aftermath
Iraq 71/2 years on
Iraq’s story has not been widely told. Iraqis have not gained the democracy or freedom glibly promised to them — indeed they have lost a great deal which may never be returned
By Kamila Hyat
Before the middle of March, 2003, when US marines arrived in Iraq to begin an invasion that would bring an occupation of over seven years, most Iraqi children were healthy, there were few sectarian killings and all cities in the country received power for 24 hours a day.

Two different wars
How will the exit from Iraq impact the US position in Afghanistan if at all
By Ammara Ahmad
Everyone who has survived this decade will never forget the 9/11, Afghan war and Iraqi invasion. A comparison between the US occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq is possible because both invasions were done primarily by the US, under war on terror and against a Muslim country where it received a lot of resistance. Both the wars are far from being won. However, withdrawal is possible from Iraq, whereas Afghanistan still needs time. Though the situation seems largely alike, the ground reality is far from comparable.

Long hard path to democracy
The status of democracy in Iraq remains fragile and for the right reasons
By Sher Ali
Earlier this year, the US Air Force commissioned RAND report titled, The Iraq Effect explained regional implications of Iraq war by stating, “The war has stalled or reversed the momentum of Arab political reform; local regimes perceive that US distraction in Iraq and the subsequent focus on Iran have given them a reprieve on domestic liberalisation.”

region
Neighbourly concerns
By Mazhar Khan Jadoon
Seen as an end to foreign occupation, the withdrawal of US troops from Iraq has created a vacuum in a changed Middle East that has seen a decade of bloody war. Iraq’s neighbours, though happy with US withdrawal from a post-Saddam Iraq, are working out their own plans to gain strategic depth in the region to further their economic and political interests. The gigantic task ahead for the leaders and peoples of the Middle East is to find ways to build regional stability and cooperation in a country ravaged by a long war and perennial sectarian conflict.

Conceding to Pentagon
Democrats as divided on Iraq as they were in 2002
By Farah Zia
It is difficult to say whether the democrats share a single view on the exact nature of US engagement with Iraq. Nor is it necessary to have unanimity of view. Only that it makes an analysis of Democrats’ exit strategy on Iraq slightly problematic and less definitive.

It was the oil
There seems to be a mad rush by international contenders for Iraq’s bruised and abandoned oil sector
By Ather Naqvi

In a TV interview on February 26, 2003 former US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld vehemently denied that US was after Iraq’s oil, claiming the US does not “go around the world and try to take other people’s real estate or other people’s resources, their oil. That’s just not what the United States does.” About seven years down the line, the US is one of the major contenders for Iraq’s bruised and battered oil sector.

After about eight years of US invasion of Iraq, the world is still not a safer place. It is in fact a more dangerous place.

As the US meets the deadline of withdrawal of its troops, there are no signs or declarations of victory. It is a silent retreat from a war which should not have been fought in the first place. A drastic blunder that it was, the anti-war president who had made retreat from Iraq into an election promise did not even refer to the decision of going to war while announcing the exit plan.

The blatant lies uttered to pose Saddam Hussein and Iraq as a threat to the world could obviously not sell for long. People got to know, if they didn’t already, that the nuclear threat was a hoax and the weapons of mass destruction a sham. The invasion of an impoverished country was then justified in the name of regime change. Saddam was caught and hanged but the elation proved short-lived. The occupation forces had led to some brutal divisions in the country along sectarian and ethnic lines and thus began an insurgency-cum-civil war.

Before the US occupation forces landed in Iraq, there were no traces of terrorism or militancy or al-Qaeda. Everything came to Iraq following this occupation. War brought terrorism to Iraq and not vice versa.

Along with counter-insurgency operations began the quest for restoring democracy to Iraq. Elections were held on a template designed in the US and what the country gained instead was more violence.

The last elections held in March this year have not yet yielded a proper government which, as per the template, needs an intervention by the US which it is not ready to give. It wants the world or at least the American voter to think it has disengaged. Besides, it has decided to leave behind 50,000 soldiers who it claims will take a back seat and help train and guide the Iraqi Security Forces. Ironically, many of the Iraqis now don’t want the US out of their country.

Where is the democracy, the freedom, the peace promised to the Iraqi people? An unconditional apology is the least the US must do at this point.

Before the middle of March, 2003, when US marines arrived in Iraq to begin an invasion that would bring an occupation of over seven years, most Iraqi children were healthy, there were few sectarian killings and all cities in the country received power for 24 hours a day.

