The following article was published by Reidar Visser, an historian of Iraq educated at the University of Oxford and currently based at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs. It is reproduced here with the author’s permission. Any opinions expressed are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect the views of Iraq Business News.

There are numerous reasons to try to make an update on exactly how many deputies each of the main political blocs in the Iraqi parliament really controls. Subsequent to the resumption of meaningful parliamentary business in November 2010 – 8 months after the parliamentary elections in March that year – the Iraqi national assembly has seen a string of replacements of candidates for a variety of reasons, as well as cases of very public defections from some of the biggest entities in parliament. With a showdown about the annual budget right around the corner, it makes sense to take stock of the new political balance.

It would be prudent to preface any analysis on this subject with a warning about the intrinsically inexact nature of this kind of science. This is so for several reasons. Firstly, Iraqi political blocs change all the time. There is no formal procedure governing this. If a MP wants to, at any time s/he can decide that it is time to seek greener pastures, jump ship and declare a new parliamentary bloc (kutla). Further complicating the analysis is the fact that, probably due to general hubris as well as the irrepressible desire of most Iraqi politicians to call themselves rais of something (“president”), many blocs insist on maintaining sub-bloc divisions – even if this practice in theory negates the principle underlying Iraqi parliamentary theory of the biggest bloc nominating the premier. If the National Alliance is the biggest bloc, how can it at the same time contain identifiable sub-blocs like State of Law, the Sadrists and Fadila? The contradiction is more pronounced in Arabic where everything is called kutla (why not at least adopt something similar to Arabic tribal terminology which beautifully expresses organizational hierarchy?)

The following article was published by Reidar Visser, an historian of Iraq educated at the University of Oxford and currently based at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs. It is reproduced here with the author’s permission. Any opinions expressed are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect the views of Iraq Business News.

Maybe it was the physical dislocation of the Iraqi cabinet and Iraqi journalists to the southern port town of Basra that was the reason. Perhaps it had to do with a desire on the part of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki to somehow please his constituency in Basra at a time when pro-federal Sunni movements have forced him to take a negative stance on the creation of new federal regions generally. Whatever it was, Iraqi politicians and journalists produced an amazing array of misleading statements subsequent to the first meeting of the Maliki government outside the capital Baghdad yesterday.

In what appeared to be direct quotes from normally reliable people like deputy PM Hussein al-Shahristani and government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh, there were suggestions that not only had Basra been granted some kind of special status with minister rank for its governor and enhanced spending powers compared with other governorates. Some even suggested that contractual powers for the oil sector were also included:

وقال الشهرستاني في تصريح صحفي ان :” مجلس الوزراء قرر في جلسة عقدها اليوم في البصرة منح المحافظ خلف عبد الصمد صلاحيات وزير فيما يتعلق بصرف المبالغ الخاصة بالمشاريع الخدمية الى جانب ابرام العقود النفطية في خطوة ينشد منها المجلس توسيع صلاحيات الحكومة المحلية في المحافظة “.

واشار الشهرستاني الى ان ” قرار المجلس اعطى المحافظ صلاحية التوقيع على صرف مبالغ تتراوح ما بين 50 الى 100 مليون دولار والتي كانت سلفا حصرا بالوزير ، كما مكن المجلس المحافظ من احالة المشاريع وابرام العقود مع الشركات (بضمنها ا النفطية) دون الرجوع الى الوزارات المعنية بالامر “.

Many observers were skeptical, but for the next 24 hours the stories made their way through Iraqi media anyway – complete with parliamentarians commenting for and against the assumed cabinet decision. After all, the Iraqi cabinet already violates so many fundamental features of the Iraqi constitution (including the right to form federal regions) that it wouldn’t necessarily be shocking for it to introduce yet another infraction, however outlandish.

The following article was published on Saturday by Reidar Visser, an historian of Iraq educated at the University of Oxford and currently based at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs. It is reproduced here with the author’s permission. Any opinions expressed are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect the views of Iraq Business News.

The Arbil Agreement and the Real World: Time for Some Cold Water

Tomorrow [Sunday] Iraqi leaders will once more meet to make preparations for their next big get-together. When, or if, there is ever a national conference-style gathering in Iraq – possibly to downgrade expectations it is now officially just called a “national meeting” – it is unlikely to turn into the implementation of the far-fetched and shadowy Arbil agreement. At most, the meeting will end in renewed agreement in principle to legislate non-implemented aspects of Arbil (strategic policy council, oil and gas law etc.) whereupon those pieces of draft legislation will come up against the usual stalemates when they actually reach the floor of the Iraqi parliament.

