Joel Wing's blog

The speaker of Iran’s parliament, Ali Larijani just finished a four-day trip to Baghdad. His visit is raising questions about Iran’s role in the 2010 Iraqi elections, and Tehran’s continued support for militants.

Iraq recently signed a number of new oil deals and has plans to move ahead with several others in the coming weeks. These are part of the Oil Ministry’s plans to open up Iraq’s resources to joint ventures with foreign companies to boost petroleum production to 7 million barrels a day in seven years. This is desperately needed as oil provides almost all of the Iraqi government’s revenue, and Iraq needs billions for development and reconstruction.

On the night of November 8, 2009, Iraq’s parliament finally passed the 2010 election law. 195 of the 175 members were present, with 141 voting for the bill. As mentioned before, the law was originally supposed to be passed on October 16, but disputes over how to conduct voting in Tamim, home to the disputed city of Kirkuk, and whether to use an open or closed list voting system, delayed the proceedings.

October 31, 2009 was the deadline to register coalitions for the 2010 parliamentary elections.

Since April 2009 monthly death counts for Iraq have fluctuated up and down. October was no different as it was higher than the previous month. Iraq’s ministries for example, reported 410 deaths in October, compared to 203 in September and 456 in August.

Despite the recent October 2009 Baghdad bombing, and the previous one in August, attacks in Iraq are at their lowest level since the 2003 invasion. The Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction recorded drops in weekly attacks in eleven of Iraq’s eighteen provinces from May to October 2009.

The day after the October 25, 2009 bombings of the Justice Ministry and provincial council buildings in Baghdad, the U.S. military praised how the government was handling the situation compared to the August 2009 attacks. After that event, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki started a major diplomatic row with Syria, blaming Baathists there for masterminding the bombing.

One of the major problems with the Iraqi government is its inability to spend its budget effectively. The country’s eighteen provinces do much worse than the central government in Baghdad. The new Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction’s quarterly report to Congress has the latest numbers on how Iraq’s governorates have done up to October 13, 2009.

In June 2009, Iraq held its first round of international bidding on its oil fields. Out of six oil and two natural gas fields, only one, Rumaila in Basra tendered a winning bid. The Iraqi Oil Ministry was widely criticized as a result, with many believing they set unrealistic terms for oil companies, and simply expected the country’s large potential to draw in investors. Since then Baghdad has tried to finalize the Rumaila deal and negotiate new ones.

The Fund for Peace released its ninth report on Iraq in October 2009 entitled “A Viable Peace?” The group argues that the military gains of the Surge have not translated into sustainable political, economic, or social changes in Iraq that place the country on the road to peace and stability. The Fund believes that there’s still a chance to accomplish this in the future however.