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Thursday, April 10, 2003
posted by gbarto at 1:40 AM:
Talked to a guy in town - of Iranian origin. Not sure when he came here, but he had a nice suggestion: Rather than spending a couple more billion to move them back later, why don't we just do Iran while we're over there?Though it sounds like Rummy's more interested in Syria at the moment.
Still, interesting to recall - as we hear about nationalism, not wanting to be "conquered" by the US, etc - that not everyone is in love with these regimes.
It was especially funny reading Tom Friedman talking about why Iraqis weren't cheering (Sure, we're free, but our water supply's been disrupted!) while watching the Iraqis cheer on television. Mr. Friedman may be very smart at times, but he can be an idiot at others. The Iraqis most likely to cheer Saddam's departure from the scene are also those most likely to have been burned by George HW Bush's "we support the Iraqi people if they want freedom, whoops never mind" mess-up. They wanted to be sure we were serious about dealing with Saddam before sticking their necks out again. Having seen that we are, they're starting to come out into the open.
Really, Tom Friedman may be bright. But a guy got a bullet in the head from Baath party agents the other day after throwing a shoe at a poster of Saddam. And he thinks the Iraqis were hesitant to cheer because of what some yo-yo from an NGO - whose name was to be given - told him?
Anyway, I'll close this scrambled up post by noting again that there are people both here and over there who - for all the talk about a shocked and aggrieved Arab world - would like to see the US keep going.
BTW, they said that Jordan was getting Iraqi oil for the equivalent of $9/barrel. Syria had a similar sweetheart deal and France's TotalFinaElf was trying to line up something similar. Would it - as the French and others are saying - be an affront to international law to scrap these efforts to line Saddam's pockets and buy him international support? Or would it be an injustice to the Iraqi people for European and Arab economic imperialists to try to give them a third of what their oil is worth? We ought to be telling the Iraqi people 1) that their oil is theirs, 2) that Saddam was selling their country's wealth for a song to line his own pockets and 3) who was gouging them and to what extent. Then they should be able to decide for themselves who they want to deal with and should be allowed to negotiate their own contracts.
Can one imagine the French, in any other circumstance, calling for anything less?
If the US tried to lock in discount contracts, would they then be screaming about the injustice done the Iraqi people?
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