The Mother of all Surprises !

Well, looks like it's not all bad news coming out of Iraq. Despite the bloodbath caused by terrorists, Iraq's economy is strong,and growing. From what you hear on the news, Iraqis are cowering in their homes, hiding from the terrorists. Things will work out in Iraq, if the Islamofacists,Iran,al-Qaeda and such were eliminated. This is why the radicals,the terrorists kill children,women,this is what they are trying to prevent.

Link:www.msnbc.msn.com...

Interesting

If they can get a stable and proficient economy, that will be the best tool for the US against the insurgency

If they show the new system works and ensure Work and basic service, well the region will stabilise

Exactly like Germany after WW2

Like the article says, between 30 and 50% of unemployment. That's the pool of local support to the insurgency

If it wern't so tragic, that article would be hilarious.

I don't have to look too hard to find the giveaway line:

There's even a positive spin to be put on corruption. Money stolen from government coffers or siphoned from U.S. aid projects does not just disappear.

This whole article is an exercise in spin.

Firstly, let's be clear. The "liberation" of Iraq was always about "opening the country up to foreign investment" - an innocuous-sounding phrase that actually means asset-stripping.

Did you know that Jay Garner, the US' first "proconsul" in Iraq (how easily those Imperial terms come these days) was replaced by L. Paul Bremer because he wanted to hold elections too soon?

This extract from Greg Palast's Armed Madhouse details how Garner's genuinely democratic and liberatory impulses were squashed by Rumsfeld.

"My preference," Garner told me in his understated manner, "was to put the Iraqis in charge as soon as we can and do it in some form of elections."

But elections were not in The Plan.

The Plan was a 101-page document to guide the long-term future of the land we'd just conquered. There was nothing in it about democracy or elections or safety. There was, rather, a detailed schedule for selling off "all [Iraq's] state assets" -- and Iraq, that's just about everything -- "especially," said The Plan, "the oil and supporting industries." Especially the oil.

There was more than oil to sell off. The Plan included the sale of Iraq's banks, and weirdly, changing its copyright laws and other odd items that made the plan look less like a program for Iraq to get on its feet than a program for corporate looting of the nation's assets. (And indeed, we discovered at BBC, behind many of the odder elements -- copyright and tax code changes -- was the hand of lobbyist Jack Abramoff's associate Grover Norquist.)

But Garner didn't think much of The Plan, he told me when we met a year later in Washington. He had other things on his mind. "You prevent epidemics, you start the food distribution program to prevent famine."

Seizing title and ownership of Iraq's oil fields was not on Garner's must-do list. He let that be known to Washington. "I don't think [Iraqis] need to go by the U.S. plan, I think that what we need to do is set an Iraqi government that represents the freely elected will of the people." He added, "It's their country … their oil."

Apparently, the Secretary of Defense disagreed. So did lobbyist Norquist. And Garner incurred their fury by getting carried away with the "democracy" idea: he called for quick elections -- within 90 days of the taking of Baghdad.

But Garner's 90-days-to-elections commitment ran straight into the oil sell-off program. Annex D of the plan indicated that would take at least 270 days -- at least 9 months.

Worse, Garner was brokering a truce between Sunnis, Shias and Kurds. They were about to begin what Garner called a "Big Tent" meeting to hammer out the details and set the election date. He figured he had 90 days to get it done before the factions started slitting each other's throats.

I've already gone into this in more detail in another thread.

Let's look at mobile phones. Within days of the invasion, a Bahrani company, Batelco, had managed to get mobile service restored, but they were shut down by the US very quickly. So much for the free market.

This article gives valuable insight into the reasons behind this decision. The US wanted its own system in place, to substitute for the already up-and-running infrastructure:

The result is that the world has a single standard, and enjoys economies of scale and very, very cool gadgets. The USA on the other hand decided to allow four incompatible standards to battle it out, thus blocking innovation from overseas, and allowing cellphone carriers to play atrocious bait and switch games with cellphone subscribers here. Er, that's us.

