Gas prices up, oil production down in Iraq

While the Bush administration tried to put an optimistic spin on Iraq’s Dec. 15 election, its efforts were quickly eclipsed by the ongoing resistance and the economic collapse of the occupied country.

Iraq’s oil exports in December were down to 1.1 million barrels per day—their lowest level since April 2003, just after the U.S. invasion. The price of gasoline, historically kept low in Iraq through state subsidies, shot up by six times in the new “free market” economy.

The price hike was such a shock that Iraq’s oil minister, Ibrahim Bahr al-Ulum, resigned. Adding to the grief of the Iraqis was a two-week shutdown of the biggest gasoline refinery. These problems led to mass protests around the country and a near-uprising in Kirkuk, where police shot and killed four protesters on Jan. 1.

Deputy Prime Minister Ahmad Chalabi, a longtime Pentagon favorite who is notorious for his corruption and whose party did badly in the election, has now replaced al-Ulum as oil minister.

Iraq’s electrical output is still lower than it was before the invasion. In Baghdad there is electricity for at most six hours per day.

And now President George W. Bush says that the U.S. will no longer pay for reconstruction projects in Iraq. At one time the White House had promised the “best infrastructure in the Middle East” for the country that the U.S. has occupied and half-destroyed.

Secular and Sunni-based parties have continued to protest the recent election process and its outcome. The big winners are the members of a Shiite religious coalition that includes the SCIRI and DAWA parties. These groups have cooperated with the occupation but are considered close to Iran.

This coalition, with 130 seats, is still short of the 184 seats, or two-thirds majority, needed to form a government. It must form an alliance either with the pro-occupation Kurdish parties or some other grouping.

While the U.S. occupation forces went along with the SCIRI and DAWA parties’ attacks on the secular and Ba’athist forces in the geographical center of the country, Washington has shown hostility to an Iraqi government that could be friendly to Iran. The U.S. prefers to support Chalabi’s group, which got only about 5 percent of the vote, and Ayad Allawi, whose party got less than 15 percent.

U.S. frees al-Kubaysi

The biggest step Washington has taken that shows friction with the puppet government is the freeing of prisoners, including those who were associated with the ruling Ba’ath Party in pre-invasion Iraq.

Among the 38 prisoners freed from a camp holding 103 high-level Ba’athists was Abdel Jabbar al-Kubaysi, the leader of the Iraq Patriotic Alliance, a resistance organization.

Al-Kubaysi was an opponent of Saddam Hussein’s grouping in the Ba’ath who left Iraq in the 1970s but returned shortly before the invasion in order to oppose the U.S. assault. He was arrested in the summer of 2004 and held for 16 months in custody.

The U.S. authorities also freed two women: Dr. Huda Ammash, known for her work detailing the ravages of depleted uranium on Iraqis, and Dr. Rihab Taha. U.S. propaganda has demonized the two women, calling them, respectively, Mrs. Anthrax and Dr. Germ. The Iraqi puppet government protested their release.

U.S. officials have not explained why at this particular time they have released these prisoners, some of whom said they had been tortured.

Al-Kubaysi, who lost 25 pounds while he was being held incommunicado, has told the French and Jordanian media that three former officials of the Saddam Hussein era had died under questioning. He named them as former Prime Minister Hamzeh al-Zubaidi, former Ba’ath party official Adel al-Duri and former intelligence commander Waddah al-Sheikh.

Recruitment down for 2005

On the home front, the weakest point for the U.S. military has been its inability to replenish its forces with new recruits. Despite the lack of well-paying jobs for non-college-trained youths, both the Army and the Army National Guard fell short of their recruiting goals for fiscal 2005. The Army fell short by 6,000, or about 8 percent. The National Guard missed its total by 20,000.

These figures are even more striking because the Army has lowered its test standards and is accepting recruits from among those who scored the lowest, while the National Guard has begun paying “finder’s fees” to members who direct the service to new recruits.

The Army had looked to the African-American community for a proportionally greater number of recruits. In the year 2000, about 24 percent of Army new enlistees were African Americans. But in 2004, the percentage dropped to 14 percent.

The Pentagon’s problems came to a boil in Duluth, Minn., where Vietnam veteran Scott Cameron has put up a sign outside the recruiting station giving the count of U.S. troops killed and wounded in Iraq. The seven military recruiters want the sign taken away. “It’s disheartening,” said Staff Sgt. Gary J. Capan, the station’s commander.

The truth hurts.

The same disheartened mood seems to permeate U.S. ranks in Iraq. One GI in Iraq wrote an e-mail to his uncle saying that people “back home get a false picture of the war. We don’t want to leave the camps,” he said, “because when we go into town, someone tries to blow us away.”