Speeding The Withdrawal In Iraq

I know that the fate of 140,000 troops half a world away isn't "in the news" at the moment, but we may be accelerating withdrawal in Iraq.

U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said today that he sees "some chance of a modest acceleration" of U.S. troop withdrawals from Iraq.

Gates, returning from a trip to Iraq, told reporters aboard his plane that perhaps one combat brigade would come out of Iraq ahead of schedule. He did not give a precise timetable.

Gates said that Gen. Ray Odierno, the top U.S. general in the country, told him that the security situation in Iraq is better than expected.

President Obama has announced plans to withdraw American combat forces from Iraq by Aug. 31, 2010, leaving 30,000 to 50,000 U.S. troops in advising and training roles until the end of 2011.

Kevin Drum thinks that recent tensions between Iraqi security forces and US troops could be a reason for this. But this is a modest acceleration, basically an extra brigade by the end of the year. Looks like a standard ROI to me. It's clear that Iraqi commanders and the political class have asserted a measure of control over their own country, and that's a good thing. But if it were really the case that American forces were hassled every time they tried to fight, they'd be leaving sooner.

Meanwhile, the legitimate problem in Iraq concerns the Kurdish-Arab civil war that could break out within a matter of months, particularly over control of Kirkuk. I don't think US forces have much of a role to play in that, but it could entrench them further in the conflict if the violence spreads from the north into Baghdad. I'd love to see more discussion on how to stop that from happening, because I fear it's inevitable.

The Latest In Iraq

I've been remiss in not writing more about Iraq lately, but Gen. Petraeus' recommendation to pause any drawdown in troops until Bush can hightail it out of office provides an opening. At first blush, you have to look at this and shake your head. Republicans spent a whole convention telling us that we're unquestionably winning in Iraq, and now the commander (with the President sure to follow) says that the situation is fragile and we have to wait another Friedman Unit before we start sending anyone home.

Now, Petraeus is right in a certain respect. Baghdad remains a dangerous place, and this campaign to evict squatters carries quite a bit of risk, as those displaced begin to return. The situation in Kirkuk is approaching a reckoning, with the Kurds seeing how Maliki routed them in Diyala and sensing that he will do the same there, depriving the autonomous region of their only oil-producing town. The Sunnis are raging over a friendly-fire incident where the US killed 6 members of their security forces, and while the US has handed over security for Anbar province to the Iraqis, that could intensify tensions, not dampen them, because Maliki is unlikely to integrate the Awakening forces he now essentially controls into the security apparatus. In fact, Maliki's swelled head is a serious threat to long-term stability in Iraq:

He is making himself the symbol of Iraqi nationalism by insisting on a date certain for withdrawal of US forces. Of course, this is more symbolic than real. Any deal will have plenty of loopholes in it. If Maliki wants to keep US forces around after 2011, and McCain is in the White House, he can do so. (Maybe not if Obama wins.) But the appearances are important here. He can go to the provincial elections (if they happen) and the national elections (if they happen) in 2009 saying that he is the man who got a timetable for American withdrawal. Moreover, he just replaced the Foreign Ministry team negotiating with the US side with his own team, headed by his national security adviser Muwaffaq al-Ruba'i and made up of experts not from the FM but from the prime minister's office. This is his negotiation now in a very personal way. Just today the first major oil deal of the post-Saddam era was announced, and it was with a Chinese company. Another bit of symbolism.

