Iraq Oil Report

Iraq’s Army will target militias in Iraq’s oil capital Basra in a last ditch effort to route the growing violence before provincial elections which may take place this fall, Kim Sengupta reports for The Independent.

This poses a huge dilemma for citizens and the country. Who exactly of the dozens of militias will the Army target — the random and/or organized street gangs, the religious fundamentalists that pack heavy weaponry, those armed fighters loyal to the ruling political parties in Baghdad, those militias loyal to the political parties that oppose the ruling parties in Baghdad?

The Army has attempted to quell violence in Basra before, with about as much luck as the British had in stopping the armed groups from taking hold of the key province and capital city in the first place.

Suspicious eyes would do well to look at the local politics, which pits the Basra-ruling Fadhila Party against the Baghdad-dominating Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, or the latter against the Sadr Movement party. And next month provinces in Iraq can form regions like Iraqi Kurdistan. ISCI has already said it wants to envelope Basra in a massive region.

He — because the fundamentalists in the parties will not let women anywhere near the leadership role — who controls the oil…

It was June 2004, about a month after I had arrived in Iraq for the first time. It was my second night in Basra, and I’d never been so sick in my life, The New York Times’ James Glanz writes about his introduction to Iraq’s reconstruction. He explains how he found the state of disrepair, and the quality of repairs that keeps Iraq’s oil sector sick to this day. He does gloss over, however, the fact that many of the problems faced as reconstruction began — “Oil pipelines burst after they were repaired; canals ruptured again and again when the pumping stations pushing fresh drinking water through them were fixed; ancient power stations with control rooms out of ‘’Das Boot’’ shorted out and went dark no matter how many times flabbergasted American engineers tinkered with the turbines.” — were the result of U.S. “planning” and “executing” the “reconstruction,” not Iraqi inability. (See: “Blood Money: Wasted Billions, Lost Lives and Corporate Greed in Iraq” by Los Angeles Times’ former Iraq reconstruction reporter T. Christian Miller. (Editor’s note: not meant as a dis on Glanz’s excellent Iraq reporting.)

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