Stephen Whiteley, Unaoil’s former territory manager for Iraq, has today become the second Unaoil executive to be sentenced for paying over $500,000 in bribes to secure a $55m contract to supply offshore mooring buoys. He was sentenced by HHJ Beddoe to 3 years’ imprisonment.

This follows the sentencing of his co-conspirator Ziad Akle on 23 July 2020, another former Iraq territory manager for Unaoil, upon whom HHJ Beddoe imposed a sentence of five years’ imprisonment.

The two men conspired with others to pay considerable bribes to public officials at the South Oil Company to secure contracts for Unaoil and its clients to construct offshore mooring buoys in the Persian Gulf. The new buoys formed part of a series of state-run projects designed by the government of post-occupation Iraq to boost its economy by rebuilding the country’s oil industry and thereby expanding its oil export capacity.
​
A jury at Southwark Crown Court found Stephen Whiteley guilty on one count of conspiracy to give corrupt payments. In the same trial, his co-conspirator, Ziad Akle, was found guilty on two counts of conspiracy to give corrupt payments.

Early last October, while working in his office in Baghdad, a businessman named Hussein Laqees got a phone call from a number he’d never seen before. “We need to talk,” the caller said. The man’s voice was gruff and self-assured, a little menacing. He demanded that Laqees come meet him but refused to give his name.

Laqees demurred, and the call ended. He might have forgotten the whole exchange had a colleague not been in touch a few minutes later with worrisome news. The mystery caller, he said, was from Kataib Hezbollah, a powerful Iraqi militia with strong ties to Iran’s Revolutionary Guards. They had a business proposal to discuss.

When the militiaman called again, Laqees reluctantly agreed to a meeting. He gathered a few colleagues, and they all drove to a house off Sadoun Street in downtown Baghdad, arriving near dusk. Inside, he was led into a dim office and introduced to a small, bald man who got right to the point. “You need to work with us, there is no other choice,” the bald man said. “You can keep your staff, but you must do as we say.” He explained that Kataib Hezbollah would take 20 percent of Laqees’s gross revenue — about 50 percent of his profits.

​Laqees refused. His company, Palm Jet, had a five-year government contract to run a V.I.P. terminal at Baghdad’s international airport, along with a nearby hotel; it also works routinely with Western aeronautics firms like Lockheed Martin. He could not have any dealings with a group like Kataib Hezbollah, which is listed by the U.S. government as a foreign terrorist organization (as is the unrelated Lebanese group also called Hezbollah). The bald man replied that if Laqees refused, he would seize everything he owned in Baghdad. Laqees looked at him in disbelief. “I’m an investor,” he said. “There is law.” The bald man shot back: “We are the law.” He told Laqees to give him an answer by noon the next day.

War as the locus point of all things Iraqi is a popular but erroneous lens colouring the ways that the country and the 2003 invasion have been discussed by English-speaking media. 

​Once Upon a Time in Iraq, a new BBC Two five-part documentary series by James Bluemel has been commended, largely in the West, for its perceived ability to challenge myopic views of the Iraq war. 

The series traces events between 2003, when occupation forces put Iraq in a stranglehold, and 2014, the moment the Islamic State was born. It yields the floor to Iraqi and American subjects who, though stood on opposite sides, share on camera their lived experiences of fighting and surviving the war, and the inner demons those events unleashed. 

A treasure-trove of archival footage animates the story, intertwined alongside sombre interviews. Participants are invited onto a dark, unadorned set, which feels akin to a therapy session, as they walk the audience down memory lane, pebbled with recollections of loss and trauma. 

After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, a blue-ribbon commission and congressional committees uniformly blamed the U.S. national security apparatus for failing to “connect the dots” of evidence that might have exposed Osama bin Laden’s plot.
​
Less than two years later, President George W. Bush launched a ruinous war in Iraq based on a far greater intelligence failure, one that saw the CIA, Pentagon and other agencies effectively make up the evidence that the White House sought to justify invading a country that had not attacked — or even threatened to attack — the United States.

The serial mistruths, mistakes and misperceptions about Iraq’s supposed weapons of mass destruction and alleged support for Al Qaeda are laid out in devastating detail in Robert Draper’s authoritative new book, “To Start a War: How the Bush Administration Took America Into Iraq.”

This is well-trod history, but Draper mines newly declassified documents and tracks down previously unavailable CIA and Defense officials to flesh out the sordid story of the run-up to the March 2003 invasion, the start of a grinding conflict that would last eight years and claim nearly 4,500 American lives.

TO START A WAR
​
How the Bush Administration Took America Into Iraq

​In April 2003, after he had launched the invasion of Iraq, George W. Bush stood in the Oval Office reception room and watched the televised liberation of Basra, which serves as the country’s main port. Next to him was Secretary of State Colin Powell, who had warned Bush about the dangers of ousting Saddam Hussein from power. Smoke rose from the intelligence service headquarters. The city prison had been opened. Looters were filching desks, chairs and water tanks from state buildings. As he looked at the pictures, Bush was perplexed. He asked, “Why aren’t they cheering?”

In “To Start a War,” which is filled with such telling scenes, Robert Draper carefully examines the Bush administration’s illusions about Iraq. Draper is a writer at large for The New York Times Magazine and the author of “Dead Certain,” a study of the Bush administration that relied on numerous interviews with the president himself. Draper relates that Bush, who was apparently displeased with his depiction in “Dead Certain,” declined to be interviewed for this book. But Bush did not seek to hinder access to his former aides and Draper has performed prodigious research, including conducting interviews with several hundred former national security officials and scrutinizing recently declassified government documents. He does not provide any bold revelations, but offers the most comprehensive account of the administration’s road to war, underscoring that Bush was indeed The Decider when it came to Iraq — there was never any debate about not overthrowing Hussein.

