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17 Jun 2007 03:17 pm
Iraq's Economy and Insurgency
It took sanctions and Saddam twenty years to extinguish Iraq's economic growth. The 2003 invasion was merely a punctuation point in collapse. Here's an in-depth survey. One fascinating nugget observed by the Arabist is the following:
Throughout the 1990s, most of Iraq's oil was transported in relatively small tanker trucks — to Jordan and Turkey with dispensation from Washington and undercover to Syria and the Gulf. As the pipelines to Turkey and the Gulf were turned back on in 2003, most of these truckers — many of whom had close ties with, and indeed colleagues in, neighboring countries — were out of a job. Hence, it is not surprising to learn that pipeline attacks "are now orchestrated by [insurgents and criminal gangs] to force the government to import and distribute as much fuel as possible using thousands of tanker trucks."
What exactly the diverse and fissiparous insurgency really is will probaly only be known by future historians. In this, as in so much else, Iraq is essentially a mystery.
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