Surrendering Costly Achievements in Iraq

[yota691]

Surrendering Costly Achievements in Iraq

27/12/2012 04:06:00By DAVID ROMANO

Under the Oil-for-Food program between 1997 and 2003, Iraq’s budget amounted to some six billion dollars a year. With that money, every Iraqi had a monthly food basket, the country had electricity around the clock in nearly every city, services like garbage collection were conducted reasonably well, and people enjoyed security as long as they did not run afoul of their vicious Ba’athist dictatorship.

Today’s Iraq enjoys an unimaginably higher budget. Oil revenues bring in some one hundred billion dollars a year. One would think that with such vast sums of wealth, the country would enjoy spectacular increases in standards of living. Instead, garbage lies uncollected on street corner after street corner, with little children playing in disease-ridden alleyways. Security remains elusive as kidnappings, mafia shakedowns and political assassination cast a shadow across entire communities. Baghdad and other cities still lack electricity, with noisy portable generators rumbling through the night and spewing their pollution across entire neighborhoods. Some twenty-five billion dollars “spent” on restoring the country’s electricity grid seems to have produced little tangible results, possibly because the business interests who rent generators don’t want the electric grid restored. Recently, brand new, huge and publically financed generators were found in the desert near Basra, unused and gathering dust.

Perhaps if there weren’t so much money to be made in Iraq, politics would prove a little less corrupt. Much poorer countries have managed to get their house in order and provide fairly good governance to their people with a lot less public resources. In Iraq, on the other hand, the Prime Minister goes on a senseless $4.2 billion dollar weapons shopping spree to Russia, after which it turns out his son set himself up to skim a good deal of the money off the top of the deal. Politician after politician engages in an elaborate charade of parliamentary theater and sectarian populism as they collude with their “enemies” to line their pockets.

Average Iraqis increasingly lose faith with their government as the shell game continues. As Nuri al-Maliki increasingly rides rough shod over the Constitution and the law of the land, the American State Department seems to forgive him all his transgressions. Instead of demanding a better showing from Maliki, they pressure the Kurds, the Sunnis and non-Dawaa Party Shiites to make nice with Maliki. It’s a mind-boggling stance for the Americans to take, after they have shed so much blood and treasure in Iraq. They left the country with a good constitution and the basis for solid institutions and responsible security forces, only to see all these hard-fought achievements squandered by a Prime Minister more intent on lining his pockets and monopolizing power than advancing the country.

Under Maliki, the Iraqi state seems headed right for some kind of implosion. If the United States wants to make one last effort at avoiding a new civil war in the country, they need to warn Iran’s man in Baghdad in no uncertain terms. Instead of asking the Kurds not to build an oil pipeline with the Turks, or demanding that the Sunnis submit to yet more arrests and exclusion (one estimate I heard today was that only ten per cent of current prison detainees in Iraq are Shiite), they need to push Maliki to respect Iraq’s constitution and share power. That means no extra-parliamentary military appointments such as the Tigris Operations Command, Article 140 or some consensus based alternative for the disputed territories, the right of governorates to form into regions, truly independent commissions, reducing nepotism, and so forth. Failing this, Washington should inform Maliki behind closed doors that they will support his opponents. That could mean Kurdish secession from a dysfunctional Iraqi state, a renewed Sunni insurgency that makes common cause with Sunnis in Syria, or other projects. He just might get the message before he sails the Iraqi ship into the rocks.

* David Romano has been a Rudaw columnist since August 2010. He is the Thomas G. Strong Professor of Middle East Politics at Missouri State University and author of The Kurdish Nationalist Movement (2006, Cambridge University Press). http://www.rudaw.net/english/science/columnists/5587.html

[MyLadiesDaddy]

author of The Kurdish Nationalist Movement

Yea an American sympathetic to the List. Why don't that surprise me.

So this college educated idiot is now telling us that the people of Iraq

were so much better off under the rule of Saddam? I'm

sure that the people of Iraq might not agree. And as for the civil services

we have been told for some time now that they are back to normal. I have

seen current video clips of Iraq citizens shopping in the local market and

eating at the open air cafes. We here know that the picture painted by this

person is not an accurate one. Oh and I bet all my dinar that this prof is a liberal.

[uncirculd]

Yeah as for food and services they may have been better off. The difference now is the widows and orphans are starving and have neither food or services. The young can't get jobs because the deadlock of the control of the funds. (maliki and his ministers) Investment laws have been hindered because he will not allow it to happen if he cannot control it. He holds 100's of proxy positions in the government. Dang they quit because he won't let them do their job.

It's close to over. I just hope we don't see a serious spring. I think the PM is either mental or on drugs. It's so hard to see. Thank God for wisdom. Know the day and time your living in, watch those who come in sheepskin clothing promising miracles. Maliki has made a lot of promises. I am still waiting for him to implement:

Erbil

Ministers

Government positions we don't even talk about

Services for the people

The long drug out Kuwait Issue

The agreement of a nuke free ME (i.e. Iran)

Tariffs (full compliance)

Other laws passed and not implemented