Making Big Money on Iraq
Pete W. Moore
US
soldiers check for tanker overfilling at the
Baiji oil refinery, Iraq. (Eros Hoagland/Redux) |
Kuwait has its diwaniyyas,
Yemen its qat chews. But for languorous trade
in rumor, gossip and flashes of political insight,
there is no substitute for chain-smoking and eating
Iraqi masgouf.
At one of several Iraqi establishments
in Sharjah, a down-market cousin of Dubai in the United
Arab Emirates, the host centered the bulging fish upon
a table for six. “Iraq’s economy is like the fish,”
he said, laughing. “How much you get depends on how
quickly you eat.” It is an apt description of today’s
Iraq—the country’s patrimony is literally being divvied
up and devoured.
Despite global financial crisis and
declining oil prices, the Iraqi government and its
American backers have crafted some good news. Though
bombings bedevil Baghdad and Mosul, and street crime
remains rampant, they can point to measures of improvement.
US troops have withdrawn from the cities and towns
inside concrete encampments, and Prime Minister Nouri
al-Maliki’s assertion of central control over Shi‘i
Islamist rivals in Baghdad and the south appears to
be holding. In February, Washington’s top economic
official in Baghdad proclaimed: “We may well be at
a turning point, frankly. We’ve heard this before,
but the conditions are lining up so that there could
be significant interest being shown by Western companies.
Politics are becoming more normal. What that means
is the door is open for greater business activity and…engagement.”[1] In
April, the Maliki government, in cooperation with London,
held a high-profile international conference to encourage
foreign investment. Sadly, these sightings of “green
shoots” of economic rebirth are misleading. Something
is indeed growing in Iraq’s political economy, but
its roots are venerable and sturdy, and it is far from
healthy.
The ambient violence after the 2003
US invasion, whether resistance to occupation or sectarian
infighting, has dismembered Iraq economically, creating
local militia monopolies, criminal public-sector fiefdoms
and regional capital havens. To say that corruption,
bribery and intimidation are widespread would be an
understatement; these practices are an integral part
of many businesses. As with other complex civil conflicts
in the era of globalization, the years of mayhem in
Iraq unfolded within an unregulated regional market.
And as with blood diamonds in Africa or the Mafia-controlled
supply chains revealed by Roberto Saviano in Gomorrah (2008),
the globalized marketplace has given a boost to violence
and criminality in Iraq. The year of direct US rule
from May 2003-June 2004 opened the Iraqi market to
external predation, while the rise of competing Shi‘i
Islamist and other powers in the south reached northward
to reshape Baghdad’s political-economic relations with
the neighborhood. The Gulf states, in particular the
UAE and Iran, are now major players in Iraq’s economy.
People and goods flow unregulated into Iraq while capital
and resources flow out.
In a sense, Iraq’s political economy
appears to be refashioning itself upon the familiar
model of state patronage and graft established during
the decades of Baathist rule. Many of the country’s
import supply chains and distribution networks continue
to depend upon ministries and state companies born
in the 1970s. But the old edifice is inhabited by new
patrons who are serving a new set of clients. Open
borders and free trade, instead of building democracy
and sparking socioeconomic development, as envisioned
by ex-US proconsul L. Paul Bremer and his neo-liberal
underlings, have been harnessed by these new powers
to consolidate their increasingly authoritarian rule
and to funnel profits into their own coffers.
Not for the Meek
On the morning of May 30, 2009, former
Minister of Trade ‘Abd al-Falah Sudani, a member of
Maliki’s al-Da‘wa Party, boarded a flight from Baghdad
to Dubai. Only weeks before, Sudani had resigned from
the ministry after allegations of massive fraud in
the purchase of food imports, mostly from Iran. Initially,
he was not legally implicated—rather, 50 of his subordinates
were—but the benefits of sanctuary in Dubai were obvious.
The plane was only in the air for 30 minutes before
it turned around and headed back to Baghdad, where
security officers placed Sudani under arrest. It was
quite a change from the days when fallen Baathists
and exiles would flee not south, but west to Amman.
For decades prior to the US invasion,
the gateway to Iraq was Jordan. This history is well
known.[2] The deep social, political and economic ties between the Baathist
and Hashemite regimes managed to keep both of them
afloat through the ravages of war, sanctions and international
isolation in the 1980s and 1990s. Jordan is still an
important point of entry into Iraq (see table), though
exports have not returned to pre-invasion levels, which
topped 800 million Jordanian dinars per annum.
