Iraq Press Roundup

The newspaper of the influential Sunni group the Association of Muslim Scholars commented in its editorial Thursday on President Bush's decision to invade Iraq and violate its "humanity, traditions, cultural inheritance and civilization," promising in return three things -- food, medicine and freedom.

Under the headline "Bush's promise: Freedom as ugly as Hell," al-Basaer newspaper dubbed Iraqi exiles who returned to the country with U.S. forces "the group of betrayal," saying they had advertised for Bush's agenda.

"Bush turned Iraqis into hungry people, needy for the simplest elements of life, driving them to flee their homes and look for safe haven in other countries," the newspaper said.

The people of Iraq today believe that the medicine that Bush promised them has turned out to be the weapons and explosives used against them, leading women, children, the young and the elderly to be displaced inside their own homeland.

The editorial added that the "freedom" Bush said Iraqis would experience in reality the U.S. prisons that contain tens of thousands of Iraqis who face human rights violations and torture.

"The Abu Ghraib scandal is a witness to Bush's policy applied in U.S. prisons in Iraq. … We don't know what else the United States is doing to Iraqis, but we understand that the so-called Iraqi government is committing even more heinous crimes against the innocent people of Iraq," the newspaper, based in Saudi Arabia, said.

The newspaper also said that the justifications for the U.S. invasion were only allegations that were revealed as false to the public all over the world as soon as the United States entered Iraq.

It added that what Bush intended to accomplish was part of his permanent principle of pre-emptive war and what he refers to as the "price of freedom."

As a result of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Bush's administration could never gain what they planned from dominating the world and controlling international decisions, the editorial said.

"The invasion of Iraq resulted in ringing the bells of danger in Russia and the creation of a new impetus to oppose the West (and) ... American power."

The newspaper added that the occupation of Iraq didn't bring the promised "democratic revolution" to the Middle East, a dream Bush was planning to import to the region.

The paper also said Bush assumed that a war on Iraq would bring safety to Israel and solve the Palestinian-Israeli conflict; yet it only made that situation more complicated.

The newspaper concluded that the United States has tried to portray Iran as the major power in the region that presents a danger to its neighbors and other Arab countries.

"More instability and conflicts in Iraq and the region are the real promises that the United States brought with them when they invaded Iraq," it summarized.