaf. Since Muqtada must have known that al-Hashimi’s body would be taken to Kazimiya, his decision to go there and to employ armed militiamen there as body guards seems to me to have been calculated to provoke an incident. Muqtada has forbidden Shiites from cooperating with the United States, and has demanded an immediate US withdrawal, so he was no fan of Aqila al-Hashimi.

The incident shows how little the US is in control on the ground. If it had been, Aqila would be alive, and her funeral procession would not have been turned into a clerical power play.

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