The Iraq War: Winners and Losers
Amir Taheri, Arab News Staff

Who are the biggest winners and losers from the war in Iraq?

The biggest winner is, by far, the Iraqi people, now liberated from the
worst regime in its contemporary history. The biggest loser, of course, is
the Baathist gang that had brutalized Iraq under Saddam Hussein. Without the
forcible toppling of his regime, Saddam, who will turn 66 next week if he is
still alive, could have remained in power for another two decades. Judging
by what he did in the previous two decades of his rule one shudders at the
thought of what he might have done in the next 20 years or so.

All the champions of the idea that the Arabs deserve only dictatorial and
brutal regimes share Saddam’s loss.

Also among the losers are other dictators who now know that, with the Cold
War ended, there is no Soviet Union to rush to save them at the last moment.
A trend has started in Iraq that is certain to continue until all the
remaining dictatorial regimes are thrown into the dustbin of history.

The camp of the losers also includes France and Russia, and, to a lesser
extent, Germany, who encouraged Saddam Hussein to remain hooked to his
suicidal ways until the very end. From now on no other dictator will trust
them as friends capable of coming to the rescue at a difficult moment.
President Jacques Chirac’s disingenuous assertion that no one had the right
to change Iraq’s regime was based on the assumption that the Iraqis had
chosen Saddam’s brutal dictatorship in the first place.

Fortunately there are many more winners in this war than losers. The Arab
nations are rid of a regime that had not only given all Arabs a bad name but
had acted as a center of conspiracy and aggression against many of them.
There is not a single Arab leader today who would regret Saddam’s demise.
All of Iraq’s neighbors could be included among the winners. Iran sees the
end of a regime that provoked an eight-year war that claimed over a million
lives. The toppling of Saddam also means the closure of anti-Iranian
terrorist camps maintained by Saddam on Iraqi territory.

Turkey would be a big winner, too. As Iraq’s No.1 trading partner, Turkey is
certain to play a key role in Iraqi reconstruction. At a time that the
Turkish economy is in its deepest crisis for a decade, the reopening of the
Iraqi market is the best piece of news Ankara’s new government could have
expected.

Syria could also benefit from the new impetus that the change of regime in
Iraq is certain to give to the stalled the reform movement in Damascus.
Jordan, acting as Iraq’s natural outlet to the sea, is likely to benefit
from its neighbor’s economic revival. Iraq will also provide the Hashemite
kingdom with additional geopolitical depth.

Kuwait could also be regarded as a big winner. The next Iraqi regime is
certain to take legal and political steps to relinquish all territorial
claims against Kuwait. The return of confidence and stability could help
propel the Kuwaiti economy, in stagnation since 1990, back into robust
growth. The entire Gulf region, and beyond it the OPEC nations as a whole,
will also benefit from the end of Saddam’s regime.

Saudi Arabia, too, will be among the beneficiaries of regime change in Iraq.
The Baathist tyranny in Baghdad was like a time bomb that was bound to
explode at some point.

In the longer run the United States and its key allies, especially the
United Kingdom, must also be regarded as big winners. The common wisdom
right now is that George W Bush and Tony Blair are the biggest winners from
the toppling of Saddam Hussein. This is certainly true in the short-term.
Both men are enjoying exceptionally high popularity in the polls. What might
happen to them in the medium and long-term, however, remains to be seen.
Most democracies have the strange habit of kicking out leaders who have won
wars. The tradition goes back to ancient Athens, the first democracy, in
which any leader who returned victorious from a war was sure to lose his
job.

Think of Churchill, who was defeated in the first general election after his
World War II victory. And, more recently, we had President George Bush, the
father, who lost his re-election bid despite the highest-ever popularity
ratings after the war to liberate Kuwait.

One of the key characteristics of democracy is the people’s ingratitude
toward their leaders. It is only in a dictatorship that the people are
forced to be grateful to the ruler, praising his generosity and wisdom every
day. In a democracy the best compliment to pay a leader is to kick him out
in the next election.

Arab News Opinion 18 April 2003

US Fulminations Against Syria: Arab Fears Justified
Andrew Green, The Guardian



LONDON, 18 April 2003 — America’s sudden onslaught against Syria has taken
the world by surprise. The White House is said to have blocked the
Pentagon’s preliminary planning for a military assault on the country, and
earlier this week Tony Blair assured the British House of Commons that there
were “no plans for an attack on Syria” — language eerily reminiscent of that
used about Iraq last autumn. Something must lie behind all this.

