Iraq- The West Shakes Up The Middle East

by Patrick Cockburn

  The US has repeatedly denied it wants permanent bases in Iraq but one Iraqi source said: "This is just a tactical subterfuge." Washington also wants control of Iraqi airspace below 29,000ft and the right to pursue its "war on terror" in Iraq, giving it the authority to arrest anybody it wants and to launch military campaigns without consultation.

  Mr Bush is determined to force the Iraqi government to sign the so-called "strategic alliance" without modifications, by the end of next month. But it is already being condemned by the Iranians and many Arabs as a continuing American attempt to dominate the region. Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the powerful and usually moderate Iranian leader, said yesterday that such a deal would create "a permanent occupation". He added: "The essence of this agreement is to turn the Iraqis into slaves of the Americans." Iraq's Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, is believed to be personally opposed to the terms of the new pact but feels his coalition government cannot stay in power without US backing.

  The deal also risks exacerbating the proxy war being fought between Iran and the United States over who should be more influential in Iraq.

  Although Iraqi ministers have said they will reject any agreement limiting Iraqi sovereignty, political observers in Baghdad suspect they will sign in the end and simply want to establish their credentials as defenders of Iraqi independence by a show of defiance now. The one Iraqi with the authority to stop the deal is the majority Shia spiritual leader, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani.

  In 2003, he forced the US to agree to a referendum on the new Iraqi constitution and the election of a parliament. But he is said to believe that loss of US support would drastically weaken the Iraqi Shia, who won a majority in parliament in elections in 2005.

  The US is adamantly against the new security agreement being put to a referendum in Iraq, suspecting that it would be voted down. The influential Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr has called on his followers to demonstrate every Friday against the impending agreement on the grounds that it compromises Iraqi independence.

  The Iraqi government wants to delay the actual signing of the agreement but the office of Vice- President Dick Cheney has been trying to force it through. The US ambassador in Baghdad, Ryan Crocker, has spent weeks trying to secure the accord.

  The signature of a security agreement, and a parallel deal providing a legal basis for keeping US troops in Iraq, is unlikely to be accepted by most Iraqis.

  But the Kurds, who make up a fifth of the population, will probably favour a continuing American presence, as will Sunni Arab political leaders who want US forces to dilute the power of the Shia. The Sunni Arab community, which has broadly supported a guerrilla war against US occupation, is likely to be split.

  Friday, 20 June 2008

  OIL GIANTS RETURN TO IRAQ

  Nearly four decades after the four biggest Western oil companies were expelled from Iraq by Saddam Hussein, they are negotiating their return. By the end of the month, Royal Dutch Shell, BP, Exxon Mobil and Total will sign agreements with the Baghdad government, Iraq's first with big Western oil firms since the US-led invasion in 2003.

  The deals are for repair and technical support in some of the country's largest oilfields, the Oil Ministry in Baghdad said yesterday.

  The return of "Big Oil" will add to the suspicions of those in the Middle East who claimed that the overthrow of Saddam was secretly driven by the West's desire to gain control of Iraq's oil. It will also be greeted with dismay by many Iraqis who fear losing control of their vast oil reserves.

  Iraq's reserves are believed to be second only to Saudi Arabia in the Middle East, but their exploitation has long been hampered by UN sanctions, imposed on Iraq after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990.

  The major oil companies have been eager to go back to Iraq, but are concerned about their own security and the long-term stability of the country. The two year no-bid agreements are service agreements that should add another 500,000 barrels of crude a day of output to Iraq's present production of 2.5 million barrels a day (b/d).

  The companies have the option of being paid in cash or crude oil for the deals, each of which will reportedly be worth $500m (£250m). For Iraq, the agreements are a way of accessing foreign expertise immediately, before the Iraqi parliament passes a controversial new hydrocarbons law.

  But they mean that the four oil companies, which originally formed the Iraq Petroleum Company to exploit Iraqi oil from the 1920s until the industry's nationalisation in 1972, will be wellplaced to bid for contracts for the long-term development of these fields. The oilfields affected are some of the largest in Iraq, from Kirkuk in the north to Rumaila, on the border with Kuwait. Although there is oil in northern Iraq, most of the reserves are close to Basra, in the far south.