So it's no surprise that this BBC report shows that the rules devised by the US authorities heavily favour US firms:

Rules drawn up for mobile phone licences in Iraq by the US authorities in Iraq could bar many of Europe's biggest telecoms companies - and almost all those in the Middle East - from bidding.

The rules also mean that neighbouring Arab companies may well be out of the running - including Batelco, the Bahraini telecoms company which until earlier this week was running an unofficial GSM-based mobile network in Baghdad.

After a few days of operation, in which foreign journalists, businessmen and aidworkers suddenly found their home mobiles were unexpectedly working, the US authorities forced Batelco to pull the plug on its $5m operation.

Are we starting to see a pattern here?

This is one of the reasons that the Iraqis want the US out. Everything has got more expensive and they know the profits are going abroad. Specifically, to the US. And another thing. In that first mobile phone article I posted, there's some technical stuff about the two different systems being proposed. As the original system used by the Iraqis was compatible with those in neighbour states, and the new system (backed by US companies) is not, international calls are going to be much more costly.

Almost all Iraq's trading partners use GSM, and cross-network roaming - whether domestic or international - is both technologically difficult and very expensive.

Here's another doozy from your original article:

Iraq has a debt-relief deal with the IMF that requires Baghdad to end subsidies and open up its gas-import market.

Now I was doing some research into the background of some of the people in the Iraq Study group for this thread, and I came across this article that is all about the debt relief deal. The bottom line?

James Baker, consiglieri to the Bush family and the Carlyle Group, has brokered a deal with Kuwait that means if Kuwait get their debt paid by Iraq, Baker and the Carlyle group earn a cool ONE BILLION DOLLARS.

So it's not like all of Iraq's debt is written off by a generous international community.

The article you quoted is pure spin and colludes in a massive rip-off of the Iraqi people.

Spin,seems your articles are spinning also. Mostly opinion from left leaning authors.The US should profit,why not,who's paying the bills.Some just hate to hear anything positive coming from Iraq. You really go out of your way to show it.

Originally posted by rdang
Spin,seems your articles are spinning also. Mostly opinion from left leaning authors.The US should profit,why not,who's paying the bills.Some just hate to hear anything positive coming from Iraq. You really go out of your way to show it.

So it's ok to invade a country for profit? Is that what you're saying? Because that's what the US is doing.

And when it comes to spin, I counter the arguments in the article you posted. You have done nothing to show any facts to the contrary except cry "spin". Kindly raise the level of debate.

Rdang
If things are so good in Iraq for Iraqis can you please explain the huge exodus currently happening now causing the Iraqi refugee population to explode? I don't know why people keep trying to paint a rosie red picture over there when the people of Iraq themselves keep proving over and over again contrary to what US media tries to tell us.


Pie

It looks like certain areas of the economy are growing but they may just mean alternatives aren't working. Cell phones, they probably can't keep regular lines in operation. But the poll on that page of Msnbc site is telling, 67% of Americans are against sending any more troops to Iraq(20,000)

I also wonder if this is news or was it produced by the gov't to be issued as news?

Doesn't seem to be saying much to say that iraq's economy is growing. The country was crippled by sanctions for a decade, then smashed completely during a war, then ground into nothing during an occupation.

If it wasn't growing now, that'd be something to report.

Originally posted by rdang
Spin,seems your articles are spinning also. Mostly opinion from left leaning authors.The US should profit,why not,who's paying the bills.Some just hate to hear anything positive coming from Iraq. You really go out of your way to show it.

No I do not think the US should profit because we went in on Bush's whim and destroyed the Iraqi's country and infrastructure. The owner of Halliburton made 100 million profit on the war supplying shoddy goods and services to Americans fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. That is not America making a profit. That is George Bush's friends and business partners making a profit.

Hell I went out and bought 25,000 Dinar so I am all for the Iraqi economy improving.