Today, that has changed. A majority of children in Iraq suffer malnutrition and trauma. Cancer rates near the cities of Fallujah, Najaf and Basra, the ‘liberation’ of which was announced with much enthusiasm in 2003, have recently been revealed to be higher than those at Hiroshima after 1945. The use of about 1.9 metric tons of depleted uranium ammunition and of toxic “anti-personnel” weapons, such as cluster bombs, by US and UK forces is responsible. In Iraqi hospitals, doctors who lack sufficient medicines, struggle to cope; mothers look into the faces of dying children. Few western leaders comment on the Iraq of today.

Four million Iraqis have been forced to flee their homes since 2003; those that stay on face perpetual dangers — in the form of suicide bombings, organised criminal gangs which have mushroomed since 2003 and the suffering brought by uncertainty. University research groups now put the figure of those killed at over a million. 3,000 Iraqi civilians are estimated to have died last year. 34,500 died in 2007 — but things are clearly still far from safe.

Power stays on for just over 15 hours a day. This is an improvement over the six hours that it remained on for three years ago, but still a far cry from the pre-2003 situation. In Arabic-language newspapers, Iraqi commentators speak of those days — despite the brutality of the Saddam Hussein regime — with nostalgia.

Sectarian violence in a country in which just over 60 percent of the population is estimated to be Shia has soared. Sunni Muslims challenge this figure and even the majority status of the Shias. The sub-division of Sunnis along ethnic lines, into Arabs, Kurds and Turkmens complicates matters further and the clumsy US efforts to impose a Shia government have not helped.

Before the British parliament, a former intelligence chief has admitted there was no evidence of a link between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein prior to the March 2003 invasion. Tony Blair lied to the world when he said proof existed of such a link. Indeed the war in Iraq helped Osama bin Laden take his ‘jihad’ into that country and expand it around the world. We live today with the consequences. In our own country we see them in the form of a militant threat that has grown steadily.

There is then something depressing about the images of US soldiers pulling out towards the Kuwait border, shouting, “We won” as if all that has happened since 2003 constitutes little more than a football match. The teenaged youngsters have evidently learnt little. Some would have been no more than 12 years old when the invasion began. It is unclear if they even realise much of the ‘pull-out’ is essentially a charade. 50,000 personnel — a third of the entire US occupation force — will remain behind. We have been told officially they are there to train the new Iraqi army, whose own commander says they will be ready to defend their country only by 2020. Many of those who have joined the force are desperately poor Iraqis who have few choices in life. With the Americans, they will continue to battle insurgents who hold the US occupation continues. More Americans will die in suicide attacks. So too will more Iraqis.

Already, the occupation has left behind a crippled country. It is hobbled by corruption on a scale it never knew before and burdened by torture at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere. It is a place far more brutal than it was in 2003. We do not know how much more damage will be inflicted in the years ahead.

We were told by George Bush and Tony Blair before they began their disastrous adventure in Iraq that it would make the world a safer place; that the defeat of Saddam Hussein would free us from militancy and all its dangers. We have not seen this vision unfold. Instead we have a more dangerous world. Anger over what happened in Iraq runs high in many parts of the Middle East. In almost every Muslim country it has fuelled new hatred for the US and the West. With this has come the rise in extremism and in terrorist plots involving bombings, hijackings or abductions. More and more people everywhere face a new sense of insecurity and a rising sense of distress. There is no evidence that things will change soon.

One reason for this may be the feeling that justice has not been done. Leaders like Tony Blair and George Bush have not been punished for their crimes in Iraq. There are analysts who argue these constitute actions described by judges at Nuremberg in 1946 as ‘paramount war crimes’. To make matters worse there is emerging evidence that key players in the UK and US administrations added millions to their bank accounts as a direct result of the war.

The media exposing this now had in the past connived with Bush and Blair. Many of the horrors from post-war Iraq were not told for years. Even now the full story has not been widely told. The voices of Iraq’s people remain muted. They have not gained the democracy or freedom glibly promised to them — indeed they have lost a great deal which may never be returned.

Everyone who has survived this decade will never forget the 9/11, Afghan war and Iraqi invasion. A comparison between the US occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq is possible because both invasions were done primarily by the US, under war on terror and against a Muslim country where it received a lot of resistance. Both the wars are far from being won. However, withdrawal is possible from Iraq, whereas Afghanistan still needs time. Though the situation seems largely alike, the ground reality is far from comparable.

