Iraqi Staffer for McClatchy Lists Gains After 4 Years of War -- Such As Inventing Many New Ways to Kill

By: E&P Staff During the past few weeks, we have published excerpts from the remarkable new blog published by McClatchy Newspapers. Called "Inside Iraq," it comes out of McClatchy's well-respected Baghdad bureau and contains postings (some with dark humor) written only by the bureau's Iraqi staffers and correspondents.

The following appeared today written by "Laith" (last names are never given for security reasons).
*

Yesterday Iraqis and the whole world kept talking about the memories of the war and some of the most important political developments in Iraq. Some Arabic reports concentrated on other sides especially the economic ones reflecting the reality in their own way. As an Iraqi, I feel I can't be more accurate than any channel because I lived the four years in Iraq. So let's see some of the most important achievements done by the great Iraqi and American administrations.

-- Iraqis became more courageous and fearless because they used to the daily killing by all the types of the gunmen including Iraqi army, US army, insurgents, thieves and the security companies.

-- Some Iraqis became cleverer and they started to invent new ways in killing each other, stealing from each other, hiding weapons, kidnapping and cheating.

-- We have more ministers than any other country on this crazy earth. We have even useless ministries which were invented to please some political parties. We have as far as I know 36 ministries while the USA has only 15 ministries. So we have more than double.

-- Iraqis never feel afraid of the electric shocks because we have electricity power for only two hours a day or three hours as a maximum. The rest of the day we have to use small Chinese generator that cost something like 100 $ which are not really powerful enough to kill people.

-- Iraqis found new ways to save almost everything and the most important thing is the fuel which costs Iraqis a fortune....To be honest, until now, I don?t know why we suffer of fuel shortage although our officials and specially our minister of oil who knows nothing about oil always boast that we are one of the richest oil country and we have the best oil qualities and the cheapest extracting costs.

-- We have the largest number of blast walls. Each ministry blocks the roads that lead to its building with tens of these walls. I think that the cement used in these blast walls is enough to build 1000 skyscrapers.

-- We have the biggest number of the bodyguards in the world. Each minister has not less than 15 four-wheel cars carrying at least 5 bodyguards. Each of the 275 members of the Iraqi parliament has the same number of the bodyguards and some of them (the heads of the political blocs) has even more than that. By the way, I didn?t count the bodyguards of the presidential committee members, the prime minister and his two deputies and the parliament president and his two deputies because they have foreign bodyguards.

I have to stop counting the achievements of our great governments and the greatest American administration headed by the inspired president Bush because I would never finish counting the great achievements. You can read the few ones I mentioned and you can judge by yourself.