Thursday, February 05, 2004

Is it 25 thieves instead of 1?!

Yesterday I watched a program on Al-Jazeera called (Al-ettijah Al-mo’akes or the opposite direction) and they interviewed an Iraqi journalist and an Egyptian one. The program was about the GC and SH and who is/was wasting or stealing more from Iraq’s wealth.
The host announced that the channel will be performing a poll through the duration of the program, and at the end of the hour he declared the results, which were:
** 78 % think that the GC members are stealing and/or wasting Iraq’s wealth more than SH used to do.
** 22 % think that the opposite is true.
Do you find this poll result credible?…Well, I don’t.
I’m not trying to defend the GC as it does not satisfy my ambitions, but I challenge Al-Jazeera and those 78 % to find the proof for their bad comparison.
I can’t understand why people deny solid facts and believe in illusions and skeptics.
SH and his sons left Iraq bankrupt after they stole almost every dollar in the banks, so what was there for the GC members to steal? Not forgetting that many of them were outside Iraq and came to Iraq months after the liberation.
Another fact is that the Iraqi budget is now declared after it was a mysterious issue for years, and the amounts of oil exported are now declared and these amounts give a clue about the income (although I don’t have documents that contain the exact numbers) which is really not a significant figure with respect to our needs, add to these facts the obstacles that the oil industry is facing now.
I want Al-Jazeera and the Arab to remember these solid facts:
- Salaries have considerably increased (sometimes 100 times).
- The exchange price for the ID against the $ has increased which indicates that the economy is in progress.
- Promotion of the purchase capability for governmental employees and its effect on the activity of private businesses.
- The reconstruction processes that are carried out even in very far spots in the rural areas.
I sympathize with the GC, for how can they handle such responsibilities and deal with enormous hardships with such a humble budget. The requirements of Iraq are huge, and I doubt that the GC members will find the time to steal funds!. The problem is that almost everybody here and in the Arab world think that Iraq is a rich nation just because we have oil, but the truth is that: we are poor, no, we are below the line of poverty even if we could export 5 million barrels/day.
One last thing to say is that the GC members are not in total accord with each other and I think that if one of them tried to steal or waste any of Iraq’s wealth, then the other members would be glad to volunteer to uncover this action and report the theft, and this is the advantage of plurality.

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