He has conducted a fairly successful campaign against the Sadrists, or at least it seems so far. He has skillfully used the new Iraqi forces and the US to cut at the power of the Mahdi Army and go after Sadrist leaders and officials. In doing so, he has also portrayed himself (with some accuracy) as the man who cleaned up militia misbehavior in Basra [...] He is now openly taking on the Sahwa (Awakening Councils) forces, demonstrating that he will not compromise on Shia Arab control of the Arab parts of Iraq. He is reneging on his earlier promises to integrate tens of thousands of Sahwa guys into the regular security forces [...] He is pushing a bit against his own allies in his coalition itself. There was a very interesting incident in Diyala province two weeks ago, covered by al-Hayat. The Iraqi forces in Diyala entered Kurdish areas in the province (Khanaqin) and ordered the peshmerga out. There was a stand-off, eventually settled when Massoud Barazani made a rare trip to Baghdad to work out the problem. But the taste left in the mouth of the Kurds was not a pleasant one, and Maliki has made it clear that the Iraqi Army can go wherever in Iraq he orders it (well, he hasn't tried to send it into the KRG) [...]

So we have what looks like a coherent strategy to go after opponents, weaken allies and portray oneself as the symbol of Iraqi nationalism in dealing with the U.S. Is Maliki overreaching? Despite the Mahdi Army setbacks, Sadrists could still do better at the polls (if they happen) than Maliki's candidates. The Sahwa people could return to insurgency, destroying the security advances of the last year. The Kurds could undercut Maliki's government in parliament. An ambitious army general could push him aside, if his control of the army is less than total. But so far, Maliki seems to be on a winning streak.

This is some solid analysis. The Bush Administration probably feels it is in their best interest to allow Maliki to rule as a strongman. They have always been attracted to dictatorial rule as a means of maintaining order. However, Maliki's tough moves against the Sunnis and Kurds could easily backfire. Maliki clearly thinks he can go it alone, and thus he's extracting all sorts of concessions on a status of forces agreement. I agree that the implementation of that agreement will depend on the US President, and Maliki is largely playing a political game to be the nationalist champion of Iraq.

The truth is, however, that such tension would end if the US simply left Iraq. Maliki is pushing to become the strongman right now because he has US backup. If we actually left instead of constantly pretending to leave he would be forced to negotiate with all sides of the conflict. Plus it would take the large target off the backs of the occupying force. Maliki's worrisome slide into dictatorship would be stifled, threats toward our troops would end, and the situation would force a negotiated solution far more than the current stalemate.

McCain and his team wants to focus on the decision of the surge, when that is irrelevant to what we need to do to go forward. I think the circumstances clearly argue for withdrawal, whereas McCain's position is that leaving is losing. Eventually this will catch up with him in November. He really has become marginalized as virtually the only political figure who wants to stay there indefinitely. It's not only stubborn, it's the wrong strategy for long-term stability.

Calling Their Bluff

Somehow, the reporting on this has been very thin, but it's extremely significant that the Iraqi government is gradually but insistently extracting the concession of a firm timeline for withdrawal from Iraq in ways that the Democratic Congress never has.

Iraq's foreign minister insisted Sunday that any security deal with the United States must contain a "very clear timeline" for the departure of U.S. troops. A suicide bomber struck north of Baghdad, killing at least five people including an American soldier.

Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari told reporters that American and Iraqi negotiators were "very close" to reaching a long-term security agreement that will set the rules for U.S. troops in Iraq after the U.N. mandate expires at the end of the year.

Zebari said the Iraqis were insisting that the agreement include a "very clear timeline" for the withdrawal of U.S.-led forces, but he refused to talk about specific dates.

Yes, it's conditions-based, and who becomes the next President matters as to its implementation. But the Iraqis have taken a page from George Bush's playbook to force this concession - move toward a deadline and stubbornly refuse to concede. There were about 3 or 4 points where Democrats could have achieved the same thing, but their will never held out beyond a couple days.

There are still pitfalls in Iraq that could alter any timetable, of course. Suicide bombings continue and the military operations designed to root out insurgents are still telegraphed to allow them to slip away. The collapse of the provincial elections law is very disturbing, particularly because those in Iraq's greatest trouble spots are growing increasingly angered.

