Tag: iraq

A Diamond in the Rough

Go read A Diamond in the Rough, a front-page LA Times story by my friend Ashraf Khalil, who is taking a break from Iraq in Cairo before he goes back in two weeks. It’s a wonderful little gem.

This is the kind of story is what foreign editors love these days, especially if it comes from the Middle East. As one of my own editors once told me, with so much bad news and full pages dedicated to covering the bloodshed in Iraq, a little levity is a good thing. This also often extends to outside the war zones, so that in the rest of the Middle East, stories on “serious” issues like political reform or economic crisis will be less popular than ones of belly dancers or archeological trivia. With so much sad news coming out from this part of the world, foreign pages of newspapers need something to lighten up.

208 Iraqis died last week

A disturbing report from the New York Times:

From Oct. 11 to Oct. 17, an estimated 208 Iraqis were killed in war-related incidents, significantly higher than the average week; 23 members of the United States military died over the same period.

The deaths of Iraqis, particularly those of civilians, has become an increasingly delicate topic. Early this month, the Health Ministry, which had routinely provided casualty figures to journalists, stopped releasing them. Under a new policy that the government said would streamline the release of the figures – which were clearly an embarrassment to the government as well as to the Americans – only the Secretariat of the Council of Ministers is now allowed to do so.

“It’s a political issue,” a senior Health Ministry official said last week.

No kidding.

Corruption in the Arab world

This just in from the BBC: Oil wealth ‘can cause corruption’.

Good to know they’re on top of things. Actually, to be fair this is a story about the latest report by Transparency International, the corruption watchdog. The Arab world, as always, does not fare particularly well. The least corrupt Arab countries are Oman and the United Arab Emirates who share a ranking of 29th (1st being the least corrupt, this year Finland) with Bahrain (slightly lower than Israel), Jordan and Qatar trailing not far behind in the mid-30s. Egypt and Morocco are way behind, sharing the 77th ranking — lower than Saudi Arabia and Syria, which is a bit of a surprise — and at the same level as Turkey. Libya and the Palestinian Authority don’t do too well and share the 108th position. The oil revenue issue is highlighted here:

“Corruption robs countries of their potential,” said [Transparency International (TI) Chairman Peter] Eigen. “As the Corruption Perceptions Index 2004 shows, oil-rich Angola, Azerbaijan, Chad, Ecuador, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Libya, Nigeria, Russia, Sudan, Venezuela and Yemen all have extremely low scores. In these countries, public contracting in the oil sector is plagued by revenues vanishing into the pockets of western oil executives, middlemen and local officials.”

TI urges western governments to oblige their oil companies to publish what they pay in fees, royalties and other payments to host governments and state oil companies. “Access to this vital information will minimise opportunities for hiding the payment of kickbacks to secure oil tenders, a practice that has blighted the oil industry in transition and post-war economies,” said Eigen.

And guess which Arab country is at the very bottom of the heap, along with notoriously corrupt countries like Pakistan, Congo, Azerbaijan, Myanmar and Haiti (the lowest-ranked country)?

Yup, that’s right: Iraq. Sure, it was probably down there at the bottom of the table under Saddam Hussein and the various “Mr. 10%” that controlled business, but seen as this is a report for 2004, I’m curious who they are reporting as corrupt: the Iraqi interim government, foreign contractors or the former CPA?

“The future of Iraq depends on transparency in the oil sector,” added Eigen. “The urgent need to fund postwar construction heightens the importance of stringent transparency requirements in all procurement contracts,” he continued. “Without strict anti-bribery measures, the reconstruction of Iraq will be wrecked by a wasteful diversion of resources to corrupt elites.”

Iraqi Intellectuals Seek Exile

Iraqi academics are in peril:

Since the war ended 18 months ago, at least 28 university teachers and administrators have been killed, while 13 professors were kidnapped and released on payments of ransom, according to the Association of University Lecturers. Many others have received death threats.

The result: an exodus of academics and other intellectuals, who are urgently needed by a shattered society, from their schools and often the country, joining an earlier generation of exiles who fled the regime of Saddam Hussein.

Is old Najaf being destroyed?

Kamil Mahdi reports that construction projects around Najaf are destroying the core of the old city:

The destruction of Najaf which is now under way is drastic and irreversible. A statement by the head of the Shia Waqf Diwan dated on 8 September shows clearly that the whole matter was only an idea a month ago, yet a decision was quickly taken and demolition has begun. People should at least be allowed to discuss the rights and wrongs of such decisions.

No such discussion is taking place, not even in the sham, pliant and self-selected National Council. Is this the so-called democracy all these people have died and are dying for? If the destruction continues without open and meaningful public consultation that takes place in a rational atmosphere and in total transparency, it will be nothing short of a criminal assault on Iraq’s heritage and on its history. All over the civilised world, historic cities are protected, preserved and developed in ways that retain the character and identity of the city and the integrity of its physical and social fabric.

Paranoid Saddam

One interesting aspect of the recently released CIA report that, once again, made it clear that Iraq did not have WMDs is that we now know that even Saddam Hussein’s top lieutenants didn’t know that there were no WMDs at all. This radically changes the picture of Saddam as an out-of-touch leader manipulated by underlings who were too afraid to tell him the truth:

Only Hussein Had Full Picture:

For example, many in the U.S. intelligence community had believed that Hussein’s sycophantic generals kept him in the dark about the state of Iraq’s chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs — that is, that the dictator was misled by associates who told him what he wanted to hear.

Far from being misinformed, the report says, Hussein was micromanaging Iraq’s weapons policy himself and kept even his most loyal aides from gaining a clear picture of what was going on — and, more important, not going on — with the program.

“Saddam’s centrality to the regime’s political structure meant that he was the hub of Iraqi WMD policy and intent,” the report concluded.

His paranoia and his fascination with science and technology “meant that control of WMD development and its deployment was never far from his touch,” it said.

Baghdad Year Zero

The essential Iraq article of September seems to be Baghdad Year Zero, a Harper’s piece by Naomi Klein, which is both an interesting political essay and a fine example of investigative business journalism. It’s all about the neo-cons’ dream of making Iraq a shining example of neo-liberal economic policy-making, and how that dream failed miserably in the face of reality and probably helped fuel the degeneration of the situation in Iraq.

The great historical irony of the catastrophe unfolding in Iraq is that the shock-therapy reforms that were supposed to create an economic boom that would rebuild the country have instead fueled a resistance that ultimately made reconstruction impossible. Bremer’s reforms unleashed forces that the neocons neither predicted nor could hope to control, from armed insurrections inside factories to tens of thousands of unemployed young men arming themselves. These forces have transformed Year Zero in Iraq into the mirror opposite of what the neocons envisioned: not a corporate utopia but a ghoulish dystopia, where going to a simple business meeting can get you lynched, burned alive, or beheaded. These dangers are so great that in Iraq global capitalism has retreated, at least for now. For the neocons, this must be a shocking development: their ideological belief in greed turns out to be stronger than greed itself.