The basis for conflict, Draper reminds us, had already been prepared in the late 1990s by what might be called the military-intellectual complex in Washington. Two key events occurred in 1998: The first was when Congress passed, and Bill Clinton signed into law, the Iraq Liberation Act, which the Iraqi expatriate Ahmad Chalabi and his neoconservative allies like Paul Wolfowitz had championed, and that made it official American policy to topple Saddam Hussein. The second was the establishment by Congress of the Rumsfeld Commission. It provided the former secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and other hawks with a high-profile platform to castigate the C.I.A. for its putative shortsightedness about the looming perils posed by North Korea, Iran and Iraq. In particular the commission focused on a variety of doomsday scenarios that might allow Iraq to obtain nuclear weapons and target America “in a very short time.”

Clashes between protesters and security forces erupt in Baghdad after renewed demonstrations over poor public services.

​Anti-government protesters have taken to the streets of Iraq's capital and other cities following the funerals of two people killed during clashes with security forces the night before.

The two protesters were killed late on Sunday in central Baghdad during renewed demonstrations against corruption, unemployment and poor public services, including a lack of electricity, as the country reels under a major heatwave.

The deaths were the first during anti-government demonstrations since new Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi was sworn into office in May.

A story of Iraqi politics, Pentagon oil contracts, and an ongoing foreign policy disaster

​Bribing one politician is bad. Bribing all the politicians is worse. The U.S. Department of Justice is investigating a group of companies in Kurdistan, Iraq’s semi-independent northern region, that appears to be doing the latter in order to secure a monopoly on Pentagon fuel contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

A previous New Republic investigation outlined how Kurdish and American firms used shell companies with connections to the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, one of the region’s two major political parties, to dominate fuel sales to the U.S. military and inflate prices. But PUK-aligned groups aren’t the only ones cashing in on these American fuel purchases: A tangled network of corruption illustrates how ostensible rivals can cooperate to rip off the Defense Department.

According to Kurdish government documents provided to the Government Accountability Project, where I work, additional shell companies also connect the fuel-fleecing to the Kurdistan Democratic Party, the region’s other major political faction, led by former President Massoud Barzani and his powerful family, a clan of American-sponsored kleptocrats. The billionaire Barzanis are Kurdistan’s “unofficial monarchs,” said Kamal Chomani, a nonresident fellow at the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy and editor in chief of the Kurdistan Times, an independent news outlet. “We always referred to them as the Mafia,” said a former U.S. government adviser in Iraq, who requested anonymity to speak candidly.

The Barzani family’s assets span the globe. “It was never practical to keep track of that stuff,” a former U.S. anti-corruption official said about the vast Barzani holdings, which were spread from Syria to Switzerland. And, in an awkward twist, some of the millions swindled from the U.S. military may have ended up as investments in California’s luxury real estate market.

Covid-19 and the fall in oil prices has pushed Iraq towards calamity, underlining the urgency of ending the country's fossil fuel dependency.
​
Tens of thousands of Iraqis took to the streets in October 2019 for what was arguably our country’s biggest ever grassroots socio-political mobilisation. 

The protests were borne of years of frustration and despair: at rising poverty and unemployment, at our decaying health and education systems, at falling literacy rates, and the erosion of women’s rights. 
​
The protestors’ anger was intensified by a bitter paradox. How could living standards be so dire in a nation awash with oil money? And how could the government presiding over the world’s fifth largest oil reserves fail so dismally to provide for its people?

The Democratic nominee was part of an insular Washington culture that produced the Iraq War—and the pathologies of the Trump administration.

​One early evening in November of 2005, I found myself walking through Union Station in Washington, D.C., with then-Sen. Joe Biden. The train that was to ferry us to his resident city of Wilmington, Delaware, had already completed boarding, so we were striding at a very fast clip.

Still, the senator kept talking the entire way. I’d asked him a question as we walked, and he was still answering it as we disembarked in Wilmington 75 minutes later. That question was: Why, three years earlier, had Biden voted in favor of giving President George W. Bush the authority to wage war in Iraq?

Biden’s answer boiled down to this: He had believed that the authorization vote would give the president leverage to force the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein to effectively relinquish his illicit weapons program. Further, he had believed that Bush would not blunder recklessly into war. The senator’s windy monologue featured multiple digressions relating to the Bush family’s wealth, to Vice President Dick Cheney’s nefariousness, and to the futile valor of Secretary of State Colin Powell. But those cameos were themselves illustrative of the greater tragedy.

Baghdad and Tehran sought on Tuesday to ease bilateral political tensions, as Iraq’s prime minister said it would not allow any threat to Iran coming from its territory.

​Mustafa al-Kadhimi, visiting Tehran and speaking at a news conference alongside Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, alluded to Iraq’s concern not to become a battlefield between Iran and the United States, who are arch-enemies.

“The people of Iraq want good relations with the Islamic Republic of Iran based on the principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of both countries,” he told the conference, carried live by Iranian state television.

The Iraqi premier faces a tough balancing act between Tehran and Washington, which have come close to open conflict in the region, particularly on Iraqi soil, over the past year.