Vol. 71/No. 46      December 10, 2007

Meanwhile in Washington, Democrats approved $50 billion for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq in the House of Representatives November 14. The bill was blocked in the Senate by Republicans.

Ten days after the vote the U.S. military announced that 5,000 troops will be withdrawn from Iraq as a result of improved security in the country.

Tensions between Baghdad and the KRG sharpened November 12 after the Kurds announced the signing of five new contracts with international oil companies without Baghdad’s approval. Iraq’s oil minister, Hussein Sharistani, threatened that companies that signed the contracts could be barred from operating in Iraq.

The dispute with the KRG is one factor in the Iraqi government’s inability to pass a national oil law. Disagreement between competing Shiite and Sunni capitalists over how to regulate the sharing of oil revenues is also involved. Such a law is considered key to assuring wealthy Sunnis, who were the backbone of the Hussein regime, that they have a stake in the new U.S.-backed government.

Sharistani said the governments of Iran, Syria, and Turkey will assist in preventing the KRG from exporting oil from northern Iraq. The capitalist rulers in Tehran, Damascus, and Ankara fear that the KRG inspires nationalist aspirations among Kurds living in those countries.

The Turkish military has massed up to 100,000 troops along its border with northern Iraq and threatened to invade the region to destroy bases of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which has been conducting a decades-long war in southeastern Turkey. Ankara has 1,500 troops several miles inside Iraq.

Under pressure from Washington and Ankara, the KRG has been stepping up efforts to get the PKK to end its armed struggle. The KRG has set up roadblocks to curb the supplies and movements of the PKK and banned reporters from traveling to PKK bases.  
 
Attacks decline
Iraqi civilian deaths declined from at least 1,023 in September to at least 905 in October, according to an AP count. Over the same two months U.S. military deaths fell from 65 to 39 a month.

Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki said suicide attacks and other bombings dropped by 77 percent in Baghdad since last year.

Fighting continues, however. A suicide bombing killed three police and three civilians in Ramadi November 21. Earlier that week, a car bomb in a predominantly Shiite neighborhood of Baghdad claimed seven lives. A roadside bomb killed three children. While the Bush administration has made little progress in getting the Iraqi government to approve a range of laws the administration has called benchmarks, it has made progress in winning the support of Sunni sheiks who have turned against al-Qaeda.

The U.S. military has recruited 26,000 Iraqi civilians to help fight al-Qaeda-led forces. They come from Baghdad suburbs, and in Karbala, Najaf, and Wassit provinces. Al-Qaeda has suffered defeats in its former strongholds of Anbar and Diyala provinces.

In addition, former Baathists are being reinstated to their old government jobs, one of the benchmarks for “national reconciliation.” Seventy former teachers, army officers, and police who were members of Hussein’s Baath party were reinstated in Anbar after joining the fight against al-Qaeda.

U.S. and Iraqi officials attribute the decline in attacks in part to cooperation from Iran in reducing aid to Shiite militias. Tehran, Washington, and Baghdad have held three rounds of talks since May.

Progress in those negotiations has led Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr to order his Mahdi Army militia to freeze operations and begin steps towards becoming a legal political movement, according to Stratfor, a private U.S. intelligence outfit.  
 
War funding
Meanwhile, congressional Democrats are promoting a timetable for redeployment of troops in Iraq as an “antiwar” measure in their latest bill to fund the wars there and in Afghanistan. Redeployment out of combat areas in Iraq would begin within 30 days of the bill’s approval. But like previous Democrat-sponsored war funding bills, it would leave untold thousands of troops to conduct “antiterrorist” operations.  
 
 
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