The anger among the Awakenings movements is already palpable. The New York Times quotes Ali Hatem Suleiman saying that “We are running out of patience,” and Sheik Hamid al-Hayis saying “This is a slap on the face of Iraq... we couldn’t make a big change in the government structure. That pushed us to work to make change in the provincial council. But even that we can’t touch.” Dr. iRack, just back from Iraq, reports that the notoriously outspoken Ali Hatem "is deadly serious about returning to war against all the Islamic parties (Sunni and Shia) if the Awakening groups are not given the power they think they deserve." That fits what I've heard from others less prone to hyperbole.

Leaders of the Awakenings have been warning that they are "losing patience" and "the next few months will be decisive" so many times that I suspect some people have stopped taking them seriously [...] We are potentially approaching a moment of truth. The consequences of building up these forces outside of the structures of the Iraqi state, while stringing them along with promises that require Iraqi government acquiesence to deliver may be coming due. I know well that US military commanders have been far more attentive to these issues than have the cheerleaders, and MNF-I and Ambassador Crocker have been working as hard as they can to resolve them. Their failure to deliver a compromise on the provincial elections law and their failure to deliver meaningful progress on SOI integration both suggest the limits of American influence in Iraq - a lesson which the advocates of "strategic patience", who continue to view American decisions as the only ones which really matter, never seem to digest.

The Awakenings groups continue to be denied entry into the larger Iraqi security forces, which as we learned in the NYT today is where most of the jobs are in the country, on the government rolls. The provincial elections would have provided them some representation in the Parliament, and yet should they ever go through it would spell full-scale armed conflict in Kirkuk. There are also intra-Shiite battles that have not been extinguished. Because the root causes of the violence in Iraq have not been addressed, the potential for chaos always exists. And of course there are limits to the pressure that the US military can put on this situation.

And yet, the surge supporters are a victim of their own cheerleading. Their perception of success has led to the Iraqi Shiite ruling party believing they can pummel any challenges to their power and bribe the rest, so they feel free making the move to call for a withdrawal. They've caught Bush and Cheney in a real bind - you can only walk the tightrope between "we're winning" and "it'll all go to hell if we leave" for so long. In addition, that American-centric view of the state of play in Iraq is deeply misguided. We've set events in motion that we now will find difficult to control.

There's No Corner Turned

The series of bombings yesterday in Baghdad and Kirkuk underscored the continued presence of sectarian tensions that have been unresolved by the security gains in the period of the surge. Of particular concern is this bit:

The attacks also underscored that the raw passions and anger fed by Iraq’s deep ethnic, regional and sectarian divides can still instantly ignite. Concerns about stability ran so high that Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki ordered a battalion of Iraqi troops to reinforce Kirkuk and put other unspecified “emergency reserve” troops on alert in case the violence spread, state-run television reported late Monday.

The city was already on edge when thousands of Kurds poured into an area near the provincial headquarters on Monday morning, to protest legislation in Baghdad that would dilute the Kurds’ dominance in the city.

Then, just after 11 a.m., a suicide bomber blew herself up, killing at least 17 demonstrators and wounding 47 others, according to Iraqi security officials.

No one claimed responsibility for the bombing, which bore the hallmarks of Sunni Arab extremists. Nonetheless, many in the crowd blamed Turkmen extremists for the attack, and within minutes a mob of enraged Kurds began attacking Turkmen political offices and setting their buildings ablaze.

“They burned Turkmen buildings and they burned many cars,” said Brig. Burhan Taha of the Kirkuk police.

Gunfire and rocks from the mob wounded at least 25 Turkmen guards, according to the Kirkuk police. The guards — some armed with machine guns — returned fire, killing at least 12 Kurds in the mob. An additional 102 people were wounded in the melee that followed the bombing, the police said, though it was not clear how many were shot by Turkmen guards or wounded by other violence.

