Four Years of Achievments

By Laith, an Iraqi at McClatchy's Baghdad Bureau (so forgive the English -- how do you think you'd do in Arabic?)

[L]ets 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 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. I couldn’t know almost 30 of them because they don’t show on TV and we have no idea about their work or whether they do some work or not. In fact and as far as I knew, most of them have no idea about the work of the ministries they run.

* 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 fortune. Because the ministry of oil increased the prices of the fuel many times, Iraqis started to invent ways of saving the fuel like mixing one type of fuel with another one which is cheaper to save some dollars or using the cars and the electricity generator for limited times like using the car only to go to work and using the generator only at night. 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 which I believe that can form three matches of China great 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 4 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

I feel so proud.