Yesterday's rocket

You may have seen on the news that the UN secretary general was giving a speech here in Baghdad when a mortar landed yesterday. He shat it and ducked under the podium. Very amusing. It was very loud and sounded more like a rocket than a mortar. It made the news so we got loads of emails saying "are you ok?" which was nice and all, but this happens all the time so it's always a bit confusing when we get these are you ok emails.

Friday at last. Have a good weekend.

Cases closed!

You may have heard recently about one of the Guantanamo detainees - Khalid Sheikh Mohammed - "admitting" his role, indeed "confessing" to being the guy who organised, at least 30 terror plots against the US, including 9/11. Of course, the "confessions" took place under torture and the hearings are behind closed doors, so they don't remotely live up to the standards of transparency you'd expect from any civilised nation, let alone the one that shouts loudest about democracy and due process than any other. I'm pretty sure if I was being tortured I'd say anything to try and get them to stop. You get the impression the US doesn't give a shit whether he did them or not - as long as they've got somebody to pin the blame on they can shut the file and Americans can sleep safer at night "knowing" that someone has been brought to account.

Actually, I can sleep safer too. If that guy was responsible for everything they say he was (sorry, he says he was while 10,000 volts were going through his balls) then odds are he's the bastard who stole my bike when I was 13. I bet he also cut off the head of Jebediah Springfield and Bart just took the fall too.


Jebediah Springfield yesterday

Four years on

This week marked the 4th anniversary of the (latest) invasion. So much has happened in that 4 years I'm not going to attempt a summary of the highlights (are there any?) and the lowlights (too many to mention). Last weekend there were mass marches in several cities across the world to mark the event. In Baghdad there were a couple of car bombs and one day 3 trucks containing chlorine blew up.





It does seem to be much better on the streets of Baghdad at the moment. There is the occasional car or truck bomb that goes off, and some bodies do turn up on the streets each day (I saw a couple in the Tigris a few days ago) but it's not dozens of bodies every day like it used to be. The extra troops on the streets and in the neighbourhoods are bringing a bit of stability that hasn't been there for a long time. The locals are pretty wary of it though. People think that the militias are just laying low and seeing what tactics the troops are using for now, and that when the troops pull out the militias will be back. That could take a while. The surge is expected to peak around July and last until at least November. If enough people can get into employment and the electricity and water supply gets more reliable, it might be that the militias find themselves with no grassroots support. Of course, it may be that the troops pull out and the militias do resume control of the neighbourhoods. Time will tell, and the locals are probably right to be sceptical.




There are really 2 things of equal importance that have to be sorted out for Iraq to have a hope of getting anywhere. The first is the obvious one - security. The second is corruption. Getting a company registered in Baghdad is more difficult if there's an element of non-Iraqi ownership. Whenever there's an application to register a company which will be partly or wholly owned by a non-Iraqi person or company, or which will have a non-Iraqi director, the application is referred by the Companies Registry to the Residency Office at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. This is a rule that existed during Saddam's time to screen non-Arab shareholders to make sure they weren't terrorists or otherwise known to be unfriendly to Iraq. It should take no more than 3 days for the application to pass through the Residency Office before being signed off as cleared. These days, unless you pay a low level official a bribe, it takes around 4 weeks. We don't pay bribes under any circumstances, and I think that's the right way to operate, even in a place like Iraq. If we paid bribes we could get in the shit under Iraq's Penal Code. Funnily enough, people charged under the Penal Code often bribe their way out of the charges. Sam Allardyce would love this place. Bung heaven.






Take another example - private security companies (PSCs). These get a bad press, and sometimes rightly so. Some companies are cowboys and think they're above the law. They're usually the ones driving around like maniacs and who in the past had no qualms about killing civilians. Most PSCs are not like that, at least the ones I know. Most of them are very professional, courteous and focused on their proper job. They do an important job, protecting various ministries and ferrying Iraqi and Western officials and companies through dangerous places.



The process of obtaining an operating licence for security companies has been in a mess for a long while. They've been drafting a law to regulate the licensing and oversight of PSCs, which they really need to have in place to make the industry accountable and to weed out the bad from the good. The draft as it stands is crap and conflicts with various provisions in some other laws in Iraq. I gave a presentation to some government ministers and flunkies and 250 other people a few months ago telling them where the draft was in conflict with other laws. It didn't go down too well with the ministers. They have been quietly registering PSCs of their own and refusing operating licences for foreign owned PSCs. There was a flurry of activity at the start of the year when a dozen or so PSCs were given their operating licence. I know at least one of them flew the official at the Ministry of Interior that deals with this, and a mate of his, to Europe on a jolly with spending money (sorry, "to inspect the head office") and lo and behold he presented their operating licence to them when he was about to get on the plane back to Iraq. Now they're asking that lawyers don't go with the PSCs when they submit their file because they want a bribe to be paid and the lawyers not to see.




Someone who's in the know about such things told me last week that the Iraqi government is sitting on at least 40 billion dollars. This is because several signatures of government ministers are needed in some cases to get money paid out by the government. Sometimes the Shiites will sign off but the Sunnis won't, and vice versa.

So what can be done about this? If it is to stay in one piece and not break into three, Iraq needs a secular government. The obvious person to take control is Ayad Allawi, but even if he came in and a secular government is formed, it won't solve the whole problem. It would be a good start, but the corruption at low levels would still be there, if not the corruption higher up too. Unfortunately, if there was an election today, people would still vote along sectarian lines, despite the trouble that has caused so far. A total change in mentality is needed in Iraq, from the voters right up to the top of government. Otherwise things will keep going backwards.

