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| Iraq |
| U.N. Official: Iraqis Ready to Turn on U.S. Troops |
| 2003-08-13 |
| PARIS (Reuters) - Prominent Iraqis who despised Saddam Hussein will take up arms against U.S. forces if life under occupation does not quickly improve, a senior U.N. official said in outspoken criticism of Washington’s postwar policy in Iraq. Ghassan Salameh, adviser to the special U.N. representative to Iraq Sergio Vieira de Mello, told the French weekly Le Nouvel Observateur in an interview published Wednesday that the United States had bungled its victory since toppling Saddam. "Many influential Iraqis who initially felt liberated from a despised regime have assured me that they will take up arms if the coalition troops do not arrive at a result. Time is short," the magazine quoted Salameh as saying. He did not spell out which prominent Iraqis had warned of an uprising against the U.S. and British-led coalition. The U.N. mission, he said, made a point of meeting senior figures and took credit for pushing the U.S. administrator to give executive powers to the appointees on Iraq’s new Governing Council. He said protests over energy shortages in the southern city of Basra showed that Washington’s British allies, who have generally been seen as more active in bringing Iraqis into administering their region, also faced difficulties. Southern Iraq, dominated by the long oppressed Shi’ite Muslim majority, had hitherto been fairly calm. But prominent Shi’ite clerics have made clear they are impatient to be left alone, at long last, to run their own affairs. Salameh warned that ordinary people, frustrated by the lack of basic services four months after the fall of Saddam, could rally behind ideological opponents of the occupying forces. "In reality, the population is very surprised. They don’t understand how such a level of efficiency during the war could be followed by such a lack of efficiency in ’peace,"’ he said. Salameh accused the U.S. government of promoting an ideological agenda and of making "errors of judgment." This included a purge of members of the dissolved Baath party, which affected thousands of qualified professionals with little or no ideological attachment to Saddam. These were now being replaced by "proteges of local factions," he said. |
| Posted by:snellenr |
| #8 ...and in a French newspaper. I'd take this as gospel. |
| Posted by: tu3031 2003-8-13 10:07:42 PM |
| #7 Wow! Critics of the U.S. in the U.N.? Let's start charging them rent! |
| Posted by: Cyber Sarge (VRWC CA Chapter) 2003-8-13 9:58:56 PM |
| #6 Ghassan Salameh used to be Lebanon's Minister of Culture. Now, as we all know, Lebanon is under Syrian occupation. All members of the Lebanese government are hand-picked by Syria. Is it surprising that one of Bashir al Assad's (the Syrian leader) minions would be down on the American administration of Iraq? |
| Posted by: Zhang Fei 2003-8-13 9:03:06 PM |
| #5 Wonder how long any of the lights would stay if the US Army left? The US is the only thing between civilization and anarchy. Iraq without the US would make Liberia look like the kingdom of peace. |
| Posted by: john 2003-8-13 8:56:48 PM |
| #4 Well, by golly, we'll just have to get a move on, won't we? One thing that's disappointed me about the Iraqis is that they've had several chances to beat the heck out of Robert Fisk and haven't done so. Don't they respect the tradition set by their Afghan brothers? |
| Posted by: Matt 2003-8-13 3:43:25 PM |
| #3 Let's see, an Arab UN bureaucrat talks to his class allies (Baathists) in Bagdad and they tell him that they're pissed because the Americans purged them and won't allow them back into power. What this tells me is that we're succeeding! Based on things I've read in Strategy Page and elsewhere about the power situation, the only reason that the Sunni areas in Bagdad had 24/7 power was because Saddam decreed that the rest of the national power grid would suffer rotating outages in order to supply Bagdad's needs. From this we can infer that anyone carping about power outages is almost certainly from Bagdad (or some other favored Sunni town such as Tikrit) and probably a Baathists (the poor Shia neighborhoods got blackouts, too). So we can assert with a high degree of confidence that Ghassan Salameh (1) never left Bagdad for his fact finding and (2) has only been talking to Baathists. |
| Posted by: 11A5S 2003-8-13 3:11:40 PM |
| #2 Wasn't it the UN that mentioned 500,000 dead and displaced? Millions dead of disease? They can't be wrong every single time can they? |
| Posted by: Yank 2003-8-13 2:48:38 PM |
| #1 Just out of curiousity...what do the Iraqis do all day? Seethe, check. Whine, check. Something constructive...(crickets) I'm hoping that the above is based on the vociferations of a noisy minority, and most Iraqis are trying to lift themselves up by the bootstraps...instead of considering picking up a rifle and shooting at an American (or Brit). |
| Posted by: mjh 2003-8-13 2:47:36 PM |