It could be argued that only two items in the Arbil agreement stand out as having some realistic chance for implementation: Cabinet bylaws and the distribution of the security ministries.

Maliki knows perfectly well that the inclusion of the cabinet bylaws as a separate item at Arbil was aimed at restraining himself as a potential strongman. However, unlike many of the other items in the Arbil agreement, on the bylaws one Maliki cannot easily hide behind the claim that the proposed mechanism is outside the constitution. In fact, the constitution specifically demands the adoption of bylaws for the cabinet (85), and not even a parliamentary decision is needed.

What Maliki can do, of course, is to rely on the proven ability of Iraqi politicians to quibble forever over even the most inconsequential details, making it a safe bet to assume that no early adoption of cabinet bylaws is terribly likely.

That aspect should be kept in mind also by those who want to use the upcoming meeting for the purpose of modifying what they see as highhandedness on the part of Maliki. Perhaps they may want to have a look at the second implementable item instead: The allocation of the security ministries.

The US State Department is planning to cut its diplomatic presence in Iraq by as much as half, the New York Times reports.

Michael W. McClellan, spokesman for the embassy, said :

“Over the last year and continuing this year the Department of State and the Embassy in Baghdad have been considering ways to appropriately reduce the size of the U.S. mission in Iraq, primarily by decreasing the number of contractors needed to support the embassy’s operations.”

He added that the number of diplomats, currently about 2,000, is also “subject to adjustment as appropriate.”

The embassy is hiring Iraqi staff and sourcing more goods and services to the local economy.

Staff numbers at the $750 million embassy, the largest of its kind in the world, have reached nearly 16,000 people, mostly contractors, but many of them are confined to the embassy due to security concerns. The annual cost of the operation is around $6 billion.

Turkey, by contrast, which is Iraq’s largest trading partner, employs roughly 55 people at its embassy, and the number of actual diplomats is in the single digits.

American officials believed that Iraqi officials would be far more cooperative than they have been in smoothing the transition from a military operation to a diplomatic mission led by American civilians.

Increased bureaucracy in relation to importation of food for embassy staff has caused frustration, with stocks sometimes running low.

According the New York Times, the Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki’s office, and sometimes even the prime minister himself, now must approve visas for all Americans, resulting in lengthy delays. American diplomats have had trouble setting up meetings with Iraqi officials.

Plans for a 700-person consulate in the northern city of Mosul have been scrapped for budgetary reasons.

Iraq’s foreign minister, Hoshyar Zebari, met with Ambassador James F. Jeffrey (pictured) last week to discuss, among other things, the size of the American presence here. “The problem is with the contractors, with the security arrangements,” Mr. Zebari said.

Mr. Jeffrey is expected to leave the task of slimming down the embassy to his successor, as he is expected to step down in the coming weeks.

One State Department program that is likely to be scrutinized as officials consider reducing the size of the embassy is an ambitious program to train the Iraqi police, which is costing about $500 million this year — far less than the nearly $1 billion that the embassy originally intended to spend. The program has generated considerable skepticism within the State Department — one of the officials interviewed predicted the program could be scrapped later this year — because of the high cost of support staff, the inability of police advisers to leave their bases because of the volatile security situation and a lack of support by the Iraqi government.

The Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr recently stated, “I ask the competent authorities in Iraq to open an embassy in Washington, equivalent to the size of the U.S. embassy in Iraq, in order to maintain the prestige of Iraq.”

(Source New York Times)

Last year the oil-rich state of Basra announced it wanted more independence from Baghdad. This year it changed its mind. Decision makers say the timing is wrong, critics say Baghdad put locals under pressure, according to this article from NIQASH.

Any opinions expressed are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect the views of Iraq Business News.

When the oil rich province of Basra announced that it would seek to become a federal region – that is semi-autonomous from the central Iraqi government in Baghdad – it caused problems. And now that the region has announced it will no longer seek autonomy, the decision is also seen as controversial.

“Now is not the right time for raising the federalism issue,” the spokesperson for Basra’s provincial council, Hashem al-Luaibi, told NIQASH. According to al-Luaibi, reasons why included the fact that the local electoral commission apparently didn’t agree with the region’s request and the fact that there were issues with Iraq’s neighbouring states as well as other issues.