Jordanian Exports to
Iraq
| Year |
Jordanian Dinars
(millions) |
| 2003 |
224 |
| 2004 |
237 |
| 2005 |
380 |
| 2006 |
327 |
| 2007 |
376 |
| 2008 |
573 |
| Source:
Jordanian Ministry of Industry and Commerce
(1 dinar=$1.41) |
|
The leaders who were chosen by the
Americans from among former Shi‘i Islamist exiles and
then elected in 2005 are hardly friendly to the government
in Jordan or the Iraqi exiles resident there. Accordingly,
a number of obstacles to the Jordanian trade have arisen.
The demise of Baathist Iraq ended Amman’s trade protocol
with Baghdad, by which oil was shipped to Jordan at
cut-rate prices in exchange for exports and re-exports
from Jordan. Without this guarantee, Jordanian exporters
now have to rely on cash payments from Iraqi importers
and state-owned enterprises. Lacking the legal and
security framework of state-to-state trade, Jordanians
must rely on Iraqi partners with connections in Baghdad
to make deals. As one Jordanian exporter put it, “No
Jordanian businessman will risk visiting Baghdad, so
we have to hire often untrustworthy representatives
there.” Perhaps the most overt expression of the changed
political environment is the general refusal of Iraqi
ministries to allow Jordanian companies to bid on tenders,
when Syrian and Iranian companies reportedly face no
such constraints.
Trade routes from Jordan have also
become increasingly costly and risky since 2003. Prior
to the invasion, a joint public-sector firm, the Jordan-Iraq
Land Transportation Company, carried the goods. Jordanian
and Iraqi drivers moved freely across the borders and
delivered anywhere. That entity ceased to exist after
the invasion and its trucks were looted. Neither the
Americans, ideologically averse to the state sector,
nor Iraq’s Shi‘i and Kurdish parties have been eager
to resurrect the company. And if the cities are more
secure than at the zenith of the civil war, Iraq’s
roads are a different story, remaining plagued by bandits,
many of whom have organized themselves to control stretches
of asphalt as if they are the state. Moving stacks
of cash and valuable cargo across al-Anbar province
is not for the meek. As a result, since 2004, Jordanian
trucks offload their merchandise at the border, where
private Iraqi truckers pick it up for the trip to Baghdad.
Today there are a handful of private trucking companies
with offices in Jordan and Syria that have come to
dominate transport between Baghdad and points west—and
their market share is not due to business acumen. As
one private transport manager boasted, “Our company
has the best delivery record because, with our contacts,
no one will dare mess with our trucks.”
Since the invasion, these trucks have
also become a primary means of supply for US bases.
The matter is very controversial in Jordan and unclear
in the trade statistics, but it is commonly believed
that US troops consume a large portion of Jordan’s
exports to Iraq, particularly the large volume of foodstuffs.[3] Consequently,
official Amman finds itself in a quandary. Reticence
about the US invasion has yielded to nervousness about
a US withdrawal, because that event is likely to reduce
Jordan’s influence upon its neighbor to the east, as
well as the profits its businessmen reap there. The
Gulf, by contrast, is poised to benefit in any case.
Struggle for the South
As Iraq’s oil reserves are concentrated
in the south, Basra is the country’s second largest
city and the Gulf opens onto the Indian Ocean, maritime
portal to the riches of South Asia and the Far East,
the south has been a crucial economic conduit throughout
Iraqi history. It is quickly regaining that status.
In 2008, Iraq became the number three destination for
re-exports from Dubai, behind only Iran and India.
Prior to 2003, Iraq was not even in the top ten.
Kuwait, meanwhile, has leveraged its
political and geographic position to become another
major supplier of the goods flowing to US bases in
Iraq. And Saudi officials are planning construction
of a free trade and storage zone on the border with
Iraq. Many of these new trade linkages intersect with
the business interests of Iraqi militias or party-controlled
public-sector monopolies.
The other heavyweight on the Gulf,
Iran, now claims to be Iraq’s largest trading partner.
Accurate data on Iran-Iraq commerce are elusive. Official
estimates value the trade, composed overwhelmingly
of Iranian exports, at $3 billion per year. Whether
these estimates are accurate or not, no one disputes
that there has been a substantial increase in this
trade from the relative trickle that existed prior
to the US invasion. And the linkages are expanding.
In 2004 Iranian authorities established the Arvand
Free Trade Zone in Khuzestan, on the Iraqi border.
