Parliamentarian Assassinated

Guerrillas assassinated a member of parliament in Baghdad on Tuesday. They cut down Dhari Ali al-Fayadh, along with his son and three bodyguards. Al-Fayadh had run for office as part of the largely Shiite United Iraqi Alliance. The oldest member of parliament, he served as speaker of the house when it first met. He is the second member of parliament to be killed.

Reuters reports:

"In other incidents on Tuesday, a suicide bomber dressed as a policeman blew himself up in a hospital in Musayyib, south of Baghdad, killing three people and wounding 13. A car bomb killed two bodyguards in a failed assassination bid on the chief of traffic police in the ethnically divided northern oil city of Kirkuk and police opened fire on a crowd of demonstrators in the southern city of Samawa wounding seven."

US forces began a new campaign at Haditha.

45% of Americans in a new poll say that the US will never succeed in Iraq. Some 49% thought it could, but most of those believed it would take five years (a very optimistic time scale).

Iraq's new government is trying to get out of a United Nations-imposed program that subtracts 5 percent of its oil revenues to pay compensation to Kuwait and others for damage done by Iraq in the 1990-1991 invasion of Kuwait. Iraq wants the ability to negotiate bilateral deals rather than being under the UN thumb on this. The Iraqi government is only able to pump about 1.4 million barrels a day because of sabotage, and needs every cent to run the government and work against the guerrilla movement. Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and others, however, want the payments to continue, figuring Iraq owes them $50 bn. for damages.