The Hot-Money Cowboys of Baghdad

High_Gravity

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Nov 19, 2010
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The Hot-Money Cowboys of Baghdad

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“My friend, Iraq is a rich, virgin country!” one of its richest men, Namir al-Akabi, told me with a startling enthusiasm when I met him earlier this year at his office in Baghdad. Akabi is the chairman of the Almco Group of Companies, a conglomerate he built from nothing in the wake of the American invasion in 2003. What makes Iraq’s economic potential so great, he explained, despite everything, is not just its abundant natural resources — it is the shattered state of Iraq itself: the damage done by the American war, but also the long, steady decay under Saddam Hussein, from the war with Iran that began in 1980 through the invasion of Kuwait a decade later and the crushing international sanctions that followed the first gulf war. The country has been decimated, and therein lies its potential.

Like many of Iraq’s wealthiest men, Akabi grew up in exile: his family left in 1970, when he was just 7, in the early days of Baath Party rule. He lived first in Jordan, then London, then Moscow. He was back in Jordan building housing when the United States invaded his homeland and made him a very, very rich man. “How many five-star restaurants are there in Baghdad?” he asked as we drove in a convoy of Chevy Suburbans through the bleak streets and highways. “None! I’ve tasted them all.” Houses, hospitals, roads, bridges, electricity, communication networks, hotels, supermarkets and, not least, pipelines and refineries for the coming boom in oil and natural-gas production. “Iraq needs everything!” he said. “Anything you can think of. A car rental! Everything you take for granted in the West.”

He was not exaggerating. Not long after that conversation, I met Ayad Yahya, the general director of Al-Bilad Islamic Bank. While we talked in his office, a young, English-speaking assistant came in and proudly showed off the bank’s first debit card. They were planning on rolling out the card to customers the following week, as soon as they worked out the kinks in the computer system Yahya recently bought from Oracle. The A.T.M. itself was still in its shipping box in the bank’s lobby.

Yahya, an aging economist who once worked for Iraq’s state bank, recalled visits to Amman and Beirut under Hussein’s rule. “We brought back bananas and Pepsi for our children,” he told me. “We said to them, ‘This is a banana.’ ” In 2007, while the sectarian fighting in Iraq was still in full bloom, Yahya acquired the means to make Pepsi himself. He led a group of investors that took over the formerly state-run Baghdad Soft Drinks Company, a factory on the city’s southern outskirts that was once partly owned by Hussein’s erratic and fearsome son, Uday. It was the officially licensed Pepsi franchise in Iraq from 1984 until it shut down production after the invasion of Kuwait in 1990. Now it’s humming again. With new management, a renewed Pepsi license and an extensive refurbishment, including new bottling lines, generators and water purifiers (the source being the Tigris River, half a mile away), it supplies 80 percent of the soda in Baghdad and nearly half in all of Iraq. This makes it one of the country’s largest manufacturers, which is a sign of its managerial success and also the sad state of manufacturing in Iraq.

“The economy is growing, but the path is long,” Yahya said later over a lunch at the soda plant that included Iraq’s national dish, a delicious roasted carp, called masquf, and Diet Pepsi. “This is just the very beginning.” As we ate, Al Jazeera murmured on a flat-screen, broadcasting the protests in Egypt that toppled Hosni Mubarak. Yahya watched the scenes, riveted. “Arab investors used to think Egypt was the most stable,” he said. “Now we are.”

The war in Iraq is widely seen as a colossal blunder of American hubris that killed tens of thousands and displaced many more, leaving a shattered, sectarian wreck of a country. Even now, as President Obama withdraws the last of nearly 50,000 American troops by the end of the year, the insurgency simmers and the state is neither stable nor fully democratic. The government is rife with corruption and paralyzed by an ossified bureaucracy. And yet also, undeniably, Iraq has turned a corner. After years of war, looting, sectarian bloodshed and political infighting, Iraq’s economy is beginning to take off, fueled by a resurgence in oil exploitation — and soon natural gas — and an influx of foreign capital that has swelled despite the protracted political impasse that followed Iraq’s parliamentary elections in March 2010.