A February 2009 Iranian trade delegation to Baghdad
agreed to boost trade to $5 billion. Many of the imports
from Iran are the types of processed food and cheap
consumer goods that once came exclusively from Jordan.
Aside from oil, the Shi‘i pilgrimage
business, which exploded after the fall of the old
regime, is the south’s most lucrative enterprise. It
is estimated that some 1,500 Iranian pilgrims visit
the shrine cities of Najaf and Karbala’ daily. In these
cities, Iranian construction and management companies
dominate hotel and tourist facility construction. And,
for Iraqis suspicious of Iranian influence, rumors
persist that a new road conduit is planned to expand
the cross-border linkages. Reportedly, most if not
all of this Iranian export business is controlled or
managed by various companies answering to the Revolutionary
Guard, a feature that greatly occludes precise measurement.
What is most apparent to Iraqis is the vast array of
Iranian manufactured goods present in markets and retail
outlets throughout the country. At the height of the
sectarian violence, there were reports that Sunni militias
had banned the sale of Iranian goods in their areas.
Naturally, the new dominance of Iranian trade and finance
feeds the perception, among Iraqis and Americans alike,
of a closer overall Iranian-Iraqi relationship overseen
by a Maliki government monolith. In fact, however,
Iran’s economic involvement in Iraq is an object of
fierce competition among the country’s ascendant Shi‘i
parties.
‘Ammar al-Hakim, son of the late ‘Abd
al-‘Aziz al-Hakim, and head of the Islamic Supreme
Council in Iraq (ISCI), has risen to become a particularly
important figure in Iraqi-Iranian trade. Having been
founded at the behest of the Islamic Republic of Iran
in 1982, and having fought on Iran’s side during the
bitter war of that decade, ISCI is the Shi‘i actor
most credibly denounced in Iraq as a Persian cat’s
paw. But the party has its own profit-making agenda.
By 2005, it was reported that the junior Hakim had
taken control of the Shahid al-Mihrab Corporation,
an entity that, according to two former Iraqi trade
ministers now exiled in Sharjah, was controlled by
the intelligence services under Baathist rule. This
previously little-known company managed what small
amount of trade with Iran there was in the south and
monitored the activities of the few pilgrims allowed
into the country. As with many old Baathist institutions,
after 2003 Shahid al-Mihrab was taken over by new powers
to pursue new ends. Control of this company has facilitated
ISCI dominion over construction permits and transportation
related to the pilgrimage business, as well as Iranian
retail imports into the southern towns of Kut, ‘Amara
and Basra. It remains to be seen what effect the January
2009 provincial elections, in which ISCI performed
poorly, will have on the party’s grip on these assets.
Meanwhile, ISCI’s main rival, al-Da‘wa, profits from
control of federal ministries and their business dealings
with Iran.
Gasoline
trucks in Iraq. (Angelos Giotopoulos/Falcon
Photo Agency) |
Since ministries and the state-owned
companies under their auspices remain the buyers and
distributors for most of the items that Iraq needs,
and since corruption is a given, positions of power
in the public sector mean getting rich quick. State-owned
companies once imported raw materials to produce consumer
goods (importing fabric, for example, to make shirts),
but two decades of neglect during wars and sanctions
and then willful destruction of physical plants since
2003 have left most factories without machine tools,
so Iraq now simply purchases finished goods. (This
is another reason why Iraqi labor unions have been
laid low. Workers whose factories do not manufacture
anything have little bargaining power.) Perversely,
even though rehabilitating these factories would pay
off in development terms, generating jobs and upgrading
Iraqi workers’ skills, ministry officials have little
interest in doing this. Investment in factories might
benefit the geographic areas controlled by rival parties,
so the officials would rather dole out millions each
month in import contracts. The contracts deliver cash
in hand; businessmen who deal with ministries and state-owned
companies report that kickbacks are a requirement at
all levels. For those with the right militia or party
contacts, bribery can be well regulated and streamlined,
albeit costly. For others, graft demands can come from
all directions. “Without the right contacts,” says
a Turkey-based Iraqi trader, “I experience bribery
demands from everyone, from the guard at the door to
the quality control officers in the back.” Even if
one secures a contract, rival businessmen backed by
other groups can spoil the deal. On top of all this,
many ministry officials and director-generals of state-sector
companies have little civil service experience and
nepotism is widespread. A week prior to former Trade
Minister Sudani’s arrest, his brother Sabah Muhammad
Sudani was apprehended on suspicion of corruption linked
to the ministry. But Sudani and his ministry were hardly
an exception.