The charges are hardly earth-shattering. Syria is accused of harboring Iraqi
fugitives. Possibly so. The Syrians opposed the invasion of Iraq. The Syrian
authorities cannot prevent Iraqis getting across a 400-mile desert border.
It would not be surprising if, rather than accept the humiliation of handing
them over to the Americans, they ushered unexpected guests toward an
aeroplane.

Second, the Americans allege that the Syrians have tested chemical weapons.
Not a surprise. Several countries in the Middle East are believed to possess
such a capability, including Algeria, Egypt, Iran and, notably, Israel. The
case for invading Iraq turned on Saddam being a crazy dictator who might
pass chemical or biological weapons to terrorists. It would be hard to
describe Bashar Al-Assad in such terms. If Syria has chemical weapons, it is
for a good reason — as a second-strike capability against Israel. It is
inconceivable that the Syrians would strike first, knowing the Israelis
would immediately go for nuclear retaliation.

The third American allegation is an old chestnut — that Syria is a rogue
state supporting terrorism. The Syrians have long given hospitality to the
political wing of Palestinian rejectionist movements. They permit the
Iranians to channel through Damascus airport the arms required by Hezbullah
in south Lebanon. These are regarded as potential levers in negotiations
with Israel for return of the occupied Golan Heights. They also give Syria
some measure of influence over the Palestinian and Hezbullah resistance.
This is tough diplomacy, Middle East-style; it hardly amounts to being a
rogue state.

The most straightforward explanation for the American campaign is that it is
an effort to deter the Syrians from granting sanctuary to fleeing Iraqis.
But there must be more to it. Perhaps the Americans have suddenly woken up
to the fact that Syrian hostility could destroy their attempts to stabilize
Iraq in the months to come.

The American invasion of Iraq was intended to “decapitate the regime”. In
fact, it has knocked the stuffing out of the entire system of government.
Saddam’s reign was one of terror imposed from above. All those involved were
corrupt and most had blood on their hands. The families of their victims
will be out to kill them at the first opportunity. They have no alternative
but to run for their lives.

In a further twist, the Sunnis live in fear that the Shiite majority who
they have oppressed for decades will turn against them. That is why the
doctors, at least those who were Sunni, abandoned their hospitals in the
face of gangs of looters, most of them Shiites.

The apparent ease of the military victory is extremely deceptive. Iraq is
now on the verge of anarchy. The first requirement is to impose some measure
of order, the second to re-establish a skeleton administration that can
distribute humanitarian aid effectively. Then begins the task of assembling
some kind of political structure. This will take months, if not years.
Meanwhile, there is every risk that American and British troops will be seen
as an occupying force, and become targets for sniping and suicide attacks.
If Syria were to turn a blind eye to a flow of weapons and volunteers across
her border with Iraq, the security situation could degenerate very quickly.
Indeed, we could find ourselves in a quagmire.

The Syrians could well be in a position to block our efforts to create what
Tony Blair described as “a peace worth the war”. They might be tempted to do
so. What the UK’s Foreign Secretary Jack Straw calls “the new reality” looks
to them like an American puppet state in Iraq that might settle with Israel
at the expense of the Syrians and Palestinians.

Indeed, the Arabs see a deeper plot and they may not be entirely wrong. Some
members of the Bush administration came into office determined to overthrow
Saddam, occupy Iraq and extend American control through as much of the
region as possible. For these officials, some of them close to the Likud
party, the invasion of Iraq was only a first step intended to pave the way
for the removal of Syria as the last strategic opponent of Israel.

These are some of the explanations for the sudden attempt to intimidate the
Syrians. The American campaign may make President Assad more cautious, but
the Syrians are not easily intimidated. What is clear is that the rest of
the Arab and Muslim world will be deeply antagonized by such tactics. If our
primary aim is to counter terrorism by diminishing the mass support on which
it thrives, this is hardly the best way to go about it.



Between Restoration and Revolution in Iraq
Michael McFaul, The Washington Post



WASHINGTON, 18 April 2003 — For supporters of democracy, there is nothing
more exciting or memorable than the fall of another dictator. The
construction of a new political system, however, is a much more ambiguous
process. The French still commemorate the storming of the Bastille, but the
consolidation of democracy afterward took decades. Russian democrats at one
point celebrated August 1991 as the month Soviet communism collapsed, but
they stopped having parties later in the decade, when democracy’s arrival
still seemed far away. Navigating the gap between the fall of the old order
and the formation of the new order is always difficult; it’s especially
dangerous when extremist movements and ideologies are added to the mix.

