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. At first glance you might say, "well fair enough, they don't want foreigners coming and taking over the place". But that's got nothing to do with it. 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. We tell our clients up front what the situation is and they tend to support us for being above board. 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 (which is a couple dozen). Most of them are very professional, courteous and focused on their proper job. They do an important job as well, 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 even asking that lawyers don't come 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 and this country will get left further and further behind the rest of the developing world.