Neighboring Countries and the Draining of Oil and Dollars from Iraq

While political and official circles are keeping busy with the affairs, worries and developments of the internal political crisis and its interactions, which are varied and open to different probabilities, other parties among our comrades, brothers and friends from neighboring countries are keeping busy with affairs and worries of another kind, different from the affairs and worries of us Iraqis. That is the case even if their worries live off of our worries, which provide for them the model environment for helping them produce oil or developing the production in the oil fields shared with Iraq and comfortably benefiting from Iraqi petrodollars.

Iraq is being subjected to unprecedented financial and monetary pressure because of the movement of Iraq’s cash in U.S. dollars to outside its borders, which drives the value of the Iraqi dinar compared to the U.S. dollar in the direction of decline. It also means an increase in the domestic average inflation, especially for consumer goods. Economic developments like this are quite serious and important because they are related to the lives of Iraqi citizens and their standard of living. However, what is noticeable is many people’s fear of the people influential in this matter or their lack of courage in talking about the crisis and its impacts, especially regarding its real reasons. It is as if they are fabricating the very conditions that make it impossible for them to talk and then saying, “Look, what can I do?”

And those who talk about this crisis and acknowledge this “siphoning” stop doing so when the matter has to do with naming the comrades, brothers and friends who are siphoning off Iraq’s dollars and hard-currency riches. It is as if they do not know them, or as if this is Iraqi generosity among neighbors based on how the Prophet Muhammad (p.b.u.h.) enjoined us to look after our seventh neighbor — so what about our first or second neighbor — even if it is at the expense of the resources, riches and assets of us Iraqis? And there is no doubt that the decline of the Iraqi dinar compared to the U.S. dollar is not a domestic crisis related to the performance of the Iraqi Central Bank or its fiscal policies, since the Iraqi dinar for past years since 2003 has retained its value and strength in the market compared to the U.S. dollar; if not for the increased demand for the dollar, the dinar’s value would not have declined. As for the increased demand for the U.S. dollar in the Iraqi markets, it is not related to the needs of the Iraqi domestic market, since these needs — that is, local needs — are known and have not changed. Rather, what has changed are the additional urgent foreign needs related to the need of our comrades in the Islamic Republic of Iran and our brothers in the Syrian Arab Republic for U.S. dollars because of the implementation of economic sanctions imposed on the two countries for reasons and situations to which we Iraqis are not party.

In addition to Iraq’s hard-currency riches seeping out beyond the borders, a leak of another kind also exemplifies a loss of Iraq’s resources and natural riches. This is happening through some neighboring countries’ investments in the shared oil wells on Iraq’s borders with these countries without Iraq’s knowledge, consent or at least agreement with it. Iraq has 24 oil wells shared with Iran, Syria and Kuwait, whose reserves economic sources estimate at 95 billion barrels of oil.

Indeed, Iran for example, which currently produces 130,000 barrels a day from fields shared with Iraq, is devising a production plan to raise this average to one million barrels a day in 2013, to increase to 5,200,000 barrels a day in 2015. This is despite the fact that Iraq still has not settled its border problems with neighboring countries and has not finished drawing its borders with these countries.

Iraq’s riches cannot be protected by good intentions, boring daily assurances of neutrality and the lack of need for force or the use of it, since loose money encourages theft. There has to be protection for these riches, which are coveted by those far away, let alone those nearby. As for the mechanisms for that, they are among the axioms of building a strong state that also adopt the axioms of the elements, conditions and concepts of national security in its modern, comprehensive meanings, with the goal of protecting Iraq and its natural wealth.