Here’s an issue I’ve been wanting to bring up for quite awhile, and now seems a good time to do it.

The issue involves Iraq’s oil production, and the question is: what happened to it and the billions and billions of dollars the country was raking in?

In a Fox News story aired perhaps a month or two before our latest invasion of Iraq Carl Cameron noted in concluding his segment that the U. S. was buying Iraq’s oil to the tune of over 100 million dollars A DAY! And that’s just from us.

Presumably Iraq is still a member of the international extorion club known as OPEC. What has happened to Iraq’s oil production during the last six years, and what is it’s status now? I don’t know where to go looking for answer to this question but maybe you have it.

And while we’re at it, how about some reimbursement from the Iraqi government to compensate us for all the blood, sweat and tears we’ve shed in preserving their country.

Your comments on these issues would be greatly appreciated.

I agree with you on everything and frankly I have to because you clearly understand it a lot better.

The only thing that I would add though is that while I totally agree that the situation remains unbelievably complicated that our forces have gotten through the worst, and more importantly, that I have confidence that they can overcome the complex nature of the battlefield.

From the start, al Sistani has advocated cooperating with the MNF and gaining control through the ballot box.

AJacksonian:

I lived in the Peoples’ Republic of Williamsville from 1987 to 2007. Kaisertown is off Clinton Street? The Fruits are pretty rough these days.

Arch

ajacksonian:

Two quotes from your comment: What has gone unnoticed by the bloggers and punditry is the stand up of the IA forces and their hard work at making them non-sectarian in nature. The IA has an integrated mix of Arabs, Kurds, Yezidis, Turkomen and Shia, Sunni, Yezidi, Alawite, Christian (RC and Syriac)… This is, perhaps, the most integrated and diverse force in the ME and is now being sent to get Sadr’s JaM

and: The fundamental unit in Iraq is blood ties via tribe, and that only gets watered down with 3-5 generations of city dwelling.

Precisely why so may of us are skeptical that the Iraqi Army, let alone the National Police, is for real. Armies either work for a government, or become the government. Iraq lacks a government to employ and direct this army of theirs. So, unless the Iraqi government steps up, and quickly, the likelihood is that the army will disintegrate under stress at some future point, or else will become the government. Neither of those last two possibilities feels like victory to me.

That is not descriptive of an organization that will let ‘insurgents’ come back. Integrated top to bottom and getting rid of AQI, JaM, Badr, Qods, and good old fashioned organized crime which the previous forces turn to when things get too hot for them. You cannot describe Iraq without its military and police organizations, both of which will require a minimum of 5 years to get functional up to the NCO level and then another 5 for a full fledged command officer corps to advance to those ranks. Advancement is done on what works, not bribery or sect or tribe, which is also something of a novelty outside of Israel in the ME.

What we are seeing is the National reconciliation that America had to go through *twice* in its history: first after the Revolution when 15% of the people had left for other crown colonies or back to England, and then, again, after the Civil War. Ever hear the phrase ‘The South Shall Rise Again’? In some ways America *still* has not recovered from the Civil War, but we do seem to have recovered from the Revolutionary war.

For Iraq to keep terrorists out and at bay requires buy-in from the lowest levels to the highest and you will not get that until the provinces and local governments fully stand up. This then puts a premium on the provincial elections which will then undercut the large parties that populate parliament as they will find they don’t serve the provinces well as organizing groups. The Iraq Awakening movement, now spread to Diyala and south past Baghdad province and into the Shia areas is slowly becoming cross-sectarian, cross-tribal and cross-cultural.

Watching this from SEP 2006 there has been one very, very pointed thing the tribal chiefs have put forth: technocratic government is the best way to go. That is getting to be a very appealing idea to a lot of people after AQI, Badr, Sadr, JaM, Secret Cells and just thugs and killers roamig around killing folks on contract. Getting the electricity on and keeping it on, and ditto for water, sewage, roads, railroads, airports, oil infrastructure… that sounds kinda nice to the folks in the Iraq Awakening movement.

Some of those that have left will *never* come back, and Iraqis will deal with that.

On the ’segregated neighborhood’ deal, I grew up with the remains of that in Buffalo. An area of the city called ‘Kaisertown’ had some of my family in it. They were Poles, and there were Italians, southern black families, Thai, Greeks… it was ‘Kaisertown’ due to the large number of immigrants from Germany there… in the 1880’s. So just how well has America done with that population? Separated them for good and all?

Those neighborhoods in Iraq cannot stay integrated if their families and tribes are multi-sectarian and there is a pretty high ‘marry out’ rate to other ethnicities and religion has been no obstacle in marriage in Iraq. That really bollixed up AQI, BTW. Really, really got them in bad straights thinking that ’sect’ mattered more than ‘tribe’. Now we, in the US, must learn from *their* mistakes and not make the exact, same one in approaching Iraq. The fundamental unit in Iraq is blood ties via tribe, and that only gets watered down with 3-5 generations of city dwelling. As the tribes go, so will go Iraq, and we best start learning that really quickly before we make the same mistakes as al Qaeda did. Luckily our troops are smarter than that… our political pundits? Unfortunately not.