30 April

By Daniel Kimmage

Britain's "Al-Quds al-Arabi": The newspaper publishes what it claims is a message from Saddam Hussein to the Iraqi people. Hulagu, the grandson of Genghis Khan, is the Mongol conqueror who sacked Baghdad in 1258.

     "The criminal Bush entered Baghdad just as Hulagu did. This is a bitter, bitter time. They triumphed over you only through treachery, for you reject the occupation and degradation. Arab pride and Islam live on in your hearts and minds. By God, it is no victory as long as resistance lives in your souls. What we once spoke of has come to pass. We cannot live in peace and security as long as the monstrous Zionist entity remains on our Arab land. There can be no divisions within the unity of the Arab struggle."

Britain's "Al-Sharq al-Awsat": Abd al-Rahman al-Rashid warns against viewing politics in the region merely as a reflection of a denominational distinction between Shi'a and Sunni.

     "If we examine recent conflicts from the vantage point of religious denomination, we discover that Iraq did, in fact, go to war against its Shi'a neighbor, Iran. But we should not forget that it also occupied its Sunni neighbor, Kuwait, and threatened Saudi Arabia as well. You cannot identify political affiliation with religious affiliation, in other words. This applies not only to Iraq. Iran, for example, is allied with the Sunnis of Azerbaijan against Shi'a Azeris, who are closer to Sunni Turkey. Many people will discover that relations with Baghdad in the future will not necessarily be good merely because its leader is Shi'a, or bad if he is a Sunni. Relations will depend on the governments involved, and not only on religious denomination."

Algeria's "Libert?" (Francophone): Tamani Salim sees a repeat of earlier failures of American foreign policy.

     "The Americans are encountering more and more opposition from the population, which, freed from the terror of the dictatorial regime, rejects foreign occupation. But the experts in the Pentagon and the White House, who launched the war to protect the economic and strategic interests of the United States and its allies in the Gulf, hardly expected this. As things stand, however, the question is not merely whether the United States will pack its bags and leave merely because the Ba'ath regime has fallen.

     "One would like to know whether U.S. forces will fire on the crowd each time a demonstration against their presence is organized. If that is the case, they will be saddling themselves with a people whose only hope is to live in freedom. It is easy to wage war, far less so to make peace. Washington, which has had ample experience in Vietnam, Somalia, and Afghanistan, does not seem to have understood this yet."