Plus:
Issam Chalabi, one-on-one
Baghdad’s uneven power distribution
U.S. OK’s Saddam-era oil law deals
Tackling unemployment
The most underrated powder keg in Iraq is located in the south — away from Baghdad’s political beef and the Turkish invasion of Iraq’s northern front — where 80 percent of Iraq’s proven oil reserves are located.
Political factions, their militias and other gangs entrenched in a power struggle over the oil resources and the crude and fuel black market, are angling for Basra. The oil capital is where nearly all of Iraq’s exports flow through.
The British are pulling back and Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki says Iraqi security forces can take over by December, though a top official in Basra says otherwise.
Iraqi police busted 267 people who entered Basra illegally, Azzaman reports.
But on the Gulf coast, at the oil terminals, armed Iraqis, under Australian and British training, say they’re ready to protect the lifeline of Iraq, Mohammed Abbas reports for Reuters.
Iraqi soldiers aboard the patrol boat scan the waters around them before they give permission to U.S. sailors to approach the Gulf oil terminal.
For the first time since U.S.-led forces toppled Saddam Hussein more than four years ago, Iraqi soldiers are taking charge of protecting the country’s greatest assets against insurgents under a plan to hand over control to Iraqis.
“The Iraqis are doing the job,” said Australian Captain Philip Spedding, who manages coalition Northern Gulf operations. “They’re the ones manning the gun positions and the radar, talking on the radio. It’s close to transition point on the terminals.”
Iraq’s southern oil fields and export facilities have largely escaped the kind of insurgent attacks that had regularly hit pipelines and oil installations in other parts of Iraq.
But Iraqis guarding the two terminals point to neighbouring states and saboteurs as potential threats. An armed Iranian lookout post is visible from one of the terminals.
Rival Shi’ite militias are vying for control of oil exports in southern Iraq, which contains the otherwise landlocked country’s only access to the sea, as British troop gradually hand over control to Iraqis. Sailors from U.S.-allied countries have been training Iraqis since soon after the 2003 invasion, in an effort to rebuild a navy devastated by sanctions and wars.
They said training was beginning to pay off.
Iraq’s Oil
Former Iraq Oil Minister Issam Chalabi sits down with CNN’s John Defterios in London.
In case you missed it: my report for UPI that the U.S. State Department says signing national oil deals using the Saddam-era law is OK.
The new position is a shift for the U.S. government, or at least a nuance in its stance, which has pressed hard for a new hydrocarbons legal regime and condemned deals signed between a regional government and private firms — especially when it’s an American company.
“We would prefer these laws to be passed before any deals are signed,” Deputy Assistant Secretary for Near Eastern Affairs Lawrence Butler told United Press International. “However, in the absence of passage of the hydrocarbon law, Iraq as a sovereign state can continue to use the Saddam-era laws to manage the sector in the meantime.”
It’s not clear what effect the U.S. stance will have on the international oil industry, salivating at the prospect of entering the third-largest oil reserves in the world, as Iraq’s Oil Ministry says it will not wait forever for a new law before signing deals.
Iraq’s Power
Some Baghdad neighborhoods get twice the daily average, Iraq Slogger reports in the Baghdad Electricity Watch.
The Turkey-Kurdish Dilemma
For Kurds In N. Iraq, A Familiar Foreboding as Shelling by Turkey Leads Many to Flee, writes Sudarsan Raghavan in the Washington Post.
The last three women left this tiny hamlet on Monday, carrying no more than their clothes and prayers. They joined 250 villagers who fled in the past two weeks, locking their homes and their yellow church and driving away on a desolate road scarred by war. Only 11 men remain, their lands separated from Turkey by a thin, emerald river winding through a fertile valley.
Iraq is asking Iran for help in solving the dispute with Turkey, writes Alissa J. Rubin in The New York Times.
And as U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice heads to Ankara to calm the situation, Yigal Schliefer explains in The Christian Science Monitor Why Turks No Longer Love The U.S.
A Turkish attack on Iraq could backfire, David L. Phillips, project director of the National Committee on American Foreign Policy and a visiting scholar at Columbia University’s Center for Human Rights, writes in The Boston Globe on Turkey’s Iraq Problem.The Center for Strategic and International Studies has an impressive Turkey Project, with new reports that can be found here.
Iraqonomics
Where was the Iraq economic expert?, asks John B. Taylor in the Washington Post, when Gen. Petraeus and Amb. Crocker gave their report to Congress in September.
In his op-ed, The Empty Chair at the Iraq Hearings, the Treasury Dept. undersecretary for international affairs from 2001-2005, now at Stanford and the Hoover Institution, writes in the voice of that missing expert:
My strong recommendation is: As soon as Gen. Petraeus and his coalition forces secure an area — a neighborhood or a town — we should immediately focus as best we can on the economic part of our mission. Help businesses reopen and hire people, especially young people who might otherwise join the enemy.
Establish organizations of entrepreneurs to tell us and the Iraqi government what they need. Build industrial enclaves if necessary. Work with Iraqis to provide security for shipments of products and key raw materials for manufacturing or agriculture.
You have heard much about the need to secure an area before significant political progress can be made; the same is true for economic progress. But economics is quicker than politics. We should move in economically even before our teams start helping on political reconciliation.
If the environment is secure, entrepreneurs — both Shiite and Sunni — can create jobs much more quickly than politicos can reach agreement, let alone pass legislation. Job creation, the economic integration of communities and the taste of prosperity will accelerate political reconciliation and the achievement of our ultimate objective in Iraq.
Iraq will send $30 million to each province to tackle unemployment, Ahmad al-Taie reports for Azzaman.Increasing employment opportunities is key, but not a standalone fix. It should be considered within the larger framework of increasing the quality of life of Iraqis.
And aside from reducing the very real threat that one may be tortured and killed on any given day, it includes increasing access to food, fuel and electricity and running and clean water and creating an education and health care system, and ironically women’s rights which are better than, not worse, than under Saddam Hussein. Then you can create hope and reduce the size of the insurgency’s numbers.
The Elements of Victory in Iraq, the latest report by Anthony H. Cordesman at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
U.S. Foreign Service officers posted in Iraq used to volunteer. Now the State Department can’t find enough staff, and are issuing forced assignments, and the foreign service corps is none too happy.
A more thorough explanation is offered by Juan Cole, Middle East expert at the University of Michigan, on his website Informed Comment.
—–