Iraq has it all: Ethnic and religious divides, foreign troops, and returning
exiles and revolutionaries ready to step in with an alternative vision for
how to organize Iraqi state and society when those who first take power
fail. Although Germany, Japan and France in 1945, or Haiti and the Balkans
in the 1990s, have become the analogous regime changes of choice for many
Western analysts, we would do well to add France in 1789, Russia in 1917 and
1991, Iran in 1979 or Afghanistan in the early 1990s as other historical
metaphors that may help us understand Iraq today. These revolutionary
situations shared several characteristics after the fall of the old order.

First, the collapse of the old regime left a vacuum of state power. The
anarchy, looting and interruption of state services that we see in Iraq are
predictable consequences of regime change. Second, after the fall of the
dictator, expectations about “life after the dictator’’ exploded. People who
have been oppressed for decades want to benefit from the new order
immediately. The urgent and angry questions last week from Ahmed Chalabi,
the Iraqi National Congress leader now back in Iraq, about why the Americans
have not provided more relief faster is typical. The first leaders after the
departure of the king in France, the czar in Russia or the communists in
Eastern Europe knew Chalabi’s situation well. Paradoxically, society’s
expectations inflate at precisely the same moment when the state is least
prepared to meet them. Third, the coalition that opposed the dictatorship
dissolved. While the dictator was still in power, this united front embraced
one ideology of opposition — ”anti-king,’’ “anti-czar,’’ “anti-shah’’ or
“anti-communist.’’ In doing so, these coalitions consisted of economic,
political, ethnic and religious forces with radically different visions for
their country after regime change. Unity ended after the dictator fell. In
Russia, Bolsheviks and liberals in 1917 and nationalists and democrats in
1991 went their separate ways. In Iran in 1979, Islamic leftists, liberals
and militant clerics celebrated their shared goal of removing the shah. Just
a few years after the collapse of the old order, many of the coalition
partners who brought down the shah were out of power or in jail. Soon after
the Soviet puppet regime in Afghanistan fell, the anti-Soviet coalition
forces were killing each other.

The Iraqi opposition today consists of exiled liberals and generals, Kurdish
nationalists, Shiite and Sunni clerics, Islamic fundamentalists, a
smattering of monarchists and the unknown local leaders throughout the
country who have quietly provided comfort to opponents and passive
resistance to Saddam Hussein’s totalitarian regime. From other regime
changes, we should assume that this united front against Saddam will no
longer be united after Saddam. The combination of a weak state, soaring
expectations in society and factional fighting in the anti-authoritarian
coalition gives rise to two dangerous “solutions.’’ One is restoration.
Living in anarchy, people want order. Who can provide order most quickly?
Those who previously provided order. How can order be provided most quickly?
By deploying the same methods used before. For both American officials
governing Iraq and the Iraqi people, the temptation to settle for a new
regime led by new leaders with autocratic proclivities grafted onto old
state structures from Saddam’s regime will be great.

But there is another, more sinister solution that can also gain appeal: The
victory of the extremists. The end of dictatorship is a euphoric but
ephemeral moment. When the new, interim government does not meet popular
expectations, the radicals offer up an alternative vision to construct a new
political (and often social) order. It is amazing and frightening how often
they win. In February 1917 the end of Russian czarism seemed to create
propitious conditions for constitutional democracy. Less than a year later,
the Bolsheviks had seized power. In 1979 the first provisional government in
Iran contained many prominent leftist intellectuals and even some liberals.
No one today, however, remembers Mehdi Bazargan or Abol Hassan Bani-Sadr,
while everyone knows the name of Ayatollah Khomeini, the radical cleric who
pushed these others aside to dictate his vision for Iran. The Taleban seized
control in Afghanistan to end the years of anarchy after the collapse of the
old order there.

In Iraq, this threat from revolutionaries — that is, the terrorist wing of
Islamic fundamentalism inspired by Osama Bin Laden — is now latent and below
the radar screen, but real. For devotees of this world perspective, Iraq
offers a ripe opportunity. Not only is the old state gone and expectations
high, but the only authority in the country is, in their revolutionary
discourse, an imperial occupying force of infidels. Vladimir Lenin and
Khomeini would have drooled over such propitious conditions for revolution.

The third path between restoration and revolution is long and bumpy.
Liberal, moderate grass-roots movements from below always take more time to
emerge and consolidate than the autocratic forces of either restoration or
revolution. To succeed in Iraq, they will need their US allies for the long
haul. Premature departure guarantees thugs in power at best and Osama Bin
Laden supporters at worst.