  Since the US invasion, Iraqis have been wary of foreign involvement in their oil industry.

  Many are convinced that the hidden purpose of the US invasion was to take over Iraqi oil, but the Iraqi Oil Minister, Hussein Shahristani, has said that Iraq will hold on to its natural resources.

  "If Iraq needs help from international oil companies, they will be invited to co-operate with the Iraqi National Oil Company [Inoc], on terms and conditions acceptable to Iraq, to generate the highest revenue for Iraq".

  Inoc's technical expertise has deteriorated sharply during the long years of sanctions. Iraq is currently exporting 2.1 million b/d and is expecting to have oil revenues of $70 billion this year, but its government administration is too dysfunctional and corrupt to rebuild the electricity or water supply systems. The government has $50 billion in the Federal Bank of New York.

  Mr Shahristani has been highly critical of the KRG for auctioning off oil concessions in Iraqi Kurdistan without reference to the oil ministry in Baghdad. In an interview with The Independent last year, he said Inoc would never do business with any oil company that signed up with the KRG, and he also doubted if the oil could be exported without pipelines.

  "Are they going to carry it out in buckets?" he asked.

  Several of the small oil companies who have signed contracts in Kurdistan are hoping that in the long term there will be an agreement between the Kurds and the central government and they will then sell out to the majors at a large profit.

  The technical support agreements, as the service agreements are known, may open the door to Iraq for the majors. Mr Shahristani has said that Iraq will open up the same fields for bidding for long-term development projects soon. "We're going to announce the first licensing round by the end of this month or early next month," he said.

  The high price of oil means that Iraq is not under immediate pressure to maximise its oil revenues. The Iraqi parliament has suspected anything which looks like giving foreign companies ownership of Iraq's oil through a production sharing agreement.

  The nationalisation of Iraq's oil is one the few acts of Saddam Hussein's long years in power which is still highly popular, and Iraqi members of parliament are fearful of anything that looks like back-door privatisation in the interests of foreigners.

  For the four oil giants, the new agreements will bring them back to a country where they have a long history. BP, Exxon Mobil, Total and Shell were coowners of a British, American and French consortium that kept Iraq's oil reserves in foreign control for more than 40 years.

  The Iraq Petroleum Company (once the Turkish Petroleum Company) was formed in 1912 by oil companies eager to grab the resources in parts of the Ottoman Empire.

  The company was formalised in 1928 and each of the four shareholders had a 23.75 per cent share of all the oil produced.

  The final 5 per cent went to Calouste Gulbenkian, an Armenian businessman.

  In 1931, an agreement was signed with Iraq, giving the company complete control over the oil fields of Mosul in return for annual royalties. After a military coup in 1958, nationalisation came in 1972.

  Wednesday, 9 July 2008

  ALCOHOL RETURNS TO BAGHDAD

  Alcohol is openly for sale once mor
e in Baghdad. All over the Iraqi capital, drink stores, which closed their doors in early 2006 when sectarian strife was raging, have slowly begun to reopen.

  Two years ago, al-Qa'ida militants were burning down liquor stores and shooting their owners.

  Now around Saadoun Street, in the centre of the city, at least 50 stores are advertising that they have alcohol for sale.

  The fear of being seen drinking in public is also subsiding.

  Young men openly drink beer in some, if not all, streets. A favourite spot where drinkers traditionally gathered is al-Jadriya bridge, which has fine views up and down the Tigris river. Two years ago even serious drunks decided that boozing on the bridge was too dangerous. But in the past three months they have returned, a sign that militant gunmen no longer decide what people in Baghdad do at night. "I drink seven or eight cans of beer a day and a bottle of whiskey on Thursday evenings," said Abu Ahmed, a former military intelligence officer who now makes a living driving a taxi.