“Afghanistan is a much harder, mountainous terrain with extreme weathers and inaccessible pockets,” says Saleem Safi, a political analyst for AVT Khyber. “In Iraq, there were no bordering tribal areas where the militants could escape and seek refuge.”

The Afghan invasion came as a result of the 9/11 attacks, at a time when the US public was angry and insecure. Majority in  the US thought Afghanistan should be attacked. Yet when the Iraqi invasion was being planned, the political landscape was different. Notions about the complexity of Afghan intrusion and lack of an outright victory were common knowledge by then.

The legitimacy of the US-led invasion of Afghanistan, though it was not approved by the UNSC, relied on the argument that it was collective self-defence under Article 51 of UN Charter and not a war of aggression.

Some experts argued that the 2003 invasion on Iraq was a pre-emptive strike to prevent future attacks but the claims fizzled out when no WMDs were eventually discovered.

“The 2003 invasion of Iraq was a “war of choice” and unjustified,” says Dr Daniel N. Nelson, a Senior Fellow at the Centre for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation.

“The action to oust the Taliban regime from Afghanistan was, instead, entirely justified since the Taliban had given a safe haven and support to those who plotted and implemented a direct attack against the United States.” A 2003 CBS poll indicated that 64percent Americans consented to an armed crackdown in Iraq, but 63pc wanted a political solution instead of entering a war. More than half of these believed that terror threat to the US will increase after an Iraqi invasion. Even traditional US allies like France, Germany, New Zealand and Canada opposed the war, arguing that the presence of WMDs in Iraq is unproven by the UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (Unmovic).

“The two countries are very dissimilar in socio-economic, historical, cultural, and geographic terms. Taliban and their extremist allies wanting to regain power in Afghanistan planned, supported, or endorsed attacks throughout the world (Bali, Madrid, London, and elsewhere including Pakistan)” explains Dr Nelson “Those differences go a long way towards explaining why “pulling out” of Afghanistan will not happen soon.”

“The attention on Afghanistan, though perhaps not the number of troops will increase,” says Brigadier Mehmood Shah, a defence and Afghanistan expert. “Since Iraq was not a fulfilling mission, the target in Afghanistan is not merely direct involvement but also building up on diplomatic influence.”

There is also a division of opinion regarding the American ‘victory’ in Iraq. “The American objective to remove Saddam was fulfilled,” says the political analyst Ejaz Haider. “However, the war was lost in terms of exchequer, devastation and the democratic model US wanted to implement there in order to re-engineer the Middle East politically.”

”The US is not abandoning Iraq and will continue to support an elected government with political, economic and military resources. This continuing support is justified given the originally unjustified nature of the US invasion” says Dr Nelson.

“In Obama’s West point speech, there is an 18 months deadline to resolve Afghanistan,” says Ejaz Haider. “However, how many troops will remain in Afghanistan, will they be present on field or in garrisons and carry air strikes, is unknown yet.

Another constraint in Afghanistan is that the war is being fought by NATO. The UK and Germans have other priorities, different concerns and Afghan leadership choices. In Iraq, only US and the UK were fighting. The costs of the Iraq war were borne by US primarily, unlike Afghanistan. The Iraqi invasion cost was much higher and hurt the recession-hit Americans more. In 2008 a Washington Post piece declared about Iraq: “You can’t spend $3 trillion on a failed war abroad and not feel the pain at home.”

The death toll in Iraq was also higher than that in Afghanistan. According to an organization called Global security, some 4300 American troops died and 30,000 were injured, compared to just 1200 in Afghanistan.

The situation in Afghanistan is far from resolved at the moment. The best position would have been to destroy the al Qaeda control centres in Afghanistan through aerial attacks and not mingle in the country politically. But now that the US is there, it will have to stay. Otherwise it might leave behind an unstable Afghanistan with Taliban stronger than before.

Earlier this year, the US Air Force commissioned RAND report titled, The Iraq Effect explained regional implications of Iraq war by stating, “The war has stalled or reversed the momentum of Arab political reform; local regimes perceive that US distraction in Iraq and the subsequent focus on Iran have given them a reprieve on domestic liberalisation.”

The original sin committed by US administrator Paul Bremer in 2003 was to assign twenty-five seats in the Iraqi Governing Council (IGC), strictly along sectarian lines based on the assumption that 60 percent of the population is Shia, 20 percent Sunni, and 20 percent Kurds, who are mostly Sunni would get along.