Iraq’s business environment, to quote
one participant, “is about getting your money as fast
as you can and getting out.” Corruption was certainly
prevalent before the US invasion (a fact commonly used
as a defense by US officials), and the sums involved
are relatively comparable, but the greater political
chaos has multiplied the number of players and the
risks. Under the 1990s sanctions regime, Baathist cronies
became millionaires when the state protected their
smuggling operations from competition. Today, observers
say, there are more new millionaires, linked to the
Shi‘i religious parties and assorted militias, who
are more ruthless than the Baathists in guarding their
turf. As one Iraqi trader put it, “Under Saddam you
could be robbed by the public sector or forced to pay
bribes. Now you can lose your money and your life or
your brother’s.” Few serious businessmen in the country
work without some form of organized backing or protection.
Family connections help, but operating outside one’s
home base requires an added insurance policy. Protection
rackets were the bread and butter of Muqtada al-Sadr’s
Mahdi Army militiamen in Baghdad, for instance, from
2004 through 2007. As the Mahdi Army’s control over
the capital broke down, Sunni traders hired Shi‘i representatives,
and Shi‘i traders hired Sunni front men. Such cooperation
suggests to some that the sectarian divide is narrowing,
but equally it might be an expression of how deep those
divisions run and how institutionalized they have become.
Triple Dipping
In decades past, Dubai and its fellow
United Arab Emirates were home to an Iraqi expatriate
community that was tiny compared to the communities
of Amman or Damascus. That has changed. Behind Iran,
Dubai and the UAE have become Iraq’s most important
trading partners in the Gulf. The ease of transit in
go-go Dubai facilitated a boom in direct trade with
Iraq, as well as a significant, though unreported,
re-export trade through Iran. The first business to
be exploited after the fall of the old regime was used
cars. Oil smuggling followed.
Under the Baathists, automobile ownership
was restricted and all purchases went through the state-owned
car company. By late 2003, entrepreneurial UAE car
dealers began shipping older and poor-quality models
to the ports of Basra and Umm Qasr. With demand skyrocketing,
eager private buyers on the Iraqi side scrambled to
accommodate the ships and move the cars northward.
The poor condition of the port facilities at Basra
and Umm Qasr limited the size of vessels that could
safely dock. So, to keep pace with demand, Iraqi importers
opened a number of smaller, quasi-legal spots for loading
and unloading along the Shatt al-‘Arab waterway. According
to shippers in Dubai, these makeshift ports often amounted
to little more than wooden jetties across which cars
could be driven to shore one at a time. And the buyers
were no run-of-the-mill used car dealers. Some were
militia heads with the contacts and the guns to get
truckloads of cars to the capital. Others were connected
to smaller criminal gangs looking to make quick profits
as Iraq’s city streets were snarled with the influx.
In Dubai, cars ten and 20 years old could be shipped
north for as little as $135 apiece and then sold for
several thousand dollars in Basra. Residents of Dubai
began turning over used cars of any quality to agents
for a hefty cut of the resale price in Iraq. Rumors
began circulating in Dubai that the wreckage of car
bombs carried vehicle identification numbers from the
UAE, yet this did little to dampen the trade. Maliki’s
reassertion of power in the south in 2007 was advertised
as heralding an end to corruption at the ports. A year
later, Baghdad banned the import of older cars, but
enforcement has been weak. As of 2009, Iraqi ports
remain a regulatory free-for-all. With the right political
contacts and money for bribes, importers can still
get their goods past marine patrols, unloaded in port
and transported to market.
As the imports pot sweetened, officials
of the interim, transitional and elected Iraqi governments
gravitated toward Dubai. With fistfuls of dollars from
the government till, they were able to secure UAE residency
permits with no questions asked. Family relations and
front men of party leaders and sitting ministers sank
their dollars into Dubai’s booming real estate sector,
set up trading companies, invested in shipping firms
or did all three. Most have looked in Amman, Beirut
and Damascus to find the estimated $17 billion in Iraqi
capital that has fled the country since 2003, but Dubai,
Abu Dhabi and Sharjah are now the preferred tax havens.
