Memo: To Website Fans, Browsers, Clients From: Jude Wanniski Re: Yes, Says Mohammed al-Obaidi
Regular readers of “Memo on the Margin” will recognize Dr. Obaidi as an acquaintance I’ve come to trust in recent years as a straight-shooting Iraqi who has been living in exile in the UK as a medical doctor and now a university professor. He was sincerely anti-Saddam when I encountered him, but also unusual in that he agreed completely with Dr. Stephen Pelletiere, my CIA friend, that Saddam did not commit genocide and that the Iraqi Kurds who died at Halabja in March 1988 were caught between the Iranian and Iraqi forces and were collateral victims of Iranian gassings intended for Iraqi soldiers.
Mohammed also opposed the U.S. war, believing it was unnecessary and would take a great toll on the Iraqi people. He has, though, been the spokesman for the “People’s Struggle Movement,” a political party that intended to participate in the January elections until it came to believe the Allawi government was making sure the outcome of the elections would put in power a national assembly that would only serve the interests of the occupying power, the US. I frankly don’t know what’s going on in Baghdad and am mystified by the stories I read in our papers and periodicals about the coalitions getting ready for the elections. But I ran across Dr. Obaidi’s column today on Al Jazeera’s English language website and found it interesting and persuasive as to why we are hearing so much about the boycott. By the way, it was Obaidi who introduced the opinion editor of Al Jazeera to me some months ago and I am now also writing occasional columns for the network.