The result of this decision was that Iraq developed a deeply sensitive and polarised political sphere. The recent impasse over the March 2010 parliamentary elections, coupled with the barring of 500 candidates a majority of whom were Sunni, has not only jeopardised Iraq’s future political progress but has also created a political vacuum. The ongoing deadlock between radical cleric Muqtada Al-Sadr and Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki has confirmed that Iraqi politics though democratic is inherently volatile. Politicians are seen to be distrustful of each other while politics in general still operates on sectarian and ethnic lines.

The current political vacuum plus the drawdown of US troops from the country has contributed to a string of major high-profile attacks. Politically motivated killings and attacks have continued to occur despite reports that violence is now 90 percent lower. According to various estimates, Iraqi civilian casualties from the war range from 150,000 to 600,000 people, a number which is comparable to the amount of Iraqi civilians killed by Saddam Hussain who murdered an estimated quarter of million Iraqis. Still, the US government claims that around 200-300 Iraqis die every month; a number that the Iraqi authorities say is double.

Through the occupation, Iraqi people gained various democratic rights such as the freedom to vote, demonstrate or even stand for public office to an extent never imagined under Saddam. Despite these newly-installed constitutional rights; ground reality is that these rights are merely on paper.

Corruption and lack of basic services continue to be major issues for the country. For instance, today in Baghdad, residents claim to receive around 10-12 hours of electricity a day while having to use ice blocks to ward off extreme summer heat. Furthermore, health and education sectors are worse off than before the war, mainly due to the mass exodus of doctors, nurses, pharmacists and teachers who fled violence. Shortage of teachers has meant that literacy rate in the country also continued to plummet.

Iraq is faced with the basic challenge of developing its state infrastructure while also shoring up private economy. According to experts, 1/3 of Iraqis are unemployed. At this point, petroleum and international assistance are the mainstays of the economy while agriculture and industrial sectors have been completely neglected. In the past, there have been hints of economic progress, according to the IMF and World Bank, Iraq’s GDP tripled between 2002 and 2008. The effect of such growth has been limited due to the economic and market devastation caused by the US and UN sanctions.

Overall, sectarian and ethnic dynamics of society continues to dominate state set-up thus distracting the government from key state functions. The status of democracy in Iraq remains fragile as both internal and external pressures facing the state pose a major hurdle in creating a stable future for the country.

Seen as an end to foreign occupation, the withdrawal of US troops from Iraq has created a vacuum in a changed Middle East that has seen a decade of bloody war. Iraq’s neighbours, though happy with US withdrawal from a post-Saddam Iraq, are working out their own plans to gain strategic depth in the region to further their economic and political interests. The gigantic task ahead for the leaders and peoples of the Middle East is to find ways to build regional stability and cooperation in a country ravaged by a long war and perennial sectarian conflict.

The entire Arab world is also struggling to gain a foothold in Iraq and change the political landscape — Saudi Arabia is eyeing a Sunni Iraq while Iran is working for a Shia sway.

Iraq and Saudi Arabia

An Iraq without an authority able to assume the tasks that had been carried out by the departing American forces would threaten Saudi Arabia and Jordan, because Iraq may join the pro-Iran club backed by Syria. Saudi Arabia has, reportedly, also started building a 812-kilometre fence along the Saudi-Iraqi border. The purpose of the fence is to prevent terrorists from infiltrating into Saudi Arabia from Iraq. While right after the start of the 2003 Iraq War, the flow of terrorists was in the reverse direction, as Saudi mujahideen used to enter Iraq and join al-Qaeda to fight the US and its allies. Now Saudi Arabia sees itself as a future target. Saudi regime fears that al-Qaeda in Iraq will re-emerge and exploit their links with the al-Qaeda network in Saudi Arabia.

Iraq and Iran

With the absence of an agreed-upon government and with political rivals at loggerheads, the political vacuum gives Iran space to interfere in Iraq’s affairs. Iran wants a prime minister in Iraq who will follow Iranian orders. Iran backs incumbent Shi’ite Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, a secular Shi’ite who is friendly with the US and in close contact with the CIA. American withdrawal from Iraq will likely provide Iran unparalleled trade opportunities and access to steer the country’s political course in Tehran’s favour. Iran is already the main trading partner with Iraq with the volume of trade between the two nations nearing $10 billion.

Iraq and Syria

Jihadi elements, having connections with al-Qaeda and other Sunni militants groups, take the US withdrawal as a victory for Islamic fighters. Encouraged, they will keep crossing into Iraq to hit the American plans for a “US-friendly” Iraq. These forces have vowed to continue their attacks till the will of Allah prevails — and the actions on ground prove they mean business. Hence, their aggression against Iraq’s population and institutions is expected to last as long as their ideology lasts. They are reportedly backed by ideological and financial circles inside Saudi Arabia. The success of US pullout hinges on the capacity of Iraqi administration to stop the flow of jihadists from Syria. Damascus may also come under renewed pressure from the United States and Britain to rein in militants within its borders.

