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Silent Majority
The New Republic
"The United States has expressed outrage at the U.N. oil-for-food scandal but has tried to defund the Governing Council's own examination of the problem so as not to make things awkward for U.N. envoy Lakhdar Brahimi. If the United States thinks Iraqis will take more kindly to U.N. paternalism than American paternalism, they are mistaken. Many Shia and Kurds remember that Brahimi remained silent when, as undersecretary of the Arab League between 1984 and 1991, Saddam massacred tens of thousands of Shia and Kurds. And Iraqis have not forgotten U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan's February 24, 1998, comment, "Can I trust Saddam Hussein? I think I can do business with him." Iraqis, like most other peoples, are prickly nationalists. After the handover, the Iraqi government must be able to conduct its own sovereign investigation of the United Nations and anyone else. "
*Michael Rubin served as a Coalition Provisional Authority political adviser between July 2003 and March 2004, and is now a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.
-Rudey
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