Iraq has agreed a deal to supply Lebanon with 500,000 tons of heavy fuel oil. Payment will be made in “Lebanese dollars” via an escrow account at Banque du Liban, which Iraqi authorities would use to buy goods and services in Lebanon exclusively. Iraq’s heavy fuel oil, however, does not match the specifications of Lebanon’s power plants. So, what options does Lebanon have?

​Caretaker Energy Minister Raymond Ghajar briefed Iraqi reporters on Wednesday on the details of the framework agreement with Iraq for the supply of 500,000 tons of heavy fuel oil (HFO) in 2021, which has yet to be signed by the prime ministers of Lebanon and Iraq.

According to the minister, Iraq has agreed to receive payment in “lollars,”— which can only be spent in Lebanon and are currently set at LL3,900 to the dollar as opposed to the official peg of LL1,507.5 — via an escrow account at BDL. These funds would be used by Iraqi authorities to purchase goods and services within Lebanon. The value of the deal remains under negotiation, he added.

Supplies from Iraq would cover only a quarter of the Électricité du Liban’s HFO needs and about 12 percent of its total fuel imports, estimated by the Energy Ministry at around 3.8 million tons per year, including 2 million tons of diesel fuel.

With a new man in the White House, Iraq’s Prime Minister, Mustafa al-Kadhimi, appears to believe that Iraq can begin a completely new cycle of playing off the U.S. against China and Russia, as it has been doing since the first U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. The game is very simple but nonetheless very effective: Baghdad sends a signal that it may move even closer to Iran or to Russia and China through various oil field awards or other contracts and the U.S. feels compelled to counter with the offer of more funding directly or indirectly through massive deals between U.S. firms and Iraqi ones.

Iraq then takes the money and the contracts and continues to do what it was going to do anyway, which is to remain firmly on the side of neighbour Iran whose grip over the country is interwoven into its very fabric through political, economic, and military elements. In any event, Iraq’s announcement last week that it has put on hold its controversial and massive oil prepayment deal with China’s state-owned Zhenhua Oil Co. falls precisely into this long-established game with the U.S.

The US$2 billion five–year prepayment oil supply deal between the Federal Government of Iraq (FGI) in Baghdad and China’s Zhenhua Oil deal was announced with great care and attention to timing just after former President Donald Trump had lost the 2020 Presidential Election.

​Trump and his team had started his tenure out playing the usual game with Iraq, granting the country waivers to continue to import electricity and gas for power generation from Iran – despite U.S. sanctions on the Islamic Republic – for periods of two, three or even four months each time. These lengthy waivers were granted in the hope of bringing Baghdad back towards the U.S.’s side in the geopolitical power play with China and Russia going on across the Middle East, an opportunity Washington looked to leverage when al-Kadhimi visited Washington last August.

Tensions are continuing to mount between Turkey and Iran after the two regional powers traded diplomatic barbs and summoned each other's respective ambassadors to complain about their rival's behaviour. 

Both sides have criticised each other for their respective actions in Iraq, with Iran accusing Turkey of breaching Iraqi sovereignty.

Meanwhile, US President Joe Biden has given his first indications of how he intends to deal with Iran-backed Iraqi militants who attack American interests by ordering new airstrikes.

​However, rather than striking at Iranian proxies in Iraq – the country where they conducted their operations against the US – the White House decided to bomb Syria instead, a demonstration that Biden will take limited action against Tehran. 

No Arab country emerged successful from an attempt to implement democracy. Even Tunisia, which sparked the revolutions of the Arab Spring and gave hope to millions of people across the world that democracy was coming to the Arab world is still immersed in political turmoil. But Tunisia isn’t the only Arab country where the democratic experience failed. Let us look at Iraq.

Many people – including myself, admittedly – believed that the 2003 US invasion of Iraq would bring about democracy to the war-torn country. But the country that was once ruled by Saddam Hussein turned into a failed state dominated by Iranian mercenaries. Over the course of a few short years, Iraq’s elites fled the country and sought exile in the West. The country that had once been home to scientists, authors, musicians, and researchers, was deserted overnight.

Soon enough, it was taken over by rampant militias. The infrastructure collapsed. Schools and universities were forced to shut down. And living conditions throughout the country dramatically deteriorated. The rates of poverty, destitution, and hunger among the Iraqi population have almost exceeded 50%. There is no memory of a functioning state apparatus, no jobs, no public services. America, after its ill-fated invasion, claimed to have established a democratic system.

It boasted the Iraqi constitution, the court, the parties, and the free and fair elections. But the truth is that all of these things are just fraud. The Iraqi constitution – devised by Americans, not Iraqis – de facto divides Iraqis based on their sectarian and ethnic affiliations, giving the Kurds the premierships, the Shiites the presidency, and the Sunnis the parliament. In the vacuum created in Iraqi with the departure of US forces, Iran succeeded in deploying Shiite militias that took over Baghdad.

In 2008, a dramatic failure in Iraq finally set the force on a path of improvement.