Iraq and Turkey

Turkey, the old seat of Ottoman power, had successfully stayed out of Iraq war, refusing even to let US forces cross Turkish soil for the 2003 invasion. Turkey is running neck and neck with Iran as Iraq’s biggest trading partner.

The United States, during its occupation of Iraq, had been providing intelligence about Kurdish rebel positions to Turk forces. Turkish forces had been carrying out ground incursion into Iraq to hit Kurds rebels. Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan had vowed to fight the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) to the end. Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari, himself a Kurd, has been critical of Turkish action and called on Erdogan to return to peaceful efforts to woo Turkey’s large Kurdish minority away from violence. Both Turkey and Iraq will have to hammer out a strategy to tackle Kurd rebel irritant that is threatening stability on borders.

Iraq and Israel

Israel also should be concerned about the US withdrawal from Iraq before the establishment of a political structure that ensures a responsible government. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has shared his worries with US Defense Secretary Robert Gates about the emergence of a new eastern front, which may become the next threat to scared Tel Aviv. Right now, one of the biggest challenges that Israel may face from the changed Middle East is to stave off threats from a hostile milieu with charged militants. The situation is different now as the US army is no longer patrolling Iraqi territory.

It is difficult to say whether the democrats share a single view on the exact nature of US engagement with Iraq. Nor is it necessary to have unanimity of view. Only that it makes an analysis of Democrats’ exit strategy on Iraq slightly problematic and less definitive.

Of course the deadline that President Obama gave in his Feb 27, 2009, speech for troops’ withdrawal from Iraq was duly met on Aug 31, 2010. But with 50,000 US troops remaining back in Iraq — not as combat but as a transitional force to train, equip and advise the Iraq security forces as per the speech — there is still a lot of flexibility on what might transpire in the months and years to come.

A retrospective glance at the Democratic Party’s response to the possibility of a US attack on Iraq back in 2002 might be instructive in many ways. It has been rightly pointed out that if the Congress, both the Republican-dominated House and the Democrat-dominated Senate, had voted in majority against the October 2002 resolution or even if the Congress had voted in favour of adopting the UN Security Council Resolution route as in 1990, the dreaded US invasion of Iraq could have been prevented.

In an excellent article “Iraq: The Democrats’ War”, Stephen Zunes clearly declares that the responsibility for the death of 4,400 American soldiers as well as hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians, the material loss of one trillion dollars of US treasury and the rise of terrorism and Islamist extremism rests in the hands of the members of Congress which authorised the invasion.

Congress, he says, did not do so in a hurry. It had ample time — to investigate, debate, get opinion from scholars and strategists about the nuclear programme and the WMDs — and yet the resolution came about.

To his credit, Zunes reminds, Obama who was then an Illinois state senator spoke at a major anti-war rally in Chicago in October 2002. Unlike his future rivals for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination, people like Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, Christopher Dodd and Joe Biden who “were making false and alarmist statements that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was still a danger to the Middle East and US national security”, Obama said: “Saddam poses no imminent and direct threat to the United States, or to his neighbours.”

Quite prophetically, he stated that “even a successful war against Iraq will require a US occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences.” And that “an invasion of Iraq without a clear rationale and without strong international support will only fan the flames of the Middle East and encourage the worst, rather than best, impulses of the Arab world and strengthen the recruitment arm of al-Qaeda.”

He was consistent in his political stance till he became a presidential candidate, when he said that not only would he end the war but “end the mindset that led to the Iraq war.” Or, more likely, he earned the presidential nomination because he talked of peace.

As president, though, he failed “to condemn the decision to go to war or the politicians of both parties who lied about the alleged Iraqi threat” in his speeches announcing the drawdown strategy. This could be either become of  political expediency or plain graciousness.

Zunes concedes that the democrats who did support the war “did not represent the mainstream of their party”. Therefore, he notes with irony that, the “majority of President Obama’s appointees to key positions dealing with foreign policy — Biden, Hillary Clinton, Robert Gates, Dennis Blair, Janet Napolitano, Richard Holbrooke and Rahm Emanuel — have been among those who represent that very mindset.”

Of the names mentioned above, Hillary Clinton as presidential candidate had switched sides to join the peace lobby, judging the mood of the public of course.

