IRAQ - Focusing On The Non-Oil Sector - Part 25 - Iraq, Five Years After The US Invasion.

Baghdad on March 20 finished the fifth year since the US invaded Iraq. Three days earlier Iraq was visited by US Vice-President Dick Cheney. Already Arizona Senator John McCain had arrived in Baghdad with a US Congressional team to assess the situation in Iraq. Both Cheney and McCain are hawkish members of the Republican Party. While the Republican administration of George W. Bush and Cheney will see their second and final term end in January 2009, both are hoping McCain will win the November presidential election.

It seems it will take another number of years before Iraq can focus properly on the non-oil parts of its economy. The country's under-performing petroleum industry - hampered by years of Ba'thist incompetence, war, the aftermath of the US invasion and a year-long political impasse - is to be opened to IOC involvement. Cheney on March 17 urged Iraq's leaders to speed up work on getting a petroleum law finally passed by parliament and on national reconciliation.

With the US still busy trying to stabilise Iraq, meanwhile, 'Usama bin Laden has been working on a strategy to destroy the "far enemy" in North America, but only after destroying the royal regime in Saudi Arabia as well as its oilfields. This is what bin Laden, head of the trans-national Neo-Salafi network al-Qaeda, seems to have explained in an Internet posting in late 2007. He said his plans for the time being included a Neo-Salafi theocracy in Iraq (see Part 23 in OOD1-IraqBinLadenSaudiOilJan21-08) - though in reality the Neo-Salafis are on the run (see fap2-IraqBeatngQaedaFeb11-08) and their trans-national network is in retreat (see fap3-IranBinladenismFallingMar17-08). Yet on March 20, a bin Laden video appeared on the Internet saying Iraq remained the focus of a Neo-Salafi war on the US.

Marking invasion day at the Pentagon, President on March 19 said he would only order further troop cut in Iraq if it would not "jeopardise" the improvement in security which has occurred since the military "surge" took effect in 2007. He said the war had been "longer and harder and more costly than we anticipated", warning that the security gains in Iraq were "fragile and reversible".

Bush said: "We have learned through hard experience what happens when we pull our forces back too fast. The terrorists and extremists step in, they fill vacuums, establish safe havens and use them to spread chaos and carnage. Any further drawdown must not jeopardise the hard-fought gains" - thus referring to Neo-Salafi militants led by al-Qaeda on the Sunni side and rogue militias on the Shi'ite side.

While almost 4,000 US troops have died in Iraq, the number of successful attacks on US forces has declined dramatically since the surge took full effect last June. The level of Iraqi deaths has seen a large drop.

Bush credited the surge with having "opened the door to a major strategic victory in the broader war on terror". While the US military is concerned about Neo-Salafi groups in Iraq, however, they are more worried about areas along the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan where al-Qaeda and the Taliban have been regrouping. At a time when the US public has become more focused on the domestic economy than the "war on terror", Bush warned about the consequences of allowing "enemies to prevail" in Iraq, saying: "The violence that is now declining would accelerate and Iraq would descend into chaos. Al-Qaeda would regain its lost sanctuaries and establish new ones - fomenting violence and terror that could spread beyond Iraq's borders, with serious consequences to the world economy".

Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, a Kurds, on March 19 said the US-led war ended the brutal rule of torture and tyranny under Saddam, even if Iraq today faced the perils of terrorism and corruption. He said "The brutal regime of the [Sunni/Ba'thist] dictator fell...the regime that ruled Iraq for decades, the decades of darkness...[His prison] cells were Saddam's theatres for torture and brutal crimes".

Talabani said Saddam violated all values of humanity, having used chemical weapons on Kurdish "men, women and children of Halabja and carried out the brutal Anfal campaign". He was referring to military strikes launched by Saddam's forces on Iraqi Kurds in 1988 during the Iran-Iraq war. International human right activists say about 180,000 Kurdish villagers were slaughtered in these strikes. The "liberation of Iraq" by US-led forces was the start of a new era, he said, adding: "The walk on this new path began five years ago but it faces huge difficulties".