Private security companies

Last week there was an incident in which a private security company killed 8 and wounded 13 civilians on the streets of Baghdad. The convoy was returning to the green zone when a bomb or rocket went off close by, and the security personnel opened fire on the street. This was by no means the first such incident - there have been many of these. The company concerned was Blackwater, a US based company. The Iraqi authorities have reacted by saying enough is enough and it will expel Blackwater and its employees from Iraq, as well as prosecuting the individuals involved. Blackwater is a huge company and has the contract to provide protection to US State department personnel, including the US Ambassador, in all movements outside the green zone. Its expulsion would be a significant problem for the US if it happens.

I personally think it would serve them right. Blackwater has long been the company that likes to think it can operate above the law. I would estimate no less than 70% of the incidents involving a private security company killing or wounding civilians on the streets of Baghdad have been Blackwater. They didn't even bother to get a licence until a few months ago. The company has ties to the Republican party and basically has patronage from the US government which might explain why it thinks its above the system. The actions of Blackwater have always cast a shadow over the entire private security industry in Iraq. The vast majority of companies do operate professionally and are not the trigger happy mercnaries the media like to portray. Unfortunately, this latest incident will likely lead to a review by the Iraq authorities of all companies' licences, so it might well be that some other companies get kicked out even if they have operated with restraint and professionalism, and within the law.

It remains to be seen whether Blackwater really will get kicked out. Condoleeza Rice has personally intervened to try and stop this from happening. The importance of this can't be made clear enough - this is a real litmus test of how independent the Iraqi government really is from the US administration. Everyone in Baghdad knows that Blackwater is by far the worst offender and that it has always operated above the law. Whether the Iraqis go ahead and expel the company will be one of the clearest signs yet of whether they are really able to dictate their own policies independently of US wishes.

Part of the problem is the Iraqis' own making though. They were supposed to pass a law to regulate the private security industry bnut have failed to do so. I saw a draft law several months ago and it was frankly a shambles. It conflicted with other laws and had inconsistencies in itself, and was going to be a total failure if it became law. That was months ago, and we still haven't seen a next draft. The sooner they pass a law that works, the sooner they will be able to regulate the industry properly and get rid of companies without having to wait for incidents like the one last week.

Another issue at work is self interest of government ministers and people connected with the Ministry of Interior. In the last 12 months around 6 or 7 foreign PSCs have been issued with a licence from the Ministry of Interior, against about 20 odd Iraqi PSCs. The Iraq companies are all owned by government ministers and people in the Ministry of Interior. Clearly, they're trying to edge out the foreign companies so that the contracts all go to the Iraqi companies. Aside from the corrupton of this, it will spell disaster for the performance of those contracts. But hey, it's their country and we weren't invited so I can't honestly say we can claim any moral high ground in this. It's just a shame that the companies who do a good job protecting reconstruction contractors, NGOs, Iraqi officials and others will be sidelined despite doing a good job under difficult circumstances. There are many of you who read this and say "well they're only mercenaries anyway" but you're wrong. Guys like Blackwater behave like mercenaries, not the industry as a whole.

And, I should add, the vast majority of employees working for most of the companies in the industry are Iraqi. There are many foreigners, but mostly it is Iraqis doing the job. That's probably something else the newspapers don't mention.

ironic

So I spend several months in Baghdad and don't get a scratch, and 2 days into my holiday I get hit by a car. It'll be 2 or 3 months before I can go back to Baghdad but will try and write something soon. There's enough to write about.

Peace
S

PS thanks to Keri for the add

The pull out method

Again it's been a long time since I wrote. That's partly because I've been busy when I've been here in Baghdad, partly because I've been away sometimes and partly because I don't know where to start. There's so much going on here and you can hardly pick up a western newspaper (or an Eastern one probably) without there being something about Iraq in there. Since I last wrote, there have been some potential laws referred to the Iraqi parliament, Tony Blair's mercifully departed office, several hundred Iraqis and dozens of coalition soldiers have been killed, support for Bush's surge has been collapsing, and Bush commuted "Scooter" Libby's jail sentence for obstructing an investigation into the leaking the identity of a CIA operative whose husband discredited one of Bush's pre-war claims about Iraq's "WMD". And there's been much more, but that's enough to list for now.

