The decade after

of their time in power securing prestigious appointments and corrupt deals in order to make enough money for a comfortable retirement outside Iraq.”

What they have is a series of car bombs and suicide attacks on mainly Shia districts in Baghdad and other cities last Tuesday, to mark the anniversary and an assertion by the Islamic State of Iraq — another name for Al Qaeda in Iraq — which claimed responsibility for the attacks, that “what has reached you on Tuesday is just the first drop of rain, and a first phase…” What they have is a resurgence of suicide bombers with two suicide attacks being mounted every week since January this year, far less of course than the level of violence that prevailed a few years ago but an ominous harbinger of things to come as the domestic and regional situations cause the sectarian divide to widen.

What they know is that in 2003 there was, as Western experts also concede, no Al Qaeda presence in Iraq. Today, Al Qaeda in Iraq is a formidable force with off-shoots in Syria, Lebanon and Libya. More and more, it seems that Sunnis, feeling disenfranchised — the Sunni vice president has sought asylum in Turkey after Maliki’s government issued warrants for his arrest and the Sunni finance minister has sought shelter with his tribe in Sunni-dominated Anbar province after an effort was made to arrest him — and encouraged by the Syrian situation are looking perhaps to such extremist organisations to win back the political power they lost after the American invasion.

What they have is an increase in oil production to 3.6 million barrels a day, well above the 2.8 million barrels produced in 2003 but lacking the infrastructure to produce electricity, leaving much of the country with less than eight hours of electricity a day.

What they have are 2.7 million people who have fled their homes and whose resettlement remains an unresolved problem exacerbated by the return to camps in Iraq of those forced out of Syria where they had initially sought shelter. What they have is Iraqis in the thousands seeking to emigrate to Europe and other destinations.

On the brighter side, what they also have, however, is an advance on building an Iraq-Jordan pipeline that will enable Iraq to export its crude, by-passing the Straits of Hormuz and enabling increased exports of Iraqi crude, the production of which can be increased according to the International Energy Agency to 6.1 million barrels a day