Friday in Iraq and the protests continue as they have since December 21st. Above is an Iraqi Spring MC photo of the Falluja protest today. NINA reports, "Thousands of people flocked since the early hours of the day to the sit-ins yeards in Fallujah, Ramadi especially from the outskirts and areas near to the two cities to participate in Friday unified prayers." They turned out in Tikrit, in Baghdad and in Baiji.
Kitabat reports that protesters in Nasiriyah demanded better public services including electricity. 70-year-old Shiekh Abdul-Zahra Vest explains that Dhi Qar has been suffering from a lack of dependable public services since 2003. He called on all citizens to participate in the protest and demand their rights, to wear the shroud during the protests so that the message is visible to the government. He also spoke of the need for the government to provide adequate rations in the ration card system and to provide jobs for the unemployed and housing for the poor. This was the sixth day of a sit-in on this issue. In another report, Kitabat notes the cleric and movement leader Moqtada al-Sadr has expressed his support for the protesters and has called for Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to reconcile the political blocs before it's too late.
Wednesday was the UN's World Food Day. The UN prepared this [PDF format warning] online booklet for the occasion. The Iraq Times notes the UN has found that 6 million Iraqis are exposed to food insecurity and vulnerability. That's a large number and no one should suffer from that in a world where there is so much food grown. However, it's especially appalling in Iraq.
It's appalling because Iraq's population is estimated by the CIA to be around 30 million. Which would mean 1/5 of Iraqis are now living with food insecurity and vulnerability.
That's appalling.
It's even more so when you grasp Iraq's budget. As Seerwan Jafar (Niqash) reported last December, Iraq's 2013 budget is $118 billion.
Iraq's not a poor country. It's oil rich and the oil's been turned back on after years of sanctions. The oil brings in a ton of money for the government. Many times during the 20th century, the oil riches meant some of the finest public services for the people of Iraq, meant some of the finest schools and colleges, meant some of the best hospitals in the region. Today? Today all these riches and the people of Iraq live in poverty. A sixth of the population is uncertain where the next meal's coming from. Nouri's been prime minister since 2006.
In 2006, the government's budget was 34 billion in US dollars. In 2007, it lept to 41.1 billion in US dollars, then 82.6 billion and then, in 2012, 100 billion.. While a sixth of the population is uncertain of their next meal, the annual budget for the government has basically been multiplied by six since Nouri became prime minister.
$118.4 billion dollars and the people still don't have drinkable water, jobs, dependable electricity or even enough food.
Nouri al-Maliki has failed Iraq since 2006 when Bully Boy Bush installed him as prime minister. The people of Iraq said no to a second term but Barack Obama overrode their votes and had US official negotiate The Erbil Agreement to go around the voters and Iraq's Constitution so that Nouri got his second term.
Back in the Bully Boy Bush days, the press (and certain elements of the left) treated Anthony Cordesman as if he were a god. We didn't treat him like that. But we have noted him before -- to disagree with, to agree with him or just to toss out some point he was raising. This week he had a column entitled "Why Is Obama Ignoring Iraq?" (Real Clear World) and I think the following applies as much to the US press as it does to Barack:
For all the current attention to Syria, Iraq is the larger and more important state. Iraq is a nation of 31.9 million and Syria is a nation of 22.5 million. Iraq has the larger economy: Iraq has a GDP of $155.4 billion, and Syria had a GDP of $107.6 billion in 2011, the last year for which there are useful data. Most important, Iraq is a critical petroleum state and Syria is a cypher. Iraq has some 143 billion barrels worth of oil reserves (9 percent of world reserves) and Syria has 2.5 billion (0.2 percent). Iraq has 126.7 has trillion cubic meters of gas, and Syria has 10.1. Iraq has a major impact on the overall security of the Gulf, and some 20 percent of the world oil and LNG exports go through the Gulf.
This does not mean the conflict in Syria is not tragic or that it is not important. But from a practical strategic viewpoint, Iraq divided Iran from the Arab Gulf states. Iraqi-Iranian tensions acted as a strategic buffer between Iran and the rest of the Middle East for half a century between the 1950s and 2003. Today, Iraq has s Shi'ite government with close links to Iran and is a military vacuum. Iraq's Shi'ite leaders treat its Sunnis and Kurds more as a threat than as countrymen. Its Arab neighbors treat Iraq's regime more as a threat than an ally, and the growing Sunni-Shi'ite tension in the rest of the region make things steadily worse in Iraq and drive it towards Iran.
In violence, Press TV reports a Baquba bombing has killed 16 pilgrims and left forty-five more injured. Through yesterday, Iraq Body Count counts 64 violent deaths so far this month.
Fred Kaplan has an essay on The Drone War at MIT Technology Review. Here's an excerpt:
By the fall of 2009, toward the end of Barack Obama’s first year as president, the Air Force was training more drone-joystick pilots than airplane-cockpit pilots. It was the start of a new era, not only for Air Force culture but also for the American way of war.
That year, 2009, saw not just a surge in U.S. drone strikes—in part because more drones were available and the institutional resistance to them had evaporated—but also a shift in where those strikes took place. There was nothing politically provocative about drones in Iraq or Afghanistan. They were weapons of war, used mainly for close air support of U.S. ground troops in countries where those troops were fighting wars. The controversy—which persists today—began when drones started hunting and killing specific people in countries where the United States was not officially at war.
These strikes took place mainly in Pakistan and Yemen. Pakistan was serving as a sanctuary for Taliban fighters in neighboring Afghanistan; Yemen was emerging as the center of a new wing of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. Bush had ordered a few strikes in those countries: in fact, the first drone strike outside a formal war zone took place in Yemen, on November 3, 2002, against an al-Qaeda leader who a few years earlier had helped plan the attack on the USS Cole. Bush also launched 48 drone strikes in the Waziristan region of Pakistan, along the mountainous border with Afghanistan—36 of them during his last year in office.
Obama, who had pledged during the 2008 presidential campaign to get out of Iraq and deeper into Afghanistan, accelerated this trend, launching 52 drone strikes on Pakistani territory just in his first year. In 2010 he more than doubled the number of these strikes, to 122. Then, the next year, the number fell off, to 73. In 2012 it declined further, to 48—which still equaled the total number of strikes in all eight years of Bush’s presidency. In a contrary shift, 2012 was also the year when the number of drone strikes soared in Yemen, from a mere handful to 54.
These strikes have provoked violent protest in those countries, alienating even those who’d previously felt no affection for jihadists and, in some cases, provided some support for the United States. At home, a political and legal debate rages over the wisdom and propriety of drone strikes as a tool in the war on terror.
Heightening the controversy is the fact that everything about these strikes outside war zones—including, until recently, their occurrence—is secret. Drone strikes in Iraq and Afghanistan, like all other military operations, have been conducted by the Defense Department. But drone strikes elsewhere are covert operations conducted by the Central Intelligence Agency, which operates in the dark (even congressional oversight is limited to the members of the select intelligence committees) and under a different, more permissive legal authority (Title 50 of the U.S. Code, not the Defense Department’s Title 10).
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