(The UAE does not report the nationality of foreign
investments, so there is no way to know how much Iraqi
capital is there.) Dubai, known internationally for
money laundering and smuggling, is a good place to
shelter ill-gotten gains. Cash is welcome, even in
large transactions. Aside from a few private banks,
Iraq has no functioning banking system and so capital
flight means the physical transport of heaps of cash
across borders. Iraqi businessmen active in the UAE
since 2003 speak of “Fort Knox packages”—pallets of
shrink-wrapped $100 bills arriving on charter flights.
Coincidentally or not, Bremer’s Coalition Provisional
Authority and the US military’s provincial reconstruction
teams disbursed untold numbers of such packages in
the aftermath of the invasion.
The ministry corruption, the import
business, the offshore companies and the capital flight
together make up what might be called the “Iraqi triple
dip.” Dip: A minister’s trade company representative
in Dubai “wins” a contract to supply spare parts for
vehicles to that ministry. Dip: Sitting in Baghdad,
the minister receives a kickback on the deal. Dip:
That kickback finds its way to Dubai, where, along
with the exporter’s fee from the ministry, it is invested
in real estate or the company. Shadowy but well organized,
this system guarantees everyone a cut, except of course
the Iraqi public. Yet triple-dip corruption pales in
comparison to the fabulously lucrative oil smuggling
racket, which has done the greatest damage by far to
the Iraqi economy.
Out in the Open
An
Iraqi police craft in the Shatt al-‘Arab looks
for contraband fuel. (Essam Al-Sudani/AFP/Getty
Images) |
US officials typically finger insurgents
and criminal gangs as the villains in the massive theft
of Iraqi oil since 2003, preferring to ignore the links
of smugglers to political parties. Regional capital
havens, like the UAE, are crucial to the smuggling.
As many goods as have been re-exported to Iraq, a much
higher dollar amount has come back to the Emirates
in the form of black-market crude. Prior to the US
invasion, Iraq pumped 2.6 million barrels per day;
in 2003, the volume plummeted, recovering to 2.4 million
barrels per day only in 2008, just in time for world
oil prices to drop precipitously. Of these barrels
per day, an estimated 200,000 to 500,000 are smuggled.
Some American auditors doubt the estimates, given the
logistics of transporting such a gargantuan haul every
day. Much of the missing crude, they suggest, is simply
pumped back into the ground rather than processed.[4] As
so often in post-invasion Iraq, there is no way to
determine exactly how much has been stolen, but seen
from the vantage point of the money made in the UAE,
the amount is considerable.
Oil was smuggled through the south
under the Baathists, but it was the US invasion that
made the criminal enterprise widespread. Smuggling
is now out in the great wide open, and it has evolved
into something of a self-regulating system. Interviews
with Iraqis who capture the oil and dhow captains who
carry the contraband sketch a picture of modest first
steps in late 2003 and early 2004. After Iraqi port
authorities dissolved in 2003, local groups allied
with ISCI and al-Fadhila, a Shi‘i Islamist splinter
of the Sadrist trend, took control of Iraq’s two main
offshore oil-loading terminals at Basra and Khawr al-Amaya.
As in the car business, however, it was the quasi-legal
ports along the Shatt al-‘Arab that took the lead.
The most infamous such oil port is the island of al-Dakir.[5] Here,
in 2003, businessmen and militia representatives set
up repair facilities for dhows and other small ships,
as well as simple docks and oil storage units. Al-Dakir
promised quick service, competitive fees and a minimum
of awkward questions. Iraqi crude was siphoned from
inland pipelines and trucked to the island. The same
businessmen sent agents to the UAE or Iran to find
buyers. The first shipments went out on converted barges,
which had plodded to al-Dakir from Dubai and Sharjah.
Oil drums were rolled on board and the floating fire
hazards headed home. Some of the barges disgorged their
contents in Dubai, at Port Rashid or smaller facilities
like Hamriyya. Dubai’s leaders never tire of pointing
out that the city-state has no oil reserves, but it
is home to several oil service and storage companies.
Stolen Iraqi crude was sold to these companies (using
falsified documentation or none at all), which simply
“disappeared” it into the regional storage system.
A barrel sold at al-Dakir for $8–10 could triple in
price upon arrival in Dubai. As officials from the
successive post-Saddam Iraqi governments moved in to
the Emirates, the business expanded exponentially.
