View from the Ground

The Inter Press Service News Agency (IPS) has an interesting view of Iraq from the day to day life perspective of its citizenry:

Despite the allocation of billions of dollars of U.S. government money for "reconstruction", Iraqis are struggling to exist amidst soaring prices, unemployment, a devastated infrastructure, and cuts in services.

Iraqis received a monthly food ration during the Oil for Food programme which was set up to provide relief during the sanctions against Iraq up to the invasion in 2003. The head of each family was allotted monthly food coupons for commodities like sugar, rice, tea, detergents, cooking oil, beans and baby milk.

But the U.S.-backed governments, starting with the Iraqi Governing Council, have failed to consistently deliver the monthly food basket on time, amidst an unemployment rate estimated at close to 70 percent.
[...]
Abu Mushtaq, a 40 year-old father of five lacks the money to buy products in the market, even after receiving 120,000 Iraqi Dinars (roughly 85 dollars) monthly from the government to offset the shortfall in the food ration.

"Everything has gone up in price so many times," Abu Mushtaq told IPS. "Petrol, kerosene, even the price of bread has gone up so many times since the invasion. The invaders only came to Iraq to fill up their own pockets."

This is, I fear, the prevailing notion of much of the citizenry of Iraq thanks to our bungled, buffoonish, and thugish actions to its populace. Here's some more:

"The 'reconstruction' of Iraq is the largest American-led occupation programme since the Marshall Plan (for reconstruction of Europe after the second world war)," analyst Ed Harriman wrote in the London Review of Books. "But there is a difference: the U.S.. government funded the Marshall Plan whereas (defence secretary) Donald Rumsfeld and (former administrator of Iraq) Paul Bremer have made sure that the reconstruction of Iraq is paid for by the 'liberated' country, by the Iraqis themselves."

According to Harriman's research, 6 billion dollars in assets were left over from the UN Oil for Food programme, and revenue from resumed Iraqi oil exports brought another 10 billion dollars in the year following the invasion.

Nevertheless, while the U.S. Congress voted to spend 18.4 billion dollars of U.S. taxpayers' money in Iraq on 'reconstruction', Harriman says that "by 28 June last year, when Bremer left Baghdad two days early to avoid possible attack on the way to the airport, his CPA (Coalition Provisional Authority) had spent up to 20 billion dollars of Iraqi money, compared to 300 million dollars of U.S. funds."

In other Iraq news, it was another bloody day for its citizenry:

Suicide bombers attacked an Iraqi police academy Tuesday, killing at least three dozen officers and students and wounding scores more on a day of scattered violence coinciding with the trial of Saddam Hussein.

The U.S. military said the attack occurred around 12:45 p.m. when two men detonated explosives-laden vests at the police academy in eastern Baghdad. Among the wounded was an American contractor, a military statement said. It said no U.S. military personnel were hurt in the attack.

One of the bombers blew himself up near a group of students outside a classroom at the academy, the military said. Thinking the explosion was a mortar or rocket attack, Iraqi police officers and students "fled to a bunker for shelter where the second bomber detonated his vest," the statement said.
[...]
Hours after the attack, another suicide bombing killed at least three people and injured 20 others outside a Baghdad cafe. The target of the attack was not immediately clear.

In northern Iraq, four people were reported killed when Kurdish youths, apparently supporters of the region's main Kurdish political coalition, attacked members of a rival Kurdish Islamic party in several towns. Among those killed was a senior official of the Kurdistan Islamic Union, which is challenging an alliance of two main parties -- the Kurdistan Democratic Party and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan -- in Iraq's Dec. 15 elections.

Iraqi police quoted by Reuters news agency said 37 people were killed and 76 wounded in the police academy attack.