So..... the surge. Is it "working"? Is it time to pull the troops out? I was at a wedding in Sweden recently and everyone who met me posed the question and had their own view on it. But is it even possible to answer that question yet? I don't believe so. There continue to be headline-grabbing attacks now and then. About a month ago, a Shia shrine in Samarra was bombed, again, toppling 2 minarets and causing extensive damage. This was the same shrine whose golden dome was bombed in February 2006. That attack was what is widely understood to have really kicked off the sectarian trouble that still rumbles on today. There was a curfew imposed after last month's bombing for 3 days, as the authorities feared it would cause another increase in sectarian bloodshed. I never bought that, because the level of violence is already at a level that would be difficult to increase significantly further. There may have been a slight increase but I think that is mainly due to Al Qaeda wanting to put as much pressure on the US as possible in advance of September, when General Petraeus is due to report to Congress on whether the surge is working.

And that pressure is shown by high profile bombs such as the truck bomb that exploded in Kirkuk on Saturday, the death toll for which could top 150.

Not helping the situation is the continued uselessness of the Iraqi government. The Kurdish Regional Government has been pressing ahead and has agreed its own oil legislation and agreed a revenue sharing draft law with the federal government in Baghdad. The process isn't going anywhere fast in Baghdad however. It is likely at this stage that the Kurds will pass their own oil law allowing them to sign agreements with foreign oil companies, even before the Iraqi government passes its own oil and gas law (which was almost agreed in February but is now being rejected by the Kurds because the Sunnis and Shiites basically re-wrote it at a later conference). There's talk of making the revenue sharing law dependent on the federal oil and gas law, so this will take a while longer to be passed. There's little or no parliamentary activity going on at the moment anyway. Many of the MPs are out of the country for summer so raising a quorum is not necessarily going to be possible. Which could be lucky for Maliki, as a vote of no confidence is apparently being proposed against him in 5 days' time. It's questionable whether that vote will be passed, as explained better by the excellent Juan Cole blog.

So all in all I think it is too early to tell whether the surge will work. It's only in the last couple of weeks that the troop numbers have hit their peak, and violence does continue, albeit that some of it has spread from Baghdad to other places. I've heard it called the "water bed effect" whereby if you push down in one place, others rise. There are good signs in some other parts of the country, though. The western Anbar province was once a hotbed of Al Qaeda in Iraq activity but the Sunni tribal leaders there have had enough of Al Qaeda and are now fighting with the coalition troops to drive them out. That was unfathomable at the end of last year. So I think more time is needed to see how it will play out.

The Americans I have spoken to are very divided on the issue. Some think the troops should get out now, while others think that if that happens, a full blown civil war will erupt. Timing is everything though. It would be a sad irony if the surge, which is probably about the first thing Bush has got potentially right, is scuppered now by a Democratic controlled Congress which only starts asserting itself about 4 years too late, or by Republicans distancing themselves from Bush. It's unfortunate that what happens will be dictated not by events on the ground here, but political necessities in Washington. What you do clearly see now is how isolated Bush is becoming. Congressional delegations and people running for the Democratic or Republican presidential nominations for the next election are making trips out here to speak to people and get their own impression of events on the ground. I think John McCain is over here at the moment so that he can go back and come out with a statement of some sort that improves his chances of nomination. Whatever happens with troop numbers, Maliki has to go if there's to be any progress.

More on the hapless and cretinous parliament: on June 10 the parliament voted to change the Speaker of the Council of Representatives after one MP got his bodyguards to beat up another MP when he walked past his office. As the person who sent me the report said, "so, Iraqi democracy coming along nicely".

Mind you, with Bush commuting Scooter Libby's sentence to shut him up, democracy in America isn't exactly perfect. (Clinton was no saint either - he issued 140 full pardons in his final hours as president, among them to Marc Rich, whose lawyer was.... scooter Libby. If you're not too bored with reading about corrupt bastards looking after themselves in Washington you can read more here.)

An inside job?

The adviser who was kidnapped yesterday was at the Ministry of Finance giving a lecture as part of a process to implement transparency in government procurement. At the moment , ministers and flunkies are making millions of dollars in corrupt payments to influence the awarding of contracts. So, this new system to make the process more transparent means a lot of people stand to lose a lot of dead presidents. All of which points the finger at involvement not just within the Iraqi Police, but also the Ministry of Finance.