​This is a story about the nadir, the end of days. Monday, March 24, 2008, marked five years to the month after the British army arrived in Iraq, preaching to the Americans their apparent expertise in counterinsurgency operations and understanding of the manifold ways of, in the historical British upper-class vernacular, “the Arab.” This is the story of how that complacency—the claimed legacy of imperial policing and Belfast; of Greece-to-your-Rome and barely disguised Anglo-American contempt—became apparent.

The British army committed that bafflingly common 21st-century failing: It exuded superiority toward an exterior entity, then felt genuine surprise when that mean-spiritedness did not generate admiration and fellow feeling in return.

And as the British army in Basra, southern Iraq, experienced what some observers would later describe as the greatest British military disaster since Suez in 1956, or the fall of Singapore in 1942—though others dispute the drama of those comparisons—the institution itself would, on a wider level, start to engage in a wholesale (and needed) program of reform.

In 2008, for the British army, the paths of failure and improvement crossed.

This week in march was meant to be Brigadier Julian Free’s rest and recuperation slot, a mid-tour opportunity to go back to Europe for the 45-year-old commander of the British army’s 4th Mechanised Brigade. However, Major General Barney White-Spunner, in charge of the division and Free’s boss, asked to swap with him, and, well, White-Spunner outranked Free. So on March 24, with Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki inbound from Baghdad to Basra with half his government in tow, it was Free who stood waiting for him, while White-Spunner was in the Austrian ski resort of Zürs.

The administration’s measured response to a rocket attack in Erbil sharply contrasts with a Trump-era campaign against Iran that, more often than not, caught Iraq in the crossfire.

​After a rocket attack on the American Embassy in Baghdad late last year, the Trump administration renewed its threats of withdrawing diplomats from Iraq. A military retaliation against Iran was discussed, and the White House warned of a drastic response “if one American is killed.” None was.

Nor were any Americans killed in a similar strike this week on a United States military base at the airport in Erbil, in northern Iraq, that officials blame on an Iranian-backed militia. One foreign contractor died, and an American service member and several contractors were wounded, prompting Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken to describe the United States as “outraged” and another official to sternly promise “consequences for any group responsible.”

But the Biden administration’s otherwise measured response to the rocket fusillade in Erbil stood in sharp contrast with President Donald J. Trump’s pitched campaign against Iran — one that often caught Iraq in the crossfire.

The Iraqi government is finally starting to make progress in its attempt to curb the influence of Kataib Hezbollah.

​Five months after its charismatic leader Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis was killed by a U.S. drone strike at the Baghdad airport, the Iran-backed group Kataib Hezbollah’s influence on Iraq may be quietly eroding.
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Despite an institutional void since widespread protests across Shiite-majority central and southern Iraq forced the previous government to resign late in 2019 and the international coalition’s recent withdrawal from several Iraqi bases, moves are afoot to more fully integrate some Popular Mobilization Units (PMU) factions into government chains of command and structures that existed prior to 2014.

​If Iraq’s new government manages to do so, it could reduce the influence of powerful armed groups with questionable loyalty to the Iraqi state.

​NATO is planning to scale up its mission training Iraq’s security forces with thousands of new personnel as the military alliance seeks to help keep the Islamic State group at bay, Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said Thursday.

​“The size of our mission will increase from 500 personnel to around 4,000. And training activities will now include more Iraqi security institutions, and areas beyond Baghdad,” Stoltenberg told reporters after chairing a meeting of NATO defense ministers.

NATO’s training mission was launched in 2018 to help the conflict-ravaged country develop new academies and military schools for its armed forces. It was initially confined to the capital, Baghdad, and in neighboring Jordan.
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​The mission was temporarily suspended last year after a U.S. drone strike killed Iran’s top general at Baghdad airport, angering the Iraqi government.

Rockets hit US base and airport in Erbil after defense systems failed to activate

​The attack on the US military base at Erbil – in the Kurdistan region of Iraq – and the nearby Erbil airport illustrates once again that US defenses against rocket attacks are inadequate and, for the most part, don’t work.

As far as can be determined, Erbil was defended by a US Patriot air defense system and a C-RAM rapid fire gun system there to protect the Patriot.

There is no information to suggest that either system was activated when a number of rockets slammed into the base and airport. The US and Iraq say they can account for 14 rockets that hit the airport and base; the terrorist group allegedly responsible says 22 rockets were fired.

Iraq’s crude oil exports jumped in the first half of February even after OPEC’s second-biggest producer pledged to cut production this month.

The group and partners including Russia are restraining supply with the coronavirus pandemic still raging. The alliance, known as OPEC+, is seeking to ensure a 66% rally in crude prices since the start of November -- driven by vaccine breakthroughs -- isn’t reversed.

Baghdad pledged to pump below its quota in February to make up for past overproduction. Still, the pace of its crude exports in the first half of the month, if maintained through the rest of February, indicates the country may exceed its self-imposed production target of 3.6 million barrels a day and perhaps even its OPEC+ cap of around 3.85 million.
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Iraq derives almost all its income from oil and, like many other petrostates, is experiencing an economic crisis after the pandemic caused energy demand to collapse last year.