Plus:
*Iraq’s Parliament approved three crucial laws, barely, but nothing doing with the oil law
*Baghdad’s water supply cut for half of its residents
*Power workers protest lax Electricity Ministry
*Electricity and Oil Ministry’s work together to stem fuel, power shortages
*Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s upcoming Iraqi visit
Media reports from Seoul say Iraq’s Kurds have signed deals for oil and other projects with a South Korea consortium, but details are sketchy, United Press International reports.If so, the move would heighten current tensions between the Kurdistan Regional Government and Iraq’s central government, and mark a departure from the previous 20 controversial oil deals that were announced with fanfare by the KRG itself.
Part of the deal, it appears, is a construction of roads and other infrastructure package with South Korean firms. Bloomberg’s Kyunghee Park has more.
The Iraqi Parliament’s ability Wednesday to approve a package of three key laws does not necessarily translate into a reconciliatory atmosphere necessary for progress on a controversial oil law, despite the wants of Big Oil companies to have a more solid legal grounding before signing deals for which they are lining up, Ben Lando reports for UPI. Parliament was finally able to make quorum, and the $48 billion budget for this year, the release of detainees accused but not charged of lower-level crimes, and a law outlining some powers of Iraq’s provinces, wrapped into one, was barely approved. Perhaps the most divisive issue in Iraq has still not been directly tackled: who controls the oil and how the proceeds will be distributed.
Reidar Visser has more at historiae.org
Iraq is the fourth largest burner of natural gas – flaring, it’s called. In Iraq’s case the natural gas that is part of the oil recovery process, associated gas, largely has nowhere else to go, Marianne Lavelle reports for U.S. News & World Report. While a good explanation of such a problem – for the environment worldwide and, in Iraq’s case, burning up a resource that could supply power and profits – Lavelle basically says Iraq should denationalize because it’s the Big Oil firms who can fix this. I’m sure Iraq’s oil workers and companies disagree.
Iraq’s Electricity and Oil Ministers are developing a joint plan to fix the severe shortages of fuel and electricity in Iraq, Daniel Schearf reports for Voice of America.
Workers in Iraq’s Nasiriyah power station staged a sit-in, demanding the Electricity Ministry do more to help them keep the plant in operation, UPI reports. Meanwhile, Iraq’s Electricity Ministry is urging foreign companies to bid on contracts to reconstruct and build new infrastructure. The Iraqi Electrical Utility Workers Union has complained the ministry is too reliant on foreigners instead of paying Iraqi workers and companies to fix the infrastructure.
Power failures and maintenance have disrupted running water supplies to almost half of the capital, Baghdad, home to nearly 6 million people, Ahmad Raheema reports for Azzaman. A Baghdad Municipality source said the project supplying drinking water to Rasafa, the eastern half of Baghdad, was temporarily idle. A report by Agence France-Presse earlier this month detailed the flow of sewage.
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s visit to Iraq next month will be historic for two reasons: it’s the first visit of an Iranian head of state to its once arch-rival. And it will further solidify the current U.S. arch nemesis’ growing relations with Iraq. Sudarsan Raghavan for The Washington Post has more.
Is the U.S. really bringing stability to Baghdad? Patrick Cockburn asks in The Independent. He tells the story on the travails of his driver, Bassim Abdul Rahman:
…Life in the Iraq to which Bassim has returned is said by foreigners and Iraqis alike to be getting better. Perky pieces in the foreign media breathlessly describe how Sunni children are once again playing football in al-Zahra park near the Green Zone, where they would have been murdered a year ago. “The problem,” complained one American correspondent in Baghdad, “is that newsrooms back home have two mindsets – ‘War Rages’ and ‘Peace Dawns’ – and not a lot in between.”
Previous claims of an improvement in security by the US or the Iraqi government had been wholly false. I remembered Paul Bremer, the US viceroy during the first year of the occupation, claiming that the Sunni insurgents were a doomed remnant battling against “the new Iraq”. When Bremer left in 2004, he was shown on television clambering into one helicopter and then, when the cameras departed, scuttling on to a second aircraft in case those same insurgents might shoot him down.
In contrast to the spurious turning-points of the past, the most recent political changes in Iraq, which had led to the fall in American and Iraqi casualties, are quite real. But they differ significantly from the way in which they are portrayed in the outside world, and have less to do with al-Qa’ida and the US than the continuing struggle for power between Sunni and Shia in Iraq.
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