This is the kind of event that can spark recriminations. And tensions are already high in Kirkuk, where it has always been simmering, but the election law is threatening to burst it out into the open. Brian Katulis, one of the smartest thinkers in the country about Iraq, reports:

The Kirkuk dispute has its origins in the Kurdish struggle for even greater autonomy from Iraq and perhaps statehood, Iraqi national identity, and control over Iraq’s oil. Kurds claim Kirkuk for their autonomous region, arguing that they have historical claims on the city that were broken by the brutal “Arabization” campaigns of the Baathist governments of the late 20th century. Kirkuk’s oil is widely perceived to give Kurdish independence economic viability.

Ethnic Turkomans reject Kurdish claims and offer their own historical narrative. They argue that Kirkuk should be given its own special regional status, which would serve to help this minority group maintain a governing role in the city. Iraqi Arabs—both Shi’a and Sunni—insist that Kirkuk and its resources remain under the control of the national government. They say Kurdish efforts to include the city in their region are a prelude to the break-up of Iraq [...]

Today’s bombing took place against this background of increased Arab-Kurd tension over delays on Kirkuk’s status and the elections law. What the Kirkuk dispute serves to illustrate is that Iraq’s problems are fundamentally political in nature. The challenge is not security, which has improved dramatically over the last year, but political accommodation and power-sharing between Iraqi factions.

Thus far, the U.S. strategy and political discourse has been narrowly focused on the security situation, arguing over whether the “surge” has worked or not. This debate is beside the point. Iraq’s conflicts will not solve themselves peacefully unless political compromises and deals are made. As long as they remain unresolved, Iraq’s security gains will remain fragile and open to violent destabilization.

Exactly. Surge supporters try to paper over the structural impasse by citing the security improvements or hailing yet another operation to tackle extremists. But much of that is moot if there is no political reconciliation. Similarly, the success of the Sunni Awakening is not worth commenting on unless there are legitimate steps to integrate the Sunni security forces into the government; otherwise, you're relying on money to keep the peace, and that price will always go up:

The Iraqi officer leading a U.S.-financed anti-jihadist group is in no mood for small talk -- either the military gives him more money or he will pack his bags and rejoin the ranks of al-Qaeda.

"I'll go back to al-Qaeda if you stop backing the Sahwa (Awakening) groups," Col. Satar tells U.S. Lt. Matthew McKernon, as he tries to secure more funding for his men to help battle the anti-U.S. insurgents.

That's just an unsustainable solution. And so the gains in security are kind of illusory and not worth focusing on instead of the very real political compromises that must happen to avoid chaos, either sooner or later.

Progress Waits... Again

With all the talk of withdrawal and whether the surge worked, maybe somebody could take a look at the political progress that neocons claim the Iraqis are making?

Iraq's parliament passed legislation Tuesday setting new rules for provincial elections, a step widely viewed here as critical to the country's process of political reconciliation.

But Kurdish lawmakers boycotted the vote over the status of Kirkuk, an oil-rich, ethnically mixed city that Kurdish leaders believe should come under the control of their autonomous regional government in northern Iraq. The move could undermine the legislation and delay the provincial elections, which had been expected this fall.

The Kurds vowed they'd boycott the vote if it was done by secret ballot, which the Sunni Speaker of the House proceeded to do, leading to a Kurdish walkout and an expected veto by Jalal Talabani, the President of Iraq (who happens to be Kurdish).

Given all this, there is no way provincial elections carry off in October, meaning that Sunnis will still have weakened representation in the Parliament through the rest of the year. They keep delaying and delaying the status of Kirkuk because everyone knows a solution will lead to bloodshed. To consign the Kurds in Kirkuk to essentially the same forces who repressed them under Saddam will be unacceptable. And Arabs who want to limit Kurdish influence want Kirkuk in their hands, largely due to the oil resources. It's untenable.

The point is that this vaunted political progress never actually gets to a point of conclusion, and Iraq muddles through, relying on US military to keep the tense situation under control. I would argue that an end date for removal of forces would actually force them to confront these difficult issues instead of the constant delay.