  The reopening of the liquor stores is a sign of a slow if limited return of normal social life for Baghdad's embattled residents.

  Shops are beginning to stay open later, particularly in mostly Shia east Baghdad. Other social freedoms have also expanded in the past three or four months. Strict Islamic dress for women is no longer quite so common.

  This return to normality can be exaggerated. The muchtalked-of improvement in security, evident since the second half of 2007, is largely in contrast to the bloodbath of 2006 when up to 3,000 civilians were being killed every month. But it is true that explosions no longer reverberate daily across the city, allowing a semblance of the old secular atmosphere to resurface.

  Iraq was one of the most secular of Arab countries until the early 1990s. Restaurants all served alcohol and there was a plentiful supply of nightclubs.

  None of the prohibition on alcohol seen in Saudi Arabia or Kuwait held sway. In Basra, in the late 1970s, the main local complaint was that Kuwaitis were pouring across the border and drinking the city dry. In Baghdad it was possible to sit in one of the restaurants off Abu Nawas Street on the bank of the Tigris River eating fish grilled over an open fire and drinking beer and arak (a spirit made from dates and flavoured with aniseed).

  These were the last days when social life in Baghdad was free and easy. Following his disastrous defeat in Kuwait, Saddam Hussein, seeking to shore up his support, gave his regime a more Islamic complexion. The Abu Nawas restaurants went dry.

  Police patrolled the public parks in search of illicit drinkers. An Iraqi who drank had to do so at home and Muslims were banned from selling alcohol, leaving the trade to Christians.

  When Saddam's regime fell in 2003, whisky, beer and wine reappeared in restaurants and bars, but it didn't last. At the height of the Sunni insurgency, al-Qa'ida in Iraq was notorious for its savage punishments of those offending Islamic social mores. Smokers had the two fingers with which they held a cigarette chopped off as a warning.

  Dozens of hairdressers accused of giving unIslamic haircuts were shot dead. In Shia working-class areas such as Sadr City, controlled by the Mehdi Army, militia Islamic dress became obligatory.

  There are still risks. Two months ago a store owner, Abu Rami, opened up selling drink among other things in the Mansur district of west Baghdad. Several weeks later gunmen, who locals believe came from al-Qa'ida in Iraq, shot him dead with his son and set his shop ablaze.

  But few of the other reopened shops have been harassed or attacked.

  Most are near army or police checkpoints which the stores pay off in beer or cash to secure protection. Rami Aboud, who works with his uncle running a drink shop at the Jordan interchange in the Yarmouk district in west Baghdad, says he gives the police and soldiers 15 cans of beer a night or the equivalent in cash.

  His uncle, like almost all drink store owners in Baghdad, is a Christian. "At that time," says Rami Aboud, recalling the business in the early 1990s, "we were selling Iraqi beer - Farida or Sheherezade - and Grant's whisky.

  But after the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003 we sold every other kind of drink. The Iraqi breweries never reopened and Iraqis now consume imported beers such as Efes or Bavaria for a dollar a can or Heineken for about $1.70." Mr Aboud's uncle opened a second store in nearby al-Kindi Street, but sectarianism and Islamic militancy put him out of business in 2005. "I was in our older store when gunmen in two cars opened fire on us from long distance," says Mr Aboud. "I ran away with my uncle, dodging from store front to store front, and we were lucky we were not killed. We were left with our al-Kindi Street store, but we received threats that if we did not close it we would be killed and the shop burnt so we shut that too." As the sectarian pogroms turned into a civil war between Sunnis and Shias in Baghdad after the Shia shrine in Samarra was blown up in February 2006, almost all the drink stores closed in the capital. The few remaining shops nestled in a heavily defended enclave close to the Green Zone.

  Despite the improvement in security, the return to any form of normal social life is so far edgy and limited. The shopkeepers selling alcohol are wary that they may have to shut again. "We opened our shop again in April 2008 next to an army checkpoint," said Mr Aboud. "We don't think anybody will be able to shoot at us, but we are worried that we might be killed when we go to our homes." But for now, his shop is full of young men buying beer, confident they can sip it openly without anybody trying to kill them.

