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| Axis of Evil |
| Sammy turning into the voice of moderation? |
| 2002-03-25 |
Didn't Sammy tear up the formal document he had with Iran on teevee and then invade them? The new stance in Beirut, taken as Baghdad faces a threatened US attack, is in marked contrast to last year's Amman summit. President Saddam Hussein's regime then played the party-pooper, blocking any attempt to work out a resolution on Iraqi-Kuwait relations. It's only temporary. If Sammy can get through the next year with his skin intact Kuwait'll go back on the Iraqi map as the 19th province. Iraqi Foreign Minister Naji Sabri said Iraq did not want to get involved, considering that this year's summit in the Lebanese capital should concentrate on supporting the Palestinian cause. The Palestinians become very important to Sammy when he's feeling threatened. After he occupied Kuwait, he fought the Gulf War for the Palestinians, not to try and keep the swag. He said that only when it learned that the Kuwaitis had asked for their continued grievances to be put on the summit agenda that Iraq had countered with a document of its own. An Arab League official said Kuwait had taken a relatively hard line, listing its complaints since the Iraqi invasion in August 1990 and subsequent seven-month occupation and the question of Kuwaitis still missing from the war. Guess they haven't forgotten everything, at least not yet. Not that I believe in Arab gratitude. That and the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy are all pretty much out of my system. The Iraqi document was conciliatory, expressing "respect for the security and independence of Kuwait and stressing that the priority for Arab states was to "concentrate on the essential questions", namely the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and "threats against Arab countries." If the Kuwaitis are dumb enough to believe Iraq's good intentions, next time they're flattened I'll be out there hollering "No blood for oil" with the Ron Dellums crowd. Fool me once, it's your fault, fool me twice it's my fault. Arab ministers also told AFP they had been pleased to see Sabri and Kuwait's minister of state for foreign affairs, Sheikh Mohammad al-Sabah, having a "constructive dialogue" in an informal meeting of the Arab world's top diplomats on Sunday. "There were no harsh exchanges between the two countries as is sometimes the case in this sort of meeting," one official said. He added that it was expected that some sort of satisfactory compromise would be reached in the summit's final declaration to be approved at Thursday's end to the two-day summit. They don't have to holler at them. The cold shoulder's okay. I guess. Saddam's regime has been stepping up efforts to improve ties with other Arab states, especially since US President George Bush's administration lumped it into an "axis of evil" with Iran and North Korea in January. The guiding thought behind the Iraqi initiative is the theory that there's one born every minute. |
| Posted by:Fred Pruitt |