The Iraqi constitution allows provinces to become semi-autonomous regions if several conditions are fulfilled: two thirds of council members must approve the bid for independence after which a referendum can be conducted among the people of the state. Basra’s council started taking steps toward autonomy in late 2010 and went so far as to forward their request to the federal government. Apparently the request was ignored.

However right up until today it is hard to say whether the 2.4 million people of Basra want more independence from Baghdad or whether the politicians of Basra are pursuing the goal for their own ends. And now that the bid for independence has been dropped, it is even hard to know which politicians were for the idea and which were against and why they have changed their minds.

There is even conflict on this issue between politicians from within the same blocs. Many of the local politicians who voted for independence last year were actually members of the State of Law bloc, which is headed by the current Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. Al-Maliki himself has been opposed to the idea of increasing independence for Iraq’s provinces.

Basra council member Ghanem Abdul Amir Najem, also a member of the State of Law bloc, explained that for many of the politicians who had voted for independence, it was because they wished to fulfil the promises they had made to their electorates.

Basra is home to potentially 60 percent of Iraq’s oil as well as the country’s only sea port. Yet despite the oil and other income the state should be getting, it does not seem to be reaping any rewards. If the state was more independent, advocates of federalism say, it would better be able to manage its own resources.

Najem then went on to explain why he felt the bid for independence should have been dropped, at least temporarily. It was all about “timing”, he said, as well as worries about the costs of independence. The revenues the state gets would need to be used to fund the new administration instead of providing citizens with much needed services.

Meanwhile Mahmoud al-Taan, head of economic development at Basra’s provincial council, disagreed. “The elected [local] government will have more power to make decisions related to taxes and it would be able to increase its intake of oil revenues as well,” al-Taan said. However he too believed that the timing for an independence bid was wrong. The chance of intervention by foreign powers at a time when Iraq was unstable was more likely.

The more religious politicians on the council had had their own reasons for originally supporting Basra’s bid for independence. Firstly they had felt that “it expressed the will of the religious authority” – they were referring to the fact that debate about whether Basra should become more autonomous dates back to 2006 when influential Shiite Muslim-backed political body, the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, suggested that the all the mainly Shiite Muslim states of Iraq become more independent. But now, they too felt that the timing was wrong.

Critics of the decision to withdraw the bid for independence were quick to suggest other possible causes for this.

“The explanations are baseless and unrealistic,” Wael Abdul Latif, a Shiite Muslim and the former governor of Basra, said. Previous to this bid, the most recent, serious attempt at autonomy for Basra had been launched by Latif in 2008. And although Latif was a fervent supporter of independence for Basra, he and his supporters were unable to collect enough signatures to endorse a referendum.

At the time, Latif said he had been blocked by politicians in Baghdad who had put energy into ensuring that the referendum didn’t happen. In 2008 Latif says he produced documents that indicated there had been illegal interventions to hamper the autonomy project. This included bribery, pressure and even the issuing of fatwas, religious opinions, that said that anyone who supported Basra’s bid was sacrilegious.

“All of those who were with us in 2008, who supported the creation of a region, have withdrawn simply in order to keep their jobs,” Latif argued. “Council members changed their minds for the sake of their political careers and to stay in the good books of their leaders,” he added, referring to the State of Law list politicians whose list leader, al-Maliki, was opposed to federalism.

A local legal expert and council member, Tareq al-Abarseem, says that the discussion around Basra’s bid for independence, does not just reflect the tug of war for power between the provinces and the central government in Baghdad. They also reflect the aspirations of local politicians who want more power for themselves.

However now that Basra’s bid for independence has been put aside – for the time being, at least – the local council are working on the middle ground. Rather than trying to break away from Baghdad completely, they’re trying harder to extend the powers of local councils – a kind of middle ground between centralism and federalism, if you like.

And this sits well with the Iraqi Prime Minister’s own policies, announced in November 2011, which compromise by granting provinces more power but which maintain national unity at the same time.

Al-Abarseem thinks sticking to the middle path is positive for Basra. “It will help in developing locals qualified to manage the province, should the federal process [and any bid for Basra’s independence] be restarted,” he concludes. “And if the federal project remains on hold, then it will help provincial councils fulfil their promises to the electorate.”

(Source: NIQASH)

There has been a welcome outbreak of pragmatism in Iraq in recent days.

