Adel Abdul Mahdi showed himself to be a good analyst of the country’s problems. But his cabinet choices show he may not have the solutions.

​In an essay he wrote on his Facebook page five months ago, Adel Abdul Mahdi said he wouldn’t want to be Iraq’s next prime minister. The country’s toxic political culture would make it impossible to govern, he claimed. “Assuming I got accepted now, I will soon lose,” he wrote. “I will face majorities which will not allow their groups to provide necessary support.”

Now that Abdul Mahdi is prime minister, he’s discovering just how right he was. The question is whether he will seek to do anything about it. 

On Thursday, after weeks of bickering, parliament finally confirmed Abdul Mahdi, and 14 of the 22 people he named to his cabinet. There was no vote on a number of key appointments, including ministers of defense and the interior. Nearly a third of the 329 members of parliament didn’t even bother to turn up, and those who did complained they weren’t given enough time to properly consider the nominations. Abdul Mahdi didn’t help matters by handing out one-sheet resumes of each of his nominees.

​Despite Washington's best efforts, it appears Iran will likely remain a trusted ally in post-sectarian Iraq.

​Following Iraq's "inconclusive" national election on May 12, the United States tried hard to guarantee a second term for former Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi. Washington's special envoy Brett McGurk spent months talking Iraqi politicians into following the American blueprint aimed at isolating Tehran and "keeping anyone friendly to Iran out of power."

But it was all in vain. The US failed to place its desired candidates in the important positions ofprime minister, president and speaker of the parliament. Instead, Iran's Iraqi allies got their way. All three positions were filled with new faces who would not allow Iraq to turn its back to Iran.

Iran needed to make sure that Iraq's new government would not tilt towards Washington, and support the renewed US sanctions - the way Abadi did. Abadi had adopted the new set of US sanctions against Iran in August, in an attempt to countervail the electoral setback he faced in May and ensure a second term. And in doing so, he broke the Tehran-Washington compromise that brought him to power in 2014. Ironically, his anti-Iran posture received the strongest pushback from Iraq's political elite, and not Iran. He failed to control even MPs of his own coalition, andfinally McGurk had to let him go. The Basra upheaval was the last nail in his premiership's coffin.

Iraq is fast becoming a global oil powerhouse, gaining stature in OPEC after it surpassed Canada this year as the world’s fourth-biggest producer. But the war-ravaged country has little to show for its feat.

While crude markets are preoccupied with Saudi Arabia’s ability to boost output as impending U.S. sanctions curb Iranian exports, Iraq has quietly increased shipments to Asia, Europe and the Mediterranean region to offset Iran’s missing barrels.

Iraq is producing a record 4.78 million barrels of oil a day, the country’s Oil Minister Jabbar Al-Luaibi said on Saturday. Output will rise to 5 million barrels a day in 2019 and 7.5 million in 2024, he said. Consultant Wood Mackenzie Ltd. forecasts Iraq could pump 6 million barrels a day by 2025 and that its output is set to grow faster than for all countries but the U.S. over the next six years.

For all its petro-wealth, Iraq lacks steady electricity supplies and has trouble keeping the lights on -- and attracting the kinds of investment needed to create jobs and spur local businesses. “An increase in production is good news, but Iraq still fails to provide basic services like clean water and power to its citizens, including in Basra where most of the oil is extracted,” said Ziad Daoud, Bloomberg’s chief economist in the Middle East.

The service’s chief wanted to memorialize lessons from the conflict before memories faded. A draft was finished in 2016. It has yet to be published.

​WASHINGTON—Army chief of staff Gen. Ray Odierno issued the marching orders in the fall of 2013. Some of the Army’s brightest officers would draft an unvarnished history of its performance in the Iraq War.

A towering officer who served 55 months in Iraq, Gen. Odierno told the team the Army hadn’t produced a proper study of its role in the Vietnam War and had to spend the first years in Iraq relearning lessons. This time, he said, the team would research before memories faded and publish a history while the lessons were most relevant.

​It would be unclassified, he said, to stimulate discussion about the intervention--one that deepened the U.S.’s Mideast role and cost more than 4,400 American lives. He arranged for 30,000 pages of documents to be declassified. For nearly three years, the team studied those papers and conducted more than 100 interviews.

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Iraq plans to increase its oil output and export capacity in 2019, with a focus on its southern oilfields, and is close to reaching a deal with international companies, Oil Minister Thamer Ghadhban said on Tuesday.

​The new minister also said the shortfall in oil supply caused by new U.S. sanctions on Iran had yet to be gauged before Iraq and other OPEC members could decide what action to take ahead of their policy meeting next month.

Iraq, OPEC’s second-largest producer, is targeting production capacity of 5 million barrels per day (bpd) in 2019, with average exports expected to reach around 3.8 million bpd.

Iraq currently pumps around 4.6 million bpd, second only to Saudi Arabia in the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries. The bulk of Iraq’s oil is exported via its southern terminals, which account for more than 95 percent of state revenue.

Iraq’s ministry of oil has published a very optimistic report on the country’s capability to ramp up production, but internal political issues could lead to a new crisis after this weekend.

At the same time that a new Iraqi government is forming, a government that is increasing Iranian influence within Iraq, another election is threatening the country’s stability.

On Sunday, Kurdistan is voting for a new KRG parliament, a vote that may result in new power brokers in Erbil. The Kurdish elections are hugely significant for the region, as they not only decide who is going to be put forward as the potential president of Iraq, but also reshape the KRG as an entity and its relations not only with Baghdad, but also with Iran and Turkey.

​A further destabilization of Iraq would be an outcome that most regional players aim to avoid, with the war in Syria and the imminent Iranian sanctions already causing uncertainty.

Former Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) minister Muhsin Rafiq Douste, who was in charge during the Iran-Iraq war 1980-1988, has revealed to the Iranian news outlet (MEHR) that the late Libyan leader Muammar al-Gaddafi provided Iran with free ballistic missiles to be used against Iraq, on condition to target Saudi Arabia by one of them.

Rafiq Douste said that the former Iranian president, Hashemi Rafsanjani, had asked him to travel to Damascus and to see whether the late Syrian president Hafez al-Assad was willing to provide Iran with missiles. Rafsanjani was ashamed of the situation that Iran was targeted by Iraqi missiles and his country had no missiles to respond with.

Douste said that Rafsanjani at that time was representative of Iran's Supreme Leader at the Defence Supreme Council and deputy head of Iran's armed forces.

“Iran cities were under the bombardment of the Iraqi 'Scud B' missiles which Iraqis obtained from the Soviet Union, but Iran was unable to respond because; on one hand, the Iranian army had no suitable missiles to target Iraq with, and on the other hand, all countries had refused to sell Tehran such missiles.”, Rafiq Douste said.