The International Monetary Fund recently estimated that Iraq’s gross domestic product grew 2.6 percent last year — nearly as much as the struggling American economy did — and it projected astonishing increases exceeding 11 percent this year and next. Some say Iraq’s economy — estimated at roughly $80 billion today — could expand six or seven times in the next decade as it increases oil production to a level rivaling Saudi Arabia’s.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/22/magazine/the-hot-money-cowboys-of-iraq.html?_r=1&hp
 
[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2irN1G5HiRo&feature=related"]YouTube - ‪Iraq Genocide by UN Sanctions‬‏[/ame]
Iraq UN Embargoes:
United Nations and UNICEF estimate that the United Nations sanctions on Iraq resulted in the death of approximately 1.5 million people, including the death of over 500,000 children under age of 4. In 2002, a 12 non-governmental organizations study group said that the U.N. economic embargo against Iraq was flawed because it severely hurt the Iraqi people while sparing the country's leaders. The United States and the United Kingdom used their veto power to prolong the sanctions, bear special responsibility for perpetuating the sanctions against the wishes of the vast majority of the 15-member Security Council.

The oil for food program was a joke, if all the money attained from the program was used to buy food, it would have worked out to $170 per year per person. This has been calculated to be 1/4 that needed to feed a dog at the time.

Iraq after the US Led Invaision of 2003:
A study conducted by the FAFO Institute for Applied Social Science, a Norwegian research group, found in November 2004 that acute malnutrition among Iraqi children between the ages of six months and five years has increased from 4 percent to 7.7 percent since the US-led invasion.

The UK Lancet (independent and authoritative voice in global medicine) in July 2006 reported that over 600,000 have been killed since the invasion. The UK Government publicly rejected the findings of Lancet until a FOI conducted by the BBC found that the Governments Chief Scientist actually agreed with the Lancet study!

In 2006 US Johns Hopkins University and the Al Mustansiriya University in Baghdad confirmed the UK Lancet figures by estimating that 655,000 more people have died in Iraq since coalition forces arrived in March 2003 than would have died if the invasion had not occurred.

The UK ORB completed the latest and most comprehensive poll in October 2007 (polled many more regions in Iraq), they estimate 1,220,580 deaths since the U.S. invasion in 2003.

November 2007 polls (1.2 million dead) and UN Sanctions (1.5 million dead) indicate a total of at least 2.7 million civilian deaths due to Iraq sanctions and the US invasion of Iraq.

uly 2000
We see a healthcare system which in a decade has been reduced from first-world standards to a third-world disaster.

And meet the former UN Humanitarian Co-ordinator who criticises the sanctions:" we have no control...this is really a hypocrisy". When will the war of propaganda end?

Produced by ABC Australia
Distributed by Journeyman Pictures

It's better than the UN sanctions days under Clinton and Bush senior, that's for sure, when it was world and US foreign policy to starve and murder Iraqi children.
 
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Kofi Annan said the oil for food program was a success.
Yeah, if you ignore the corruption investigation, and your goal was murdering half a million children and collectively punishing an entire country for no good reason (Saddam didn't suffer, his people did though). :eusa_eh:

The sanctions on North Korea and Iran are just as 'successful'. ;)
 
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Kofi Annan said the oil for food program was a success.
Yeah, if you ignore the corruption investigation, and your goal was murdering half a million children and collectively punishing an entire country for no good reason (Saddam didn't suffer, his people did though). :eusa_eh:

The sanctions on North Korea and Iran are just as 'successful'. ;)

I heard Annan and his son made a lot of money off that program, so I guess for him it was a success.
 
Kofi Annan said the oil for food program was a success.
Yeah, if you ignore the corruption investigation, and your goal was murdering half a million children and collectively punishing an entire country for no good reason (Saddam didn't suffer, his people did though). :eusa_eh:

The sanctions on North Korea and Iran are just as 'successful'. ;)

I heard Annan and his son made a lot of money off that program, so I guess for him it was a success.
Yep, and now that North Korea has a nuke, Iran is next. These sanctions are really working to stop arms production, not.
 
Wars to end all wars just slow the process of humanities warring to set periods. Another great one is coming up.
 

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