Some Iraqis decry call to help fuel U.S. military

Some Iraqis decry call to help fuel U.S. military
Stars and Stripes
Mideast edition, Sunday, May 4, 2008

BAGHDAD — Some Iraqi officials are fuming at suggestions being floated by lawmakers that Baghdad should start paying a share of the war’s costs by providing cheap fuel to the U.S. military, the Chicago Tribune reported Friday.

“America has hardly even begun to repay its debt to Iraq,” Abdul Basit, the head of Iraq’s Supreme Board of Audit, an independent body that oversees Iraqi government spending, was reported as saying. “This is an immoral request because we didn’t ask them to come to Iraq, and before they came in 2003 we didn’t have all these needs.”

The issue of Baghdad’s contribution to the costs of the war jumped to the forefront early in April during testimony to Congress of the Iraq war commander, Gen. David Petraeus, and the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Ryan Crocker, the Tribune reported. Noting that the soaring price of oil is likely to give Iraq a revenue bonanza this year of up to $70 billion, senators quizzed the two on why Iraq isn’t using its rising oil income to pay more of the costs of reconstruction.

Iraqi and U.S. officials say they are. Iraqis acknowledge the need for Iraq to take on a greater share of its reconstruction costs and say it is doing so, the paper noted.

“I think Iraq now is able to depend on its own money. We do not ask for extra aid. We are spending on our own armed forces and reconstruction,” Bayan Jabr al-Zubaidi, Iraq’s finance minister, told the Tribune.


Article at: http://www.stripes.com/article.asp?section=104&article=54537