 | | Either Amr Moussa or Jerry Lewis. I'm not sure which. |
Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari has criticised the Arab League over what he called its disregard for Iraq, after its chief demanded to know why a draft constitution failed to refer to the entire country as an Arab nation. "The Arab League must feel the Iraqi people's problems, and I told its secretary-general (Amr Moussa) during a telephone conversation that his organisation has been very slow to take an interest in the Iraqi people," al-Jaafari said in a statement on Tuesday. "We have not seen any Arab envoys in Baghdad while foreign officials are coming here one after another," he said, adding that Arab League leaders "have no right to cast doubt on Iraq's (political) experience ... they should change their position."
The contentious article of the draft constitution states that "Iraq is part of the Muslim world and its Arab people are part of the Arab nation". Moussa, who last week said the 22-member Arab League was disturbed by the charter, responded to al-Jaafari's comments saying he "has the right" to criticise. "But the occupation and the security situation have made blurry the Arab League's role in Iraq ... and al-Jaafari understands this," Moussa said in Cairo.
| I'm still trying to figure what use the Arab League is to Iraq. Are they afraid the Kurds and Assyrians are going to take over? Even if they did, wouldn't the inhabitants still be the same people? If they spent less time on "maintaining stability" and fondling their "Arab identity" and more time on trying to figure how to improve the lot of The Masses™, the region would be a lot better off. I don't see the organization as anything more than a mutual masturbation society. I don't think Jaafari does, either — with the proviso that we're talking about the Middle East, where memories are long but attention spans are short. |
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