From tuk tuks to tanks

I've just got back from a couple of weeks in Thailand. Great times with great friends and the small matter of my birthday too. I've been in Baghdad 6 months now and it strikes me how it's the kind of place I shudder at the thought of when I'm away but don't mind it so much when I'm here. Especially at the moment as well, with all the changes due to take place from the summer onwards. Due to the land in the IZ being transferred back to Iraqis, a lot of people are going to be leaving the IZ and moving out to a military camp near the airport. We'll not be able to do that as we are independent, but we do rent off an Iraqi landlord so we don't necessarily have to leave. It will be more a question of whether it's safe enough to stay if/when they knock down the outer walls to the IZ and open up the roads again. It used to stress me out but now I'm not too worried. I'll go with the flow, stay here as long as it's safe and hit the road when it's looking like getting dangerous.

I've never said what I do here but may as well spit it out. I'm a lawyer working for a small independent company that was set up in 2003 here in Baghdad. We do all sorts of stuff, from registering companies, helping PSCs get their operating licences, advising international and Iraqi banks on issues arising from Iraq debt and guarantees, some corporate work such as advising on joint ventures or share transfers, litigation advice and representation, plus some oil and energy related work, and advice to various governments.

Since I've been here I've noticed the commercial climate get increasingly difficult. Petty corruption within government departments is rife and getting worse. We don't pay bribes which makes it hard but our clients appreciate that we do things the right way rather than the easy way. It's a hell of an eye opener but it makes me really angry to see these people all on the take rather than helping to get their country back on its feet. To be fair, though, I can also see it from the Iraqis' point of view. The US and UK steamed in here nearly 4 years ago and re-wrote a bunch of laws to open the country up to foreign investment. The Iraqis can be forgiven for thinking that the rug has been pulled from under their feet. But we are where we are. The same can be said of the security situation.

Whatever your views on the invasion and the manner of occupation, we're at a point now where it is the responsibility of the Iraqi government to deal with the violence that has escalated since last February when a shrine in Samarra was bombed. There have been some interesting comments from various places about whether this is or is not a civil war. It seems that the violence has all the hallmarks of a civil war, not least the massive displacement of people, but what is really happening is a bunch of mini civil wars. There's violence between Shia and Sunni, between each of them and the Coalition/occupation forces and, more recently, within competing Shia factions and within Sunni factions that are for or against the insurgency. The last of those seems to be a very recent trend. A lot of Sunni tribal leaders, particularly towards the west (Anbar province) have had enough and want to rid the country of terrorists streaming in from the Syrian border, Al Qaeda in Iraq in particular. That's an encouraging sign.

While I was away, the new clampdown started to take effect. It seems to have had instant results. From a selfish point of view, there seems to be a lot less rockets and mortars landing in the IZ now. Bombings and killings in the red zone are significantly down on what they were in December and January. There have been a couple of high profile, very lethal attacks, but still I think overall the results have so far been very good. The best thing is, the full force level hasn't even arrived yet. From March 11 we won't be able to eat at the dining facility we usually go to because there will be 1,000 more troops in that base alone. Which is a pain in the arse for me food-wise but must mean that more troops are coming to back up those already on the ground. A lot of arms caches have been found which is good news. Many of those contain materials for the relatively new and vastly more lethal weapon - EFPs ("explosively formed penetrators") which are like the common or garden roadside bomb (IED or "improvised explosive device") but can penetrate armoured vehicles. EFPs are said to originate in Iran, which doesn't help the political situation between Iran and the US.

However, a couple of days ago, the US agreed to come to the table with Iran and all other neighbours and the UK among others, to discuss ways to fix Iraq's problems. It can't be underestimated how significant this is. We did a major project advising the US Government on something, and whenever we mentioned Iran you could see body language stiffen and lips tighten. Iran was taboo and the thought of anything that could be considered an overture towards it was implicitly if not expressly forbidden. So let's see how that pans out.

Further potentially good news was that last week a final draft hydrocarbon law was approved by the the Iraqi Cabinet and will be referred to Parliament for a vote. This has been long-awaited and was supposed to be produced by the end of 2006. It could change everything. Basically, the issue is that the oil rich south of Iraq is populated mostly by Shiites, and the oil rich north is populated mainly by the Kurds. There's a referendum soon on whether the oil-rich city of Kirkuk will be brought within Kurdistan or remain in Iraq. I understand the expected result is that it will go Kurdish. All of which could leave the Sunnis with little or no revenue from the oil, as the middle of Iraq (which they mainly populate) hasn't got oil fields that are ready for drilling. So the primary issue the hydrocarbon law had to address was revenue sharing. And the draft seems to have done the right thing: all revenue from Iraqi oil gets pooled, and then shared out on the basis of population. In other words, all Iraqis will benefit, whether they live on an oil field or out in the desert. So far, so good. There is a potential significant problem, however, with the manner in which it (the oil) can be exploited. Production Sharing Agreements ("PSAs") are permitted by the draft law. This basically means that foreign companies can come in, produce the oil and take around 70% of the revenue. This report from globalsecurity.org sets out why PSAs might be considered inappropriate for Iraq, and the gist of it will be why the draft law may not be approved. Even if it is approved, there may be continued violence in objection to it. With any luck, though, it will be accepted and people will get on with rebuilding their lives and society.

So, all in all, very interesting times right now. Some days I am optimistic, others I am not. Today's a "glass half full" day.