UPDATE: Ugh, from Marc Lynch:

Keep an eye on the special meeting of the Kurdish Parliament called for today over Kurdish outrage over the Kirkuk provisions in the just-passed provincial elections law, which Kurdish leadership is calling a "coup against the Constitution." The Kurdish bloc is calling for a re-vote, which might make sense but would be of dubious legality. Some (overly excitable?) Arab and Iraqi reports suggest that in addition to Talabani vetoing the provincial election law (over which the Kurds walked out of Parliament) the Kurds could pull out of Maliki's government and potentially even bring it down. Wouldn't it be wild if the estimably pro-US Kurds, the biggest fans of a long-term American military presence, bring down Maliki at the height of his perceived power immediately after he expressed support for the removal of US troops by 2010... over a seemingly entirely unrelated issue?

Yikes.

And We'll Be Having This Argument In 2018

Does this sound like someone interested in reconciliation to you?

[Al-Arab al-Yawm] You talk about terrorism while you are under occupation. What does this mean?

[Al-Abdallah] There are two types of occupation now in Iraq, the American and the Iranian; both are using groups from outside Iraq under the names of Al-Qa'idah or terrorism. Sometimes, these sides are managed by both parties and conduct activities inside Iraq. For this reason, the Iraqis are confronting them, because the features of the third party are not known. It tries to kill Iraqis, nothing more. It is not actually resisting the Americans or the Iranians, but targeting the Iraqis only [...]

[Al-Arab al-Yawm] Is Iraq heading towards division?

[Al-Abdallah] We are against division, and we have great hopes that division will not be the ultimate fate of Iraq. But, so long as there is a sectarian government in Iraq, it is highly likely that it will seek to divide the country. However, we have pledged to our God and people that we will oppose this scheme.

This guy's the head of Al-Anbar reconstruction and close to the Awakening Council. We may be paying him off not to kill us, but he doesn't exactly seem ready to head into a unity government. But this doesn't stop useful idiots like Bill Kristol from continuing to push the same myth of progress in Iraq he's been pushing for the last five years, despite the fact that his own paper contradicted him on this propaganda.

Kristol relies on an uninformed public, particularly about international relations, to spread his nonsense. Those who wish to scratch the surface find the real anger between the Sunnis and Shiites in Iraq. They find the ongoing extermination of intellectuals, which is crippling to a civil society that needs to rebuild. They find people still dying. They find that Iraqi government spending on reconstruction has slowed to a crawl, and that the saintly Gen. Petraeus and the Administration falsified records to Congress highlighting the opposite. They find a real mess in Kirkuk, which threatens to open another front in the civil war:

The president of Iraq's Kurdish region warned Monday that Kurdish leaders would resist efforts to scrap plans for a referendum on the fate of the multiethnic city of Kirkuk. His tough comments came a day after nearly a dozen political parties in Baghdad challenged Kurdish designs by calling for the central government to impose a solution.

Iraqi Kurdistan leader Massoud Barzani fired back at his Arab opponents who argued that Kirkuk -- a home to Kurds, Arabs and Turkmens -- is no longer subject to an article in the Iraqi Constitution calling for a general referendum on disputed territories to be held by the end of 2007.

"There is no turning back," Barzani said in Irbil. "The referendum must be conducted in the next six months."

The oil-rich city of Kirkuk is too important to the Kurds to be papered over with some kind of fig leaf. There's going to be a deep fight for Kirkuk and it has a strong chance of being violent.

As a blogger on the Internets, I really can only take this so far. Until the Democratic Presidential candidates and the Congress end their silence on Iraq, the country will only get the wrong side of the story. Apparently, yesterday Hillary Clinton had Barack Obama sign on to her bill to stop a permanent status of forces agreement from being signed between Bush and the Iraqis. That's a defensive move at best, and a half-hearted one at that (I'll bet they'd love to have Iraq forced off the table for them).

