Democracy Is Good For Iraq

Geopolitics: While pushing democracy on Afghanistan and Somalia is a bad idea, democracy is working like a charm in Iraq. The CIA’s good buddy, Allawi, won the recent election by a whisker and he is cobbling together a coalition government, a process that will take a couple months. Allawi made two brilliant moves after the election: 1) He said the multitudinous oil contracts that his predecessor had hammered out with the world’s major energy companies will not be changed even though in the campaign he promised to scrap these deals and negotiate better ones. The existing contracts cannot be improved upon and can only be scrapped or left alone. If left alone, these contracts will increase Iraqi oil production by 12 times over the next 10 years, making Iraq the largest oil exporter in the world. The global recovery cannot continue without cheap oil. 2) Allawi reached out to the Iranian leadership and told them America will never launch an attack against Iran from Iraqi territory. The CIA maintains an anti-Iranian guerilla army in an encampment along the Iran/Iraq border; this would be the source of a US attack. With his vast CIA connections, Allawi is in a position to make good on such a promise. Shiite Iran now publically supports Allawi’s pro-Sunni political party, tacitly endorsing it as the leader in the coalescing jumble of parties that will form the new government. Iran’s former darling, Maqtada al-Sadr, is now sidelined. This is important because when Allawi was Prime Minister of Iraq the first time he (successfully) ordered the Iraqi Army to crush al-Sadr’s radical Shiite Mahdi Army, so the two men hate each other. Without Iranian backing al-Sadr should be toothless.
The Pak Army is killing an average of 15 bad guys a day starting a little more than three weeks ago. This offensive isn’t getting a lot of press but we must remember that the Taliban is like any other army or militia: kill enough bad guy fighters and the bad guys will lose the war. The Pak Army is executing a powerful offensive against the Taliban while at the same time running a large mechanized war game exercise on the Indian border. Backed by its superpower buddy, the Pak Army is a colossus, one of the largest, most effective and powerful armies on Earth.