While the fact that ExxonMobil will apparently be allowed to take part in the auction for the fourth round oil licences was not entirely unexpected, some will see it as a climb down on the part of Baghdad.

Others, such as Hess Corp, which was barred in September as a result of its contracts in Iraqi Kurdistan, will be left in little doubt that some oil companies are more equal than others.

On the party-political front, the return of Iraqiyya deputies to the parliament after several weeks of boycott has generally been seen as a positive, especially with budgets to be finalised.

But this should not lead to any complacency, as tensions between the factions still remain high.

What this all means for the long-awaited hydrocarbon law remains to be seen.

By T. Keyzom Ngodup, co-founder at Ideas sYnergy.  Ideas sYnergy is Iraq’s first multiple bottom line advisory company committed to inclusive economic and social development through market-based solutions that help build and scale youth-driven innovative ideas for social change.

An Economist report rightly pointed out that when people in the developed countries worry about migration, they tend to think of low paid incomers who compete for jobs as construction workers, dishwashers, or farmhands. When people in developing countries worry about migration, they are usually concerned at the prospect of their best and brightest decamping to Silicon Valley or to hospitals and universities in the developed world. Indeed, of the 22 Iraqis listed in Arabian Business’ 500 most influential Arabs, only nine are based in Iraq, all in Baghdad.

This ‘brain drain’ has long bothered policymakers in poor countries. They fear it hurts their economies, depriving them of much-needed skilled workers who could have taught at their universities, worked in their hospitals and come up with clever new products for their factories to make. Alternatively, several economists reckon that the brain-drain hypothesis fails to account for the effects of remittances (see table for the relatively ‘low’ Iraq remittance volume albiet important to note that ‘traditional’ money transfer services are far and few between in Iraq and can often terminate service, for example the recent termination of Iraq-US transfer), for the beneficial effects of returning migrants, and for the possibility that being able to migrate to greener pastures induces people to get more education. Some argue that once these factors are taken into account, an exodus of highly skilled people could turn out to be a net benefit to the countries they leave.

While most migrants in other countries are unemployed youth, in Iraq, migrants had been generally gainfully employed professionals in the country before seeking global opportunities with a chance to travel hassle-free through a non-Iraqi passport. Speaking to a number of Iraqi professionals who immigrated to the United States after 2003, one finds that most of them are employed in low-paid blue collar jobs, with plans to return to Iraq in the near future, contingent on improvements in security.

Late senator Ted Kennedy said at the time, “America has a fundamental obligation to assist Iraqis whose lives are in danger.” But the special visa programme, called the SIV, under the 2008 Refugee Crisis Act, has stalled, partly due to crippling bureaucratic process, lack of resources and partly due to news such as Iraqi men in Kentucky, USA charged with supporting extremists. Following the withdrawal of American troops in December 2011, the SIV programme is likely to erect new hurdles as the Pentagon closed its last few military bases in Iraq.

However our experience tell us that Iraqis are better off pursuing higher studies abroad and applying themselves in Iraq, where potential opportunities to start new businesses and non-existent services for the population is tremendous. Much will depend upon how the government of Iraq makes Iraq an attractive destination for aspiring Iraqi returnees.

By T. Keyzom Ngodup, co-founder at Ideas sYnergy.  Ideas sYnergy is Iraq’s first multiple bottom line advisory company committed to inclusive economic and social development through market-based solutions that help build and scale youth-driven innovative ideas for social change.

The Arab League envoy to Iraq, Ahmed Bin Hili, said on Wednesday that Iraq is ready to host the next Arab League Summit, expected to be held in Baghdad in March.

According to AKnews, Bin Hili arrived in Baghdad on 30th January to inspect the preparations for the summit, which has been postponed several times since March of last year  due to the wave of uprisings across the Arab world.

He told a joint press conference with the Iraqi Foreign Mnister Hoshyar Zebari that “all the preparations are there to make the next Arab Summit in Baghdad successful.”

The Arab League and the Iraqi Government have agreed on 29th March as the date for the Summit. Bin Hili said the agenda will be different this time, being more open and more interactive with the Arab [Spring] events.

Iraq’s Hoshyar Zebari said there was a real “desire and willingness” among many of the Arab countries to have an active participation in the summit in Baghdad.

The hosting of the Summit in Baghdad has been hailed by Iraqi leaders as a “national achievement” and symbolic of Iraq’s return to the Arab arena; Iraq last hosted the Summit in May 1990.

(Source: AKnews)