Time For A Gulf Of Tonkin Incident

Don't look now, but things are starting to slip in Iraq. Suicide bombings continue. Al Qaeda in Iraq and remnants of the insurgency are still attacking, particularly targeting the military and top Awakening figures. An Iraqi soldier murdered two US troops last week, showing that infiltration of the security forces is still of great concern. Sunnis are fighting amongst themselves in Anbar Province, where the bolstering of these tribal groups is threatening to end in chaos. The Iraqi middle class is finding it impossible to get legitimate work without using bribes, which imperils any rise of civil society and a push back into a corrupt, tribal society. Political reconciliation is still nonexistent and going backwards. And the surge is about to end.

Of extreme concern is the tenuous situation in northern Iraq:

Subscription-only IraqSlogger translates an Aswat al-Iraq report from Kirkuk, one of the (deep breath) oil-rich, multi-ethnic and fiercely contested northern Iraqi cities controlled by Baghdad and coveted by Erbil. The Kurdish-dominated provincial council of Kirkuk/Tammim (Kirkuk Province if you're a Kurd, Tammim Province if you're an Arab) has declared that unless a referendum on who controls the province goes forward "before the end of the fifth month of 2008," the "original residents" of Kirkuk (read: Kurds):

will have the right to decide the administrative future of their areas according to the mechanisms that they find appropriate.

In other words, by June 1 (my birthday!), one of two things happen. Either the Kurds will control Kirkuk through a referendum they've spent five years ensuring they'll win, or they will declare war, and fight until they get the city back.

Which is why the incident with Iranian gunboats in the Straits of Hormuz is so interesting in its timing. We know that the military overplayed its hand to the extreme when it claimed that Iran was supplying all those EFPs to Iraqi insurgent groups; this is why they've completely backed off that talking point. But a forward action in the Gulf could be just the distraction the Cheney Administration needs as they enter a more troubling period in Iraq.

There's just no reason to trust Fourthbranch when it comes to Iran. Until the radio transmissions are released I'm going to assume that there weren't any.

UPDATE: Just to add one thing, there are credible reports that the reason the Iraqi soldier shot the two Americans was because they were kicking a pregnant woman. Freedom's on the march!

Just Horrible

105 dead in a car bombing near Kirkuk, which is part of an entirely different civil war in Iraq, between Kurds who want the oil-rich city for themselves, and the Shiites who want it for themselves. Meanwhile we're trying to arm Shiite government factions and Sunni tribes at the same time, which is only ensuring that all sides in conflict will be well-armed as they continue to go to war with one another.

This needs to end yesterday, and it's going to take more than talk from a few Republicans trying to save their jobs.

In For The Long Haul

We've dispensed with the fiction that if we just train the Iraqi Army, we'll be out of Iraq in no time:

Military planners have abandoned the idea that standing up Iraqi troops will enable American soldiers to start coming home soon and now believe that U.S. troops will have to defeat the insurgents and secure control of troubled provinces.

Training Iraqi troops, which had been the cornerstone of the Bush administration's Iraq policy since 2005, has dropped in priority, officials in Baghdad and Washington said [...]

U.S. officials don't say that the training formula - championed by Gen. John Abizaid when he was the commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East and by Gen. George Casey when he was the top U.S. general in Iraq - was doomed from the start. But they said that rising sectarian violence and the inability of Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki to unite the country changed the conditions [...]

President Bush first announced the training strategy in the summer of 2005.

"Our strategy can be summed up this way," Bush said. "As the Iraqis stand up, we will stand down."

Military leaders in Baghdad planned to train 325,000 Iraqi security forces. Once that was accomplished, those forces were to take control. Casey created military transition teams that would live side by side with their Iraqi counterparts to help them apply their training to real-world situations.

Throughout 2006, Casey and top Bush administration leaders touted the training as a success, asserting that eight of Iraq's 10 divisions had taken the lead in confronting insurgents.

