Moving Forward

Hello everyone,I don’t have much in the way of personal travels to write about this time around. The continuing saga of sand storms has made traveling a real hit or miss experience. I have spent the last couple of weeks stuck on Speicher, and the issues that I have been working on here are not interesting enough to make you want to read about them (or me to write about them).


There is obviously still plenty going on in Iraq in general. Although the government was hoping to hold provincial elections on October 1st, that timeline won’t be kept. The sticking point is the failure of the Parliament to pass a Provincial Elections Law before adjourning for the remainder of August. One of the major stumbling blocks has been the status of Kirkuk Province up here in the north. Kirkuk is heavily Kurdish, and there is a lot of oil coming from the province. The Parliament has been trying to figure out how to frame the elections in Kirkuk. The Kurds want Kirkuk to be a part of the autonomous Kurdistan region, while the national government does not want this. According to reports from Kirkuk, many Arabs living there are content to allow the Kurds to govern their region because the Kurdish regions have been the most orderly and stable in Iraq since Saddam was removed. The Kurds in Kirkuk will not accept a proposal to have the elections set up so that there are equal numbers of seats in the Kirkuk provincial government to divide power equally between Kurds and other factions. Most reasonable people don’t see how the elections can occur at all in 2008 based on the fact that this Kirkuk dispute is holding up the entire election law process. Voter registration is moving forward, however. I’ve read comments that although the security has improved in Iraq, the political process is still broken because there are still some stalemates. Doesn’t the fact that there is a stalemate in Parliament rather than a shootout in the streets of Kirkuk over this issue mean that the political process IS working?


In an interesting turn of events, Muqtada al-Sadr from Sadr City has called on his Mahdi Army to lay down their arms. He issued a document that says that his followers will now be guided by Shiite spirituality instead of anti-American militancy (let’s hope that there is a difference). The document says that the new focus of the Sadr sect will be on education, religion, and social justice. Under Islam, I don’t know how much separation there is between those three focus areas.


Sadr has been responsible for a lot of violence in Baghdad, but he began to lose influence when he ran away to Iran. Although there are plenty of Shiites in Iraq and Iran, thousands of Iraqis lost relatives in the war with Iran. They don’t appreciate Iran’s influence. The people of Sadr City have grown tired of being locked in their homes due to the fighting that at first Sadr, and then the Iranian special groups, have caused in their neighborhoods. Sadr has very much been forced to play catch up to remain relevant. Several months ago, he ordered his men to fight, and many said that they were tired of fighting, so he changed his mind and said that they should have a cease fire. Then the Iranians kept trying to keep the fight going, and the people realized that he is nothing but an Iranian stooge. Then Sadr said that his sect would boycott the elections, but then his own people said that they were going to participate anyway or else they would have no power, so then he said that what he meant was that some of his party could participate if they wanted to. And then Sadr said that he would no longer target Iraqis and that he would just kill Americans, but his people asked him why because the Americans keep helping them, so now he says that there will be no more focus on anti-American militancy. Let me summarize what I just said in five words or less: I think we beat him.


So what does that mean to the Sunni fight that is taking place up here in the north? Although the Sunni and Shia groups dislike each other, they feed off of each other. When you have a major group like the al-Mahdi Army laying down their arms, that is a morale breaker for other criminal groups in country. Every time peace breaks out somewhere in Iraq, the people living in areas where the terrorists are still active start to understand that peace is possible, and they start to turn against the terrorists. Every time the security improves in different regions, the Iraqi Security Forces gain credibility, so people begin to trust them and feed them information. Al-Mahdi was heavily influenced by Iran, and the Iraqis didn’t like that. AQI is largely a group formed of foreign fighters. The Iraqis are not happy about that, either.


The Sunni Awakening, as it is called, began over in Anbar province just to our west. Fallujah and Ramadi sit in Anbar, and some of the most violent battles of Iraqi Freedom occurred in those towns. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi ran his main slaughter houses out of Anbar until two F-16 pilots sent him to his Maker via two 500 pound bombs. Anbar was supposed to be turned over to be fully administered by the Iraqis back in May (the US Marines run the security in Anbar). Weather problems initially caused a delay in the handover process. Now that we are in August, the turn-over of Anbar from US to Iraqi control has not yet happened, and the reason is because the Iraqis in Anbar don’t want it to happen. Here is a quote from the Anbar area: “The people in Anbar love the US Marines. If anyone tells you any different, they are lying.” Now you would expect that I would mention that the quote came from a US Marine spokesperson, but it didn’t. The quote came from Iraqi Army Brigadier General Ali, who is the military commander in the Fallujah area. The Iraqi people do not want to take back governing authority because they think that means that the Americans will leave, and they don’t want that. Not to be repetitive, but I believe that we won in Anbar province, too.


Moving on to a final topic, there was a US GAO report recently released that claims that the Iraqis are not doing their share to fund reconstruction efforts. Let me touch on that just a little bit. First of all, a read of that report shows that it compares US spending from 2003 through the present. It only shows Iraqi spending from 2005 to the present. Keep in mind that after we invaded, Iraq had to rebuild a central government from scratch. Saddam did not have a mature centralized budget process. If he wanted money to go towards “X,” he ordered it to go towards “X.” It has been a total cash society. The figures in the GAO report show huge US reconstruction spending in 2003/2004, which is true. We went in right behind our combat troops and began to rebuild when the Iraqis literally had no government of their own. Since 2005, once the Iraqis had established a constitutional government, they have budgeted more money towards their own reconstruction than we have budgeted. For 2008, in fact, the Iraqis have ten times more money budgeted towards their construction than the US. While there is a large oil surplus here, that was not expected. No one saw the price of oil hitting almost $150 per barrel. Due to the large surplus, the Iraqi government passed a supplemental $22 billion budget on August 7th in which they directed $8 billion towards their reconstruction. Their reconstruction budget is 10 times more than the US is directing towards reconstruction here.


Once a budget is established, the government then has to have systems in place to disburse and spend that money. That may not be as simple as it seems. Until you have the technical ability to conduct funds transfers and similar electronic transactions, how do you transfer a couple million over here and a couple million over there in a cash economy? The Iraqi officials had to learn everything from scratch. What is the contracting process? Who can bid on the jobs? What is the payment process and what are the payment terms? Add to that some misguided US projects that were turned over for upkeep to Iraqis who had no technical ability to maintain the project, and you have a lot of money spent. Executing a budget is not exactly straight forward when a society has never executed a budget before.


That is probably much more information on that topic than anyone really wanted, but I have no war stories to tell this time around. The pictures aren’t necessarily related to anything that I just wrote about. The one picture shows how Iraqis get gas without waiting in long lines in this country with so much oil. I have no idea where the roadside gas sellers get their gas. The other picture shows how Saddam spent his budget when he ran it. That is called the Moon Palace, which just another Tikrit area getaway for the tyrant.


Everyone take care.