The Guardian reports today that the Ministry of Interior "became politicised by Shia extremists under the previous minister, Bayan Jabr, a leader of the Badr organisation and the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq - Iraq's largest Shia political party. Mr Jabr encouraged members of the Badr brigade to take up key posts in the ministry and subvert its operations." The Ministry of Interior is one of the worst arms of government you could ever imagine. Corruption is rife and sectarianism is evident in everything it does. The article goes on to report that Babyan Jabr has moved to the Ministry of Finance but still controls the MOI's budget and police salaries. If that's not a man with likely involvement I don't know who is. The Ministry of Finance was where the kidnapping took place and it's clear that the adviser was targeted from the fact that the kidnappers stormed into the room shouting "where are the foreigners?". Add the police involvement (controlled by the MOI) and a picture emerges.

The Times reported that a Mahdi Army official denied their involvement but said that they "called the Iraqi police in the area and they told us it was uniformed men speaking with Sunni accents". So either the police or the Mahdi Army are trying to blame it on the Sunnis but that doesn't seem remotely credible. For one, the two Ministries involved (Finance and Interior) are both Shia controlled, and the Ministry of Finance is on the edge of Sadr City, a Shia area. There's no way the Sunnis would have had the access to the area to conduct an operation like that. Look at the connection between Babyan Jabr and the Badr Brigade and you have a more likely scenario.

So hopefully the Garda guys and the BearingPoint guy will come back alive.

What a place.

Another Day in Paradise (not in the Phil Collins sense...)

Another day in paradise. A finance expert and his security team were kidnapped from the Ministry of Finance this morning. This is the first time a Westerner has been kidnapped from a Ministry as far as I know and the scale of the operation is such that it's looking likely the police themselves were involved. That ought to be news that's more good than bad in the bigger scheme of things, because if the police were involved the outcome will more likely be a peaceful one. If the Sunnis or Al Qaeda are the snatchers, less so. Police involvement would suggest a Shia angle so there is hope that this would be a political move. It should never have happened of course, and there will be obvious questions as to how this happened, but they can be asked and answered after the fate of the man and his PSD is known. As it goes, I know who the guy is and have probably met at least one of the PSD guys that were taken, and hope personally as well as morally that all will work out.

Meanwhile, the US and Iran sat down over a cup of tea for the first time since 1980 to shoot the shit. The only thing on the agenda was Iraq which is a good thing. No bleating about uranium enrichment from the US; no whining about spies possibly operating within its borders from Iran. Whether or not these talks produce anything of substance is of course important, and on track record of late you'd have to be a pessimist. But that these talks are even taking place would have been unimaginable not so long ago. It's clear evidence, if any were needed, that the power of Cheney and Bush is giving way to a more conciliatory train of thought within the US Government. And about time too. There has to be a recognition that, whether or not dialogue with Iran and Syria is likely to produce results, the mere possibility is reason enough to have a crack.

As for me, I've been fine. There's been a fair amount of incoming but not right where I am and not such that I feel threatened. I can't recall whether I ever mentioned it, but I joined/formed a band a while ago and we're having a lot of fun. There may be some people who read this and shake their heads and say "shame on you for partying it up when you're in that environment" and if that's you, you're missing the point entirely. This is a difficult environment to work and live in, so if you can do something that brings a smile to people's faces, it means that people can feel better about being here and trying to help with "The Effort". We played on a villa's roof on Friday and it was great setting up the gear when it was still light, looking to the background and seeing all the date palms and a couple of landmarks. One of the more unique gigs you could ever play, as ours all are.



I've not been so busy with work lately so have been watching a recent US TV series called Deadwood. If you haven't heard about it, it's about a US goldrush town in the 1870s that was lawless and became annexed to the Dakota territory. (To read Wikipedia's entry about the series click here, or about the place itself click here). There are certainly similarities between that place and Baghdad and it was interesting to think about that. Another interesting thing I came across (well I find it interesting anyway) is an article I read today that was written in 1920 by T. E. Lawrence. You can read the text here and again it's amazing the similarities between the circumstances of 87 years ago and those existing now and in the past 4 years. The patterns of colonialism and/or the attempts, by whatever means and with whichever intentions, seem to be fairly constant. Which makes you hope on the one hand if things will eventually work themselves out, but wonder on the other why the fuck we never learn from our mistakes.

