Patrick Cockburn on Iraq Ten Years After

For a good rundown on current politics in Iraq check out Patrick Cockburn's article, "Death and Dollars in the New Iraq: The Shia and the Kurds 10 Years After the Invasion," posted on the Counterpunch website this weekend. Some highlights: Iran is ready to wash its hands of Maliki (at least by the 2014 parliamentary elections); Muqtada al-Sadr is still a power, shrewdly positioning the Sadrists and defending a unified Iraq; and Kurdistan is booming but might overplay its hand if it chooses to piss off Baghdad by going ahead with an oil pipeline to Turkey that is already under construction.

I recently sold all the stock I had in the Turkish Investment Fund (TKF). I held onto it for over five years. I bought in originally because I thought eventually Turkey, a great nation, the seat of the old Ottoman Empire, would be admitted to the eurozone; also, I thought that Turkey would absorb most of the trade with Iraq as it went through de-Baathification. I sold because I don't think the eurozone is going to survive; plus, I think Iran and Iraq are headed for some tough times as Syria continues to unravel. Syria's collapse is something that goes unmentioned in Cockburn's piece.