  The favourite tipple of former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was Mateus Rose, the Portuguese wine fashionable in the Seventies, and the occasional glass of whisky.

  Saddam's son Uday had a more lethal reputation as a drinker. He was prone to dangerous rages and once shot dead one of his father's aides during a drunken tantrum.

  The older generation of Iraqis in Saddam's day drank arak, made from fermented dates but after 1992 beer and whisky became more popular. The present Shia/Kurdish government is made up of members of religious parties, who largely don't drink, and Kurdish leaders, who do.

  Sunday, 14 September 2008

  VIOLENCE IS DOWN, BUT NOT BECAUSE OF THE SURGE

  As he leaves Iraq this week, the outgoing US commander, General David Petraeus, is sounding far less optimistic than the Republican presidential candidate, John McCain, about the American situation in Iraq. General Petraeus says that it remains "fragile", recent security gains are "not irreversible" and "this is not the sort of struggle where you take a hill, plant the flag and go home to a victory parade … it's not a war with a simple slogan." Compare this with Sarah Palin's belief that "victory in Iraq is wholly in sight" and her criticism of Barack Obama for not using the word "victory". The Republican contenders have made these claims of success for the "surge" - the American reinforcements sent last year - although they are demonstrably contradicted by the fact that the US has to keep more troops, some 138,000, in Iraq today than beforehand.

  Another barometer of the true state of security in Iraq is the inability of the 4.7 million refugees, one in six of the population, who fled for their lives inside and outside Iraq, to return to their homes.

  Ongoing violence is down, but Iraq is still the most dangerous country in the world. On Friday a car bomb exploded in the Shia market town of Dujail, north of Baghdad, killing 32 people and wounding 43 others. "The smoke filled my house and the shrapnel broke some of the windows," said Hussein al-Dujaili. "I went outside the house and saw two dead bodies at the gate which had been thrown there by the explosion. Some people were in panic and others were crying." Playing down such killings, the Iraqi government and the US have launched a largely successful propaganda campaign to convince the world that "things are better" in Iraq and that life is returning to normal. One Iraqi journalist recorded his fury at watching newspapers around the world pick up a story that the world's largest Ferris wheel was to be built in Baghdad, a city where there is usually only two hours of electricity a day.

  Life in Baghdad certainly is better than it was 18 months ago, when some 60 to 10
0 bodies were being found beside the roads every morning, the victims of Sunni-Shia sectarian slaughter. The main reason this ended was that the battle for Baghdad in 2006-07 was won by the Shia, who now control three-quarters of the capital. These demographic changes appear permanent; Sunni who try to get their houses back face assassination.

  In Mosul, Iraq's northern capital and third largest city, with a population of 1.8 million, the government was trumpeting its success only a few months ago. It said it had succeeded in driving al-Qa'ida from the city, while the US said the number of attacks had fallen from 130 a week to 30 a week in July.

  But today they are back up to between 60 and 70 a week. Two weeks ago, insurgents came close to killing Major-General Riyadh Jalal Tawfiq in Nineveh province, of which Mosul is the capital, with a roadside bomb.

  The perception in the US that the tide has turned in Iraq is in part because of a change in the attitude of the foreign, largely American, media. The war in Iraq has now been going on for five years, longer than the First World War, and the world is bored with it. US television networks maintain expensive bureaux in Baghdad, but little of what they produce gets on the air.

  When it does, viewers turn off. US newspaper bureaux are being cut in size. The result of all this is that the American voter hears less of violence in Iraq and can suppose that America's military adventure there is finally coming good.

  An important reason for this optimism is the fall in the number of American soldiers killed. (The 30,000 US soldiers wounded in Iraq are seldom mentioned.) This has happened because the war that was being waged against the American occupation by the Sunni community, the 20 per cent of Iraqis who were in control under Saddam Hussein, has largely ended. It did so because the Sunni were being defeated, not so much by the US army as by the Shia government and the Shia militias.