BAGHDAD, June 11, (AP): A US congressman visiting Baghdad Friday suggested that Iraq pay back the United States for the money it has spent in the eight years since the US-led invasion in 2003.
Rep. Dana Rohrabacher spoke during a one-day visit by a group of six US congressman. The California Republican said he raised the suggestion during a meeting with Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki that some day when Iraq is a “prosperous” nation it pay back the US for everything that it has done here.
“We would hope that some consideration be given to repaying the United States some of the megadollars we have spent here in the last eight years,” Rohrabacher told reporters at the US Embassy after the meeting.
He did not say what reaction, if any, the prime minister had to the suggestion.
The idea of repaying the United States for a war that the vast majority of Iraqis had no role in bringing about would likely gain little traction with an Iraqi public that harbors mixed emotions about the US invasion. While many Iraqis are glad to be rid of Saddam Hussein, they blame the United States for the chaos and sectarian violence that followed.
The Baghdad city government earlier this year demanded the US pay $1 billion for damage caused to the city by blast walls erected during the war.
The congressman said the United States can no longer afford to send troops all over the world because the US is in an economic crisis.
“We could certainly use some people to care about our situation as we have cared about theirs,” he said.
Rohrabacher said the issue of cost could be a factor in any decision about whether to keep troops here past a Dec. 31 pullout deadline.
There are currently about 47,000 American forces in Iraq. Discussion is intensifying about whether Iraq will ask American troops to stay past that date.
Leon Panetta, who has been nominated to take over the Pentagon, said earlier this week during a confirmation hearing that Iraq would likely ask the US to keep some American troop presence past 2011.
Meanwhile, two car bombs exploded in quick succession in a central street of the northern Iraqi city of Mosul on Saturday, killing ten people and injuring 60, police and hospital officials said.
In an apparently coordinated double bombing, the blasts occurred in a street with many restaurants near the government compound in the main city of Nineveh province, 390 km (240 miles) north of the capital Baghdad.
Police said the first bomb targeted an army water tanker truck and then when rescuers came running to help the victims, the second vehicle detonated.
One of those killed and several of the wounded were military personnel, police said.
“I heard a huge explosion ... when I went out to see what had happened, there was another big explosion. I saw dozens of people lying in the street. I couldn’t make out who was killed and who was wounded,” restaurant owner Mone’m Mahmoud, 33, told Reuters. The blasts shattered the windows of his restaurant.
Mosul is regarded as Sunni Islamist al Qaeda’s last remaining urban base in Iraq after the group was kicked out of many parts of Baghdad and western Anbar province by US troops allied with local Sunni Arab tribal militias in 2007.
At the end of April, eight people were killed and 19 wounded when a suicide bomber blew himself up in the city.
Although violence has fallen in Iraq since the height of the sectarian slaughter in 2006-2007 following the 2003 US-led invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein, gun and bomb attacks against Iraqi security forces still occur daily.
There are fears that attacks may be increasing ahead of the planned withdrawal at the end of the year of the remaining 47,000 US troops.
“This kind of attack is aimed at creating the impression that there is no stability in the province,” Deldar Zebari, deputy head of the Nineveh Provincial Council, told Reuters.
Nineveh is on the frontline of a potentially explosive dispute over land and power between Kurds in their semi-autonomous northern enclave and Iraq’s majority Arabs.
Multiple bomb blasts killed more than 40 people in cities west and north of Baghdad earlier this month in apparently coordinated attacks that were claimed by al Qaeda’s Iraqi wing.
On Monday, five US soldiers died in a rocket attack on a base in Baghdad claimed by a Shi’ite militia.
This week, US President Barack Obama’s pick to be the new defence secretary, outgoing CIA chief Leon Panetta, said he expected Iraq to eventually ask Washington to keep US troops in the country beyond the end-2011 withdrawal deadline.