Iraq not bound by quota; struggling to reverse decline
Plus:
*Walid Khadduri on the return of Big Oil to Iraq
*Iraq presidency council gives oil smuggling law OK
*SOFA Update: English text and analysis
*Labor Minister target of suicide bomb
*Iraqis suffer for lack of basic services
*The Mahdi Army bides its time
*Much more

As OPEC decides to catch falling oil prices by cutting supply, Iraq Oil Minister Hussain al-Shahristani says anything below $80 per barrel will be a hit on next year’s budget, George Jahn reports for The Associated Press.

Iraq is not bound by OPEC quotas because of ongoing wars and sanctions that hampered development of the oil sector. Its top priority now, however, is stopping the month on month decline in production and exports, which began this fall after record post-2003 output. Reuters reports Iraq expects October data to show a turnaround that will continue through November.

The return of international oil companies to Iraq continues to instigate an old debate in this country. Politicians had objected to the presence of foreign firms and the rights they demand through the numerous accusations they had directed at previous governments on this matter, Veteran Iraq reporter Walid Khadduri writes in Al-Hayat. With time, the issue became worse and more complicated, subjecting the country’s entire oil policy to accusations which have obstructed the development of this sector in comparison to what neighboring nations have accomplished. Although the issue is still limited to general principles, new developments can be cited, including the role of oil in the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the possibility of adopting an independent oil policy that takes into consideration the interests of Iraq while it remains under occupation, and the issue of transparency during negotiations at a time when corruption prevails on the national level.

Iraq’s Presidency Council OK’d a law aimed at oil and petrol smugglers, The Associated Press reports. Little about this has been released, perhaps overshadowed by SOFA disputes. It’s likely the same law reported by UPI’s Ben Lando in April as having received a first reading in Parliament.

A bi-lateral deal to keep U.S. forces in Iraq has hit some snags after Iraqi public and political opposition surfaced. The details of it, currently, are not known and certainly evolving, but the American Friends Service Committee translated the latest Status Of Forces Agreement, which can be found here.

The SOFA would replace the existing U.N. resolution allowing U.S. occupation of Iraq, which expires Dec. 31. It has been given one-year extensions the past few years and Alissa Rubin and Katherine Zoepf report for The New York Times another extension has been backed by U.N. Security Council member Russia. The article has a good breakdown of opposition and proponents of the SOFA.

UK-based Iraq political analyst Munir Chalabi has an analysis on the popular resistance site ZNet.

For word on the Iraqi street, check out the Iraq Press Roundup, a recap of Iraqi news, by UPI’s Alaa Majeed.

Reidar Visser in historiae.org has a great analysis as well.

Iraq’s Labor Minister was targeted in a suicide bombing that killed 11 people, Katherine Zoepf reports for The New York Times.

Turkey’s President Abdullah Gul said the country is doing “a great deal” in Iraq and defends his country’s treatment of ethnic Kurds there in an interview with visiting journalists, bloggers and think-tankers and recorded by United Press International’s Ben Lando.

In al-Mashtal area, east of Baghdad, women are obliged to walk long distances and wait several hours at water distribution plants every day in order to fill plastic gallons with drinking water, Hayder Najm writes for Niqash. With an ongoing shortage of water in Baghdad, these women are desperate for clean water and this is their only option.

A new survey of Iraqis finds security, vital services and unemployment far and away the most important issues citizens face. Conducted by the Iraq Center for Research and Strategic Studies, which can be viewed here, Iraqis polled panned the political parties; the level of water, electricity and other services; are mixed on the SOFA; support a strong central government; and give nearly the same mixed reviews on Iraq establishing a strategic relationship with either the United States or Iran.

The Iraqi Health Ministry said at least 17 percent of its national water supply and some 30 percent in Baghdad is not fit for human consumption, UPI reports.

What the good news from Iraq really means: an analysis of key services like water, electricity and schools and how it relates to security, by Michael Schwartz in TomDispatch. (Schwartz’s new book is War Without End: The Iraq War in Context)

This glimpse of the degraded conditions at one Baghdad public school … is symptomatic of the larger reality in Iraq. In a sense, the (often exaggerated) decline in violence in that country has allowed foreign reporters to move around enough to report on the real conditions facing Iraqis, and so should have provided U.S. readers with a far fuller picture of the devastation George Bush’s war wrought.

In reality, though, since there are far fewer foreign reporters moving around a quieter Iraq, far less news is coming out of that wrecked land. The major newspapers and networks have drastically reduced their staffs there and what’s left is often little more than a collection of pronouncements from the U.S. military, or Iraqi and American political leaders in Baghdad and Washington, framing the American public’s image of the situation there.

In addition, the devastation that is now Iraq is not of a kind that can always be easily explained in a short report, nor for that matter is it any longer easily repaired. In many cities, an American reliance on artillery and air power during the worst days of fighting helped devastate the Iraqi infrastructure. Political and economic changes imposed by the American occupation did damage of another kind, often depriving Iraqis not just of their livelihoods but of the very tools they would now need to launch a major reconstruction effort in their own country. …

On a daily basis, this cauldron of misery renews powerful feelings of discontent, which explains why American military leaders regularly insist that the country’s current relative quiescence is, at best, “fragile.” They believe only the most minimal reductions in U.S. forces in Iraq (still hovering at close to 150,000 troops) are advisable.

Even if Washington prefers to ignore Iraqi realities, military officials working close to the ground know that the country’s state of disrepair, and an inability to deal with it in any reasonably prompt way, leaves a population in steaming discontent. At any moment, this could explode in further sectarian violence or yet another violent effort to expel the U.S. forces from the country.

Mahdi Army Bides Its Time, by David Enders in The Progressive.

Ali approaches me at a Friday prayer service in Sadr City. He wants to talk. A U.S. missile, he says, hit his house in May and killed his two sisters and badly wounded his mother. He is a member of the Mahdi militia and can no longer return home for fear the Iraqi army will arrest him. He is careful not to be seen talking to me, since unauthorized contact between us could get him in serious trouble with the militia. We quickly arrange to meet a few hours later at my hotel, and then he shakes my hand and walks away, disappearing again in the crowd of thousands of worshippers.

Like the bulk of the Mahdi militia, Ali has gone to ground. He abides by the cease-fire that Muqtada al-Sadr has ordered, but he chafes at the presence of Iraqi troops, who patrol Sadr City.

“We’ve had three Saddams. The first is gone. The second wears the clothes of a cleric. The third wears sunglasses,” Ali says, referring to Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the leader of the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council (SIIC), a rival Shiite political party, and Nouri al-Maliki, the Iraqi prime minister.

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