— The writer is a Hoover fellow and professor of political science at
Stanford University and a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace.


The Peace Will Give the Final Verdict
Timothy Garton Ash, The Guardian



LONDON, 18 April 2003 — America is on probation. That, in four words, is my
verdict on Gulf War II. America can still prove, by what it does over the
next few years in the Middle East, that it was right in what it did during
this last month of war. On what I see at the moment, I fear that the United
States will show itself to have been wrong. Not grotesquely, criminally
wrong, but prudentially, politically wrong. Then “the judgment of history”,
invoked by Tony Blair in the House of Commons on Tuesday, may come in the
famous words of Talleyrand: “It was worse than a crime; it was a mistake.”

How can I be so heartless as not to call this war a crime when I look at the
innocent bewildered face of Ali Ismail Abbas, the 12-year-old boy left
armless and orphaned by an American bomb? I will never forgot that image.
But I will also never forget the photograph from Iraqi secret police files
of an unnamed victim of their own torture, lying crooked, emaciated and dead
on a concrete floor, like an inmate of Bergen-Belsen.

For every casualty that we’ve seen in this month of war, there have been
many, many more in the 30 years of Saddam’s tyranny — and those mutilated
bodies we have not seen. The chief news executive of CNN just wrote a
strikingly honest article about the terrible news from Iraq that CNN did not
report from Baghdad for many years, in order to keep the network’s
accreditation and access under the dictatorship.

Andrew Motion crafted his anti-war poem, printed in the Guardian a fortnight
ago, as if Death started “advancing down the road from Niniveh” on March 21,
2003; but Death has been stalking that road for three decades. Nor can we
see the victims that might have resulted if Saddam Hussein had acquired
nuclear weapons, as he had clearly been trying to do.

The cold moral calculus of reckoning victim numbers against each other
always feels inhuman: More than 100,000 Kurds killed by Saddam against
perhaps as many as 10,000 Iraqi civilian casualties in this war, past versus
present, actual versus potential, gulag versus holocaust. What possible
consolation are such statistics to Ali Ismail Abbas? Every loss of human
life is infinite.

War is always horrible — even when it is waged as carefully as this one was.
Gen. Patrick Cordingley of the Desert Rats memorably described on the Today
program how officers have to prepare soldiers for close combat. “You’ve got
to persuade them that it’s all right to kill somebody,” he explained, in his
relaxed, golf club voice.

I have profound respect for a pacifist who says that war is always wrong.
Actually, the Pope comes pretty close to this position (he even opposed
armed resistance to the Nazi occupation of his native Poland), as did an
early Jewish critic of Ariel Sharon called Jesus Christ. But that is not
where I stand. I think war is sometimes a lesser evil.

So this war was not wrong just because it was war. Nor was it wrong because
of the way it was waged by American and British forces. There were some
horrifying incidents of coalition soldiers firing on civilians and comrades
in arms, and lessons should be learned from those incidents, but there was
nothing like the firebombing of Dresden — an atrocity that put in question
the just cause it was supposed to serve.

However, Gulf War II may yet prove to have been wrong politically, and
therefore in the end also morally, when we learn more of its real causes and
see more of its consequences. America’s probation now has three main parts.

First, will we find weapons of mass destruction in occupied Iraq, or at
least, more convincing evidence of recent efforts to develop them? If not,
the primary justification of the war will be much weakened. On what we know
so far, I see no good reason why we should not have continued with intrusive
UN inspections for another six months, while maintaining a threatening
military presence in the region. But don’t expect anything conclusive either
way.

Second, what will America do with Iraq? The New York Times columnist Thomas
L Friedman admonishes the Bush administration that the china shop rule
applies: “you break it, you own it”. This may not exactly be the position in
international law, but the point is well taken.

America has made itself responsible for repairing the damage to Iraq, much
of which was actually done by Saddam and his predecessors — including the
British. I don’t think for a moment that Washington wants a colony in Iraq.
I’m sure it would be delighted to see a free, prosperous, stable, peaceful,
self-governing Federal Republic of Iraq emerge tomorrow. But does the United
States know how to empower Iraqis to make one?

The early signs are not good. Perhaps the scale of looting and anarchy could
not have been foreseen, but surely it was a contingency to be planned for?
The main Shiite opposition parties boycott the first political talks. The
Kurds in the north will hang on to their own. An American soldier ruins
Iraq’s “fall of the Berlin Wall” moment by draping the Stars and Stripes
over the head of the about-to-be-toppled statue of Saddam Hussein.

