Bloggies

My brother links me to the 2006 Weblog Award nominees:

Those noms have very little overlap with the hierarchy in the Blogosphere Ecosystem. I like the Ecosystem better, but diversity is good, especially for the international links. Think I'll keep a link to the India one, the boring China one, and the Bahraini one.

I learned a new use for the Arab headdress.

Baghdad Burning, which I'd seen before, is on fire lately.

There is talk of major mismanagement and theft in the Oil Ministry. Chalabi took over several days ago and a friend who works in the ministry says the takeover is a joke. "You know how they used to check our handbags when we first walked into the ministry?" She asked the day after Chalabi crowned himself Oil Emperor, "Now WE check our handbags after we leave the ministry- you know- to see if Chalabi stole anything."

Here's some stylized haggling:

R (feigning shock and awe): "3600 dinars! What? That is almost double what we paid a week ago... why?”

Abu A (feigning sorrow and regret): "Habibti... you know what my supplier has to go through to bring me these vegetables? The cost of gasoline has gone up! I swear on the life of my mother that I’m only profiting 50 dinars per kilo...”

R: "Your mother is dead, isn’t she?”

Abu A: "Yes yes- but you know how valuable the dear woman was to me- may Allah have mercy on her- and on us all! The dogs in the government are going to kill us with these prices...”

R (sighing heavily): "You voted for the dogs last year Abu Ammar...”

Abu A: "Shhh... don’t call them dogs- it’s not proper. Anyway, it’s not their fault- the Americans are making them do it... my Allah curse them and their children..."

R (with eyes rolling) and Abu A (in unison): "... and their children’s children."

And here's a good part where she compares the reconstruction after the Second Gulf War to the reconstruction after the first:

But I digress- the topic today is reconstruction. Immediately after the war, various ministries were brought together to do the reconstruction work. The focus was on the infrastructure- to bring back the refineries, electricity, water, bridges, and telecommunications.

The task was a daunting one because so many of Iraq’s major infrastructure projects and buildings had been designed and built by foreign contractors from all over the world including French, German, Chinese and Japanese companies. The foreign expertise was unavailable after 1991 due to the war and embargo and Iraqi engineers and technicians found themselves facing the devastation of the Gulf War all alone with limited supplies.

Two years and approximately 8 billion Iraqi dinars later, nearly 90% of the damage had been repaired. It took an estimated 6,000 engineers (all Iraqi), 42,000 technicians, and 12,000 administrators, but bridges were soon up again, telephones were more or less functioning in most areas, refineries were working, water was running and electricity wasn’t back 100%, but it was certainly better than it is today. Within the first two years over 100 small and large bridges had been reconstructed, 16 refineries, over 50 factories and industrial compounds, etc.

It wasn’t perfect- it wasn’t Halliburton... It wasn’t KBR...but it was Iraqi. There was that sense of satisfaction and pride looking upon a building or bridge that was damaged during the war and seeing it up and running and looking better than it did before.

Now, nearly three years after this war, the buildings are still piles of debris. Electricity is terrible. Water is cut off for days at a time. Telephone lines come and go. Oil production isn’t even at pre-war levels... and Iraqis hear about the billions upon billions that come and go. A billion here for security... Five hundred million there for the infrastructure... Millions for voting... Iraq falling into deeper debt... Engineers without jobs simply because they are not a part of this political party or that religious group... And the country still in shambles.

And I bet even back then the media "wasn't reporting the good news out of Iraq"!