This historical backdrop, going back roughly about eight years, brings us to the current situation where the US has announced a kind of disengagement with Iraq to shift its attention to Afghanistan. There is a great deal of cynicism about the exit itself because 50,000 troops back in the country means they could immediately take up the combat role should the need arise. As for the appointment of hawks on key positions, it too is largely seen as a reaffirmation of Pentagon’s primacy in foreign policy affairs and a near failure of Obama administration.

On the flip side, and to give them credit, if the democrats were not in power, we would not have seen any exit of any kind.

In a TV interview on February 26, 2003 former US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld vehemently denied that US was after Iraq’s oil, claiming the US does not “go around the world and try to take other people’s real estate or other people’s resources, their oil. That’s just not what the United States does.” About seven years down the line, the US is one of the major contenders for Iraq’s bruised and battered oil sector.

While political contours of Iraq will continue to take new shapes, the economic reality of the country is too poor to go unnoticed. Understandably, one of the biggest challenges that Iraq faces today is to revive an economy that has been almost completely destroyed during the past one decade or so.

Since the issues of security, politics, economy and governance are all intricately interlinked, the government is struggling to stand on its own two feet. One and perhaps the only major component of the Iraq economy is the oil sector, which, according to one estimate, provides over 90 percent of government revenue and 80 percent of foreign exchange earnings.

Last year, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s government invited some of the world’s largest oil companies to revive Iraq’s long-abandoned oil wells. The hard part is that the oil companies have agreed to do just that on tough economic terms. But that is not to say that there is no competition there.

Besides the US, which is considered to have claimed the biggest share in the oil pie (which it is not as China has taken the lead as the biggest investor in the oil sector so far), countries such as the UK, Italy, and France have also jumped in the fray represented by their companies namely, Exxon Mobil Corp., Eni SpA, Royal Dutch Shell Plc, and Total SA, etc. It is to be noted that the British oil company BP Plc and China National Petroleum Corp. have won the right to explore southern Iraq’s Rumaila field, which happens to be Iraq’s largest oil producer.

The decade-long Iran-Iraq war, the Kuwait war and severe economic sanctions have destroyed Iraq’s economy and infrastructure during much of the 1980s and 1990s. Iraq struggled under the Oil-for-Food Programme put in place by the United Nations in 1995 (as a measure to help ordinary Iraqis). As a consequence, Iraq’s GDP fell sharply after its invasion of Kuwait in 1990. Later, increased oil production during 1996 and higher oil prices in 1998 increased Iraq’s GDP growth to 12 percent in 1999 and 11 percent in 2000. Iraq’s GDP grew by only 3.2 percent in 2001 and remained the same in 2002. The programme was terminated in late 2003 after the US invasion of Iraq.

But instances of failure are not the whole story. Probably the near future carries some opportunities of reconstruction for the regional and international investors. How this affects regional politics and economy remains to be seen. Iraq, with its more than 30 million population is a big new market for regional and international business.

The rosy picture put forward by some critics shows Iraq’s oil production increasing its gross domestic product and leaving it with considerable financial reserves. This seems to be a long way since right now Iraq borrows from the International Monetary Fund to keep its engine of economy moving, albeit very slow.

Some analysts believe Iraq is an economic reality that has the potential to rise again after decades-long slumber. As soon as a semblance of relative peace was in sight, economic life began to revive as 12 contracts were inked with international oil companies to increase oil production in ten of Iraq’s oil fields.

If things go according to plan and insurgency does not flare up again, Iraq’s economy can start producing positive results in the next few years or a decade at the most. That is a daunting task despite the fact that Iraq’s oil reserves are the fourth largest in the world. Today, Iraq’s oil production is estimated to be about only 2.5m barrels a day. Experts say that should increase to more than 10 mb/d by 2020 while the government’s official target is 12 mb/d by 2016. If numbers are any guide, Iraq’s economy has the potential to increase its oil revenues to about $280bn a year as compared with the $70bn according to the current figure. According to the US Energy Information Administration (EIA), Iraq also contains 110 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.

One good news for now is that Iraq’s oil production has risen to the pre-war levels. That is achievement in comparison to the period immediately and after the invasion when oil production had gone to zero. Today, according to one estimate, Iraq sells around 2 million barrels of oil a day overseas.

Not putting all its eggs in one basket, the Iraqi government has also signed an agreement with Syria in Damascus on shipping the Iraqi crude oil and gas to the Mediterranean coast through Syria.