It seems that to make really big money
in smuggling Iraqi oil one needs capital and means
of transport more than cheap merchandise. Whoever can
match cash with port contacts and guaranteed shipment
wins. By 2005, the big winners were Iraqis with friends
in high places among the parties and militias that
owned a piece of the ports and locals (both Emiratis
and Iraqi expatriates) with ready cash flow. The business
graduated from barges to larger ships that could travel
directly to the offshore facilities. Knowing the man
at the pump or his superiors allowed ship captains
to take on thousands of barrels at a time from the
offshore pipes. Until 2008, there were no functioning
meters at Basra or Khawr al-Amaya. (The meters were
either out of order before the US invasion or destroyed
afterward, depending on with whom one speaks.) Even
after meters were supposedly installed, smuggling continued
apace. By 2007 there was a frenzied market in pilfered
Iraqi crude in Dubai and Sharjah. As operating costs
increased, so did the required amounts of cash up front,
attracting bigger fish, both wealthy individuals and
consortia that pooled money, to the business. At Hamriyya
and Port Rashid, stevedores were simply rolling barrels
of oil off ships of all kinds onto trucks, night and
day. As one port manager recounted, “There were just
too many ships and different arrival times and locations
to monitor or regulate these transactions.” Everyone
along the route got a piece of the action. The pump
managers at the oil terminal, the laborers, the shippers
and those who staked the money were all openly involved.
The US Navy, whose cruisers patrolled these waters
and who hired the contractors that guarded the offshore
pipelines, probably knew a great deal about the illicit
trade.
Of course, there is no honor among
thieves and bandits suffer bad luck just as honest
traders do. Facilitators among the powers that be at
Basra would take the smugglers’ money and then fail
to grease the skids, leaving ships waiting too long
to load or denying them oil on a whim. In 2007, some
of the unwieldy barges capsized, spilling oil onto
Gulf beaches. UAE officials could not ignore the viscous
threat to tourism, and eventually they banned the offloading
of oil at commercial ports. This belated measure of
policing did little to stop the smuggling operations,
which were already mature. Dealers set up an offshore
facility—a kind of floating oil spot trading market—just
outside the territorial waters of Sharjah. Not only
did this facility exchange crude oil but it also sold
smuggled fuel oil and diesel for dhows at significantly
reduced rates. Dhows leaving UAE ports would dock there,
fill up and then continue to other destinations. Occasionally,
remembered a dhow captain, US Navy ships would “pass
by and we would wave.” Since the global financial crisis
and the plunge in oil prices, oil smuggling has slowed,
yet become more centralized. Maliki’s extension of
the writ of the state over Basra has pushed rivals
out of the offshore terminals there in favor of al-Da‘wa.
On the UAE end, the days of hiring one’s own shipper
to head north appear to be over; instead, a single
shipping authority (again, reportedly connected to
figures in al-Da‘wa) makes the trip and loads the oil.
In 2007, as the civil war raged, a
customs official told the press: “Those who smuggle
oil belong to the centers of power, both presently
and formerly during the old regime, and they are capable
of filling the mouths of anyone who opposes them with
bullets.”[6] Two
years later, with the Obama administration bent on
implementing the phased withdrawal promised in the
presidential campaign, US officials argue that Iraqi
politics is becoming more normal. But the reality is
that bullets fly less freely only because certain Iraqi
factions, those in charge of the ministries in the
Green Zone, no longer require inordinate violence to
back up their words. They are en route to extending
the writ of the state to the frontiers of the country’s
war economy. But the state is built upon a foundation
of corruption cemented in the civil war years. As Baghdad
awaits an inflow of legitimate foreign investment from
multinational oil conglomerates thirsting after the
vast fields that remain untapped, the idle factories
and the non-resident professional class suggest that
the prospect of productive investment of those funds
is slim. And though certain classes of Iraqis are riding
high amidst the rampant smuggling and other illegal
economic activity, 28 percent of young men are
out of work. The people of Iraq have been left behind
in the windfall.
Endnotes
[1] Reuters,
February 15, 2009.
[2] See
Pete W. Moore and Christopher Parker, “The War Economy
of Iraq,” Middle East Report 243 (Summer 2007).
[3] Ibrahim
Saif and David DeBartolo, The Iraq War’s Impact
on Growth and Inflation in Jordan (Amman: Jordan
Institute for Strategic Studies, 2007), p. 8.
[4] See
Luke Mitchell, “The Black Box: Inside Iraq’s Oil Machine,” Harper’s (December
2007).
[5] Jasim
Dakhil, “Squandered Wealth: Oil Smuggling in Basra,” al-Sharq
al-Awsat, September 22, 2007.
[6] Ibid.