An American general moves in as viceroy, with clumsy Reader’s Digest
rhetoric about the honor of being at ancient Ur. Incredibly, a former head
of the CIA is proposed as information minister, to supplant the incredible
Mohammed Saeed Al-Sahaf. (One comic turn succeeds another?) I currently see
all the tact of a bull in a china shop; but I hope to be proved wrong.

The third part of America’s probation is what it does in the wider Middle
East. Washington is making the right noises about the Palestinian issue, but
do we believe that anything serious will be done before the next
presidential election in November 2004? And how will it approach Syria, Iran
and others? There’s a lot of talk these days about America’s new empire. But
the biggest danger is not American imperialism; it’s American inconstancy.
On the very day victory is declared, President Bush turns the spotlight back
to tax cuts. His political adviser Karl Rove is presumably telling him that
he’ll never win the election on foreign policy. And so Iraq fades from the
screens. Like a wounded giant, America struck out after the Sept. 11 attacks
— first at Al-Qaeda in Aghanistan, then at Iraq. But soon, true to form, the
wounded giant retreats to his distant home, muttering “It’s the economy,
stupid”. The neoconservative ideologues of democratic imperialism, to whom
we pay so much attention in Europe, are sidelined.

America has never been the Great Satan. It has sometimes been the Great
Gatsby: “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy — they smashed up things
and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast
carelessness...”

One of Britain’s jobs as America’s best friend, but a task also for all the
Europeans, is to keep reminding Tom and Daisy that they now have promises to
keep.


Will Bush’s Popularity Last After War?
James P. Pinkerton, Newsday



So what are George W. Bush’s re-election prospects?

The question came up last week when White House political guru Karl Rove
predicted a “close, competitive’’ contest next year. Rove is playing the
expectations game, of course, but a look back at history suggests he might
also be right. To be sure, Bush looks unbeatable now. His approval rating
hovers around 70 percent, and he beats any hypothetical Democratic
challenger by a 2 to 1 margin. Nonetheless, Rove is wise to counsel against
“irrational exuberance’’ among Republicans because the political ghost that
looms over all military victors in democratic countries is that of Winston
Churchill. Having led Britain to a triumph in World War II, Churchill was
defeated at the polls just two months after Germany surrendered. English
voters were grateful for his leadership in wartime, but wanted something
much different — the then-socialist Labour Party — for peacetime.

And closer to home, Bush’s own father, the 41st president — who achieved the
highest approval ratings in history after his military victory over Iraq in
1991 — suffered a similarly Churchillian fate in 1992. Which might explain
why Rove went out of his way to tell his New Orleans audience, “We will not
raise taxes.’’ That, of course, is yet another echo of the earlier President
Bush, who shattered his own re-election coalition by breaking his “read my
lips, no new taxes’’ pledge.

Still, the incumbent president is coming to his own kind of grief on taxes.
Congressional Democrats are divided over the Iraq war issue, but they are
united on the tax issue. Working with just two renegade Republicans in the
Senate, they seem to have succeeded in cutting by more than half the size of
Bush’s proposed tax cut, from $726 billion over the next decade to $350
billion.

And the same polls that show Bush’s presidency riding high show his domestic
policy riding low. According to an Associated Press survey, 61 percent of
Americans agree with the statement that it’s “better to hold off on tax cuts
to avoid making budget deficits worse and ensure there is adequate money for
the war with Iraq.’’

War with Iraq. Aye, there’s the rub, working for and against the president.
National-security policy has been the key to his popularity over the past 18
months, but it’s also been the stick in the spokes of his domestic-policy
wheel. And here’s where the younger Bush could be misreading the public mood
on tax matters, just as his father did 13 years ago. Since 9/11, the mood of
the country has shifted, from private to public, away from wealth creation
and conspicuous consumption toward sterner values of solidarity and
sacrifice. If the heroes of the ‘90s were entrepreneurs and dot-commers, the
heroes of the ‘00s are firefighters and GIs.

The president has stoked this mood, appearing regularly to rally the troops
— and the voters. That’s proven to be a great plan for mobilizing support
for liberating the oppressed people of Iraq, but not such a good plan for
seeking to liberate oppressed corporations in the United States. From a
strict policy point of view, a strong case can be made for the entirety of
Bush’s tax cut, including the elimination of the double taxation of
dividends. Indeed, it’s common sense that reducing the tax burden on
investment capital increases the amount of investment capital — and
eventually, of jobs and growth.