The problem was never going to be solved by training. There is no coalition of "anti-violence" in Iraq right now. The British just handed over control in Maysan province to the same Shiite militia that we're fighting in Diwaniya. The Shiites are fighting the Sunnis. The Sunnis are fighting the Shiites. The Kurds are kicking the Arabs out of Kirkuk and that whole situation is about to spill over into yet another war zone. And everyone's fighting the US forces.

Essentially, what this article says is that we're going to dig in and occupy Iraq even more strongly, while still not putting the forces on the ground necessary to actually do that (it'd take half a million). Meanwhile we're doing things like building walls between Sunni and Shiite areas, which didn't work when we tried it years ago. What we're REALLY doing in Iraq is rowing in place, a metaphor made all too real in this Needlenose post:

For the past week, I've been thinking about what to do with this copy of Baghdad Weekly (PDF - 2.3MB) Swopa forwarded to me. The Weekly is the official newsletter of the MWR (Morale, Welfare, and Recreation) program run by Halliburton's KBR division inside Baghdad's Green Zone (they're hiring, btw.)

Trouble is, I can't get past a page 1 story on a recent rowing relay race called the Tigris 6K. I don't know about you, but when I hear about a rowing race on the Tigris, I think of boats, water, and a river in Iraq. The actual race, however, involved stationary bikes rowing machines on asphalt, surrounded by concrete blast walls and guardposts. Ironically, the Tigris river itself is literally on the other side of the protective walls.

If that doesn't sound like the British playing tennis behind the walls of the consulate in the Punjab, I don't know what does. And it will be greeted with the same result; an eventual driving out of the colonial power.

This was written a while ago by an Iraqi, but it captures the full spirit of what we've accomplished after 4 years in Iraq:

Iraqis became more courageous and fearless because they used to the daily killing by all the types of the gunmen including Iraqi army, US army, insurgents, thieves and the security companies.

Some Iraqis became cleverer and they started to invent new ways in killing each other, stealing each other, hiding weapons, kidnapping and cheating.

We have more ministers than any other country on this crazy earth. We have even useless ministries which were invented to please some political parties. We have as far as I know 36 ministries while the USA has only 15 ministries. So we have more than double. I couldn’t know almost 30 of them because they don’t show on TV and we have no idea about their work or whether they do some work or not. In fact and as far as I knew, most of them have no idea about the work of the ministries they run.

Iraqis never feel afraid of the electric shocks because we have electricity power for only two hours a day or three hours as a maximum. The rest of the day we have to use small Chinese generator that cost something like 100 $ which are not really powerful enough to kill people.

Iraqis found new ways to save almost everything and the most important thing is the fuel which costs Iraqis fortune. Because the ministry of oil increased the prices of the fuel many times, Iraqis started to invent ways of saving the fuel like mixing one type of fuel with another one which is cheaper to save some dollars or using the cars and the electricity generator for limited times like using the car only to go to work and using the generator only at night. To be honest, until now, I don’t know why we suffer of fuel shortage although our officials and specially our minister of oil who knows nothing about oil always boast that we are one of the richest oil country and we have the best oil qualities and the cheapest extracting costs.

We have the largest number of blast walls which I believe that can form three matches of China great walls. Each ministry blocks the roads that lead to its building with tens of these walls. I think that the cement used in these blast walls is enough to build 1000 skyscrapers.

We have the biggest number of the bodyguards in the world. Each minister has not less than 15 4 wheel cars carrying at least 5 bodyguards. Each of the 275 members of the Iraqi parliament has the same number of the bodyguards and some of them (the heads of the political blocs) has even more than that. By the way, I didn’t count the bodyguards of the presidential committee members, the prime minister and his two deputies and the parliament president and his two deputies because they have foreign bodyguards.

And we're going to double these achievements, by taking the Iraqi forces out of the equation and fully becoming the French in Algeria.