The long goodbye

At last, Tony Blair is off. He came to Baghdad unannounced yesterday for a last chat with the big guns here and 3 mortars went off in the IZ just as he was arriving. He went down to Basra for a "morale boosting" session with British troops down there and again a mortar went off. It's funny reading suggestions that he may have been targeted - if he really was targeted there would have been 10 times as many projectiles coming in. There were a lot last week and apparently the week before, with some injuries and a couple of Iraqis killed. It seems to have quietened down a bit the last few days; in fact it seems to have been a few quiet days generally across Baghdad. Only a temporary respite, no doubt, but a welcome one.

The draft oil and gas law seems to have taken a few steps backwards. A significant part of the draft law is its annexes, which set out who controls which oil fields. There was a meeting in Dubai a few weeks ago at which the draft of the annexes was changed considerably, such that the Kurdistan Regional Government will not back the law as it currently stands. So the law itself is a long, long way from being capable of being passed.

I joined a band a while ago which is proving, for me, to be the difference between tolerating being in Baghdad and positively enjoying it. We played a few gigs at various places, which were a mixture of private compounds or villas. We have been asked to play the UK and US embassies as well so those are a couple of gigs to look forward to. In fact we were supposed to play the US Embassy last week but in the event we couldn't as our bass player wasn't back in time. That was a relief in some ways because of the relative danger of playing a gig there - it would have been outside, by the pool, which gets hit by mortars from time to time. Would have been a hell of a buzz though.

In the US, finally Paul Wolfowitz has resigned as head of the World Bank. It's incredible that he was ever appointed, being as it was a major "up yours" to all those who opposed the invasion of Iraq, being as he was a chief architect of it. It's incredible too that he fought so hard to stay in the job when it was clear that the vast majority of the Bank's staff wanted him out and that he had clearly breached the Bank's rules on conflicts of interest. But that's symptomatic of the Bush crowd's arrogance. The US Attorney General, Alberto Gonzales, is in a similar predicament now. He was, it seems, instrumental in the sacking of 8 federal prosecutors in the US who failed to toe the Bush Administration's line on policy matters. That action badly undermines the separation between the legislature and the judiciary which is fundamental to valid democracies. It's probably only a matter of time before he will be fired or forced to resign, but it's another example of one of the neocon cabal that's grimly hanging on despite clear evidence of not being fit for the job.

It's getting warmer here by the day. Supposed to hit 42 celcius on Tuesday so it's getting towards the 3 months when it won't be below 40 and often gets to 50 or more. Shame there's no decent beach around here....

really close to home....

This just landed this afternoon. 100 metres away at best. Didn't smash any windows but still pretty freaky...

Closer to home

Yesterday afternoon 3 mortars landed fairly close, one of them I think landed in the compound next door. I heard some debris falling on the roof of an abandoned half-built warehouse also next door. A rocket exploded at 4am that made the windows shake but wasn't as close as the mortars.

One of my staff's father was kidnapped this morning. From the information available so far, it sounds like this is a case of sectarian kidnapping which will not produce a ransom and release, as would be the case if it were a straightforward criminal kidnapping. That I think is as much a sign as anything about the return to sectarian killings rather than kidnappings designed for financial gain.

It's going berserk here, but there are a number of different civil war/insurgencies going on. Asking whether the departure of the troops will facilitate the return of order is meaningless. If the troops stay, there is less of one kind of violence but more of another. If they go, likewise. It's a no-win situation for Iraq in the near term.

I was disgusted by the run-up to the war, from as early as 2002 when it was clear to me what would follow. I was disgusted in 2003 when the invasion kicked off and I've been disgusted ever since that we kicked down the door of this country when the primary aim was never to "liberate" the people (as evident from the lamentable lack of post-invasion planning). But, but..... we're way past that now. The people of Iraq and its neighbours have to take responsibility for what's going on these days.

For a while there, the surge looked like it was bringing a downturn in sectarian killings. Although there may be less bodies turning up in the Tigris or on the streets, bound and with signs of torture, the car bombings are getting really out of control.

It's up to the people here to stop it and sort their shit out, but the mentality of so many people has to change. There is no sign I can see of that at the moment. Blair and Bush should be strung up in my view for coming here in the first place, but they're not directly to blame for what's happening 4 years on.