But from a political point of view, as the polls show, most Americans don’t
support cutting taxes for the investor class at home when the soldier class
in Iraq is under fire.

In 1918, another British prime minister, David Lloyd George, summed up the
public mood in the wake of victory in World War I. “What is our task?’’ he
asked rhetorically. “To make Britain a fit country for heroes to live in.’’
For Britain in the years that followed, the proper celebration of its
homecoming heroes required a continuation of high tax rates and additional
domestic spending. He remained in office until 1922, and is still an icon of
British history.

Bush, of course, makes the argument that the pie needs to be expanded
through tax cuts, not redistributed through more government activity. Can he
confound historical precedent? The political specters of Churchill and Lloyd
George — and his own father — will be watching closely.

Opinion 18 April 2003


Editorial: Battle Over Spoils
18 April 2003



Yesterday, EU leaders called for the UN to have “a central” role in
rebuilding Iraq; in Belfast a few days ago, George Bush and Tony Blair
talked about the UN having “a vital” role.

Clearly the debate about the UN’s role is going to be bitterly contested. In
the one corner France, Russia and plenty of others, including UN
Secretary-General Kofi Annan, insist that only the UN can give legitimacy to
a postwar government in Iraq. In the other is Washington, insisting that it
will run the show and that the UN’s role will be subordinate — simply
helping with reconstruction. Between them, Tony Blair and others suggest
that the UN and the US cooperate in rebuilding Iraq.

The fact is that the UN is as much an outsider to Iraqis as the US, and the
only legitimacy that counts can come from the Iraqis themselves. If a
transitional government in Baghdad is seen to be accepted by the Iraqis,
despite having come into being as a result of US action, then it will be as
legitimate as anything the UN could organize. In any event, all the signs
are that Iraqis do not want a UN-run administration as in Kosovo. They want
an interim government that is an all-Iraqi affair — and they want it now,
not in several months’ time, which is how long the UN will take to get its
act on the road. What they want from the UN is practical help in
reconstruction. They may be suspicious of US intentions, but it seems that
they would prefer that the Americans remained for the time being to provide
law and order while the country gets back on its feet, and then go.

But the UN will have a role to play, whether the US likes it or not, because
until the UN embargo is lifted, Iraqi oil cannot be sold openly on the
international market to pay for the country’s reconstruction. If the US
tries to sell the oil, they would find themselves facing court action from
countries owed money by Iraq. The Russians and French would jump at the
chance. That means a compromise between the two positions, which in effect
means Tony Blair’s option — the UN and US cooperating.

For all the talk about legality and morality, or reality and practicality,
the debate about the UN’s role seems to be motivated as much by money. US
companies are set to make megabucks out of it. Iraq will pay, through its
oil wealth, while Washington sits back and hands out the contracts —
contracts it has already said should go to itself and the UK for having
“liberated” the country. This alone justifies a UN role in Iraq. It is
unacceptable that the US should use its military power to make money for US
companies.

But the French and Russians are equally mercenary. Their refusal to cancel
Iraqi debts worth about $8 billion each shows their real motive in opposing
the war and now in insisting that the UN be involved. It is all about money.
They fear that they will be barred from future contracts in a country where
they were joint leading players in the past. The excuse for not canceling
the debts — they said that could only be negotiated with an elected
government — was not convincing. All they needed to say was that the debt
was cancelled. There would have been no need for negotiations with anyone.
Had they done that, it would have given them an insurmountable moral high
ground.

They want contracts; the US intends to keep them for itself. The scavengers
are snapping at each other.

With the very best of good wishes,
Musa Amadu Pembo
Glasgow,
Scotland
UK.
[log in to unmask]
Da’wah is to convey the message with wisdom and with good words. We should
give the noble and positive message of Islam. We should try to emphasize
more commonalities and explain the difference without getting into
theological arguments and without claiming the superiority of one position
over the other. There is a great interest among the people to know about
Islam and we should do our best to give the right message.
May Allah,Subhana Wa Ta'Ala,guide us all to His Sirat Al-Mustaqim (Righteous
Path).May He protect us from the evils of this life and the hereafter.May
Allah,Subhana Wa Ta'Ala,grant us entrance to paradise .
We ask Allaah the Most High, the All-Powerful, to teach us that which will
benefit us, and to benefit us by that which we learn. May Allaah Subhanahu
Wa Ta'ala grant blessings and peace to our Prophet Muhammad and his family
and
companions..Amen.




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