The Befuddlement of Laws

I'm a firm believer in the saying, "you reap what you sow". The words of Jesus, first spoken to a much more agrarian culture still apply today. Let me offer proof with a simple if, then statement. If your ancestors sow a farm full of scrap metal and large steel machinery, then you reap a lot of hot sweaty days picking up this scrap metal and a good amount of money on the scrap metal market. Now I’m speaking from personal experience. The scrap metal industry is a very lucrative business and it recycles a lot of the metals we use today in manufactured goods. I call that a win-win. With this in mind it is amazing to me the amount of metal sitting in junkyards around Iraq. Iraqis are very keen of turning a profit wherever possible, ethically or not. Of course then you can get into the debate of ethics which I do not intend. If ethics pique your interest pick up Bonhoeffer and see how you feel at the end of the day. I digress. Back to Iraq…exiting out the south entry control point at Camp Baharia I can gaze off toward what used to be Camp Fallujah only a kilometer or two away. In the vast open desert to the West of Camp Fallujah there is a junk yard. But this in no mere yard of junk...it is acres upon acres of junk, aptly referred to as a junk acreage. I do not exaggerate when I say it stretches as far as the eyes can see. The junk acreage consists of piles of scrap steel and other metals. Mostly it is old military vehicles that have been stripped down to the frame and engine block. I've patrolled through it on foot many times now and am quite amazed at the mass amount of metal just wasting away there. As a good entrepreneur schooled in the halls of the Fisher College of Business and a southern farm boy personally acquainted with the scrap metal industry, I had to ask myself why is all of this scrap metal here? Don’t the Iraqis know that scrap metal means money. So I launched on official inquiry, asking as many people as I could about the junk yards. Turns out there are a lot of them around Iraq. Three major wars in the last thirty years has provided all sorts of burned out metal hulks from the various military-industrial complexes rolling across this desert. As it turns out the Iraqi people do know about scrap metal prices…and perhaps they know it too well. After the initial capture of Baghdad in 2003, there was a period of relative peace but widespread looting. This was due to many unforeseen but probably preventable factors all of which you can read about in Bing West’s “The Strongest Tribe” if you so desire. During this looting a lot of the nation’s power grid was dismantled by Iraqis who stripped the electric wire and sold the copper on the international market for a hefty profit. Copper happens to be one of the highest paying metals on the market. The Iraq power grid is still in shambles to this day due to this looting. So what does a provisional government do to stop such destruction of the power grid…they make all export of scrap metal illegal. Scrap metal exports stop immediately, junk yards pile up, and here we are today with a country literally collecting acres of junk. Two things need to happen, one the national railway needs repaired and expanded to facilitate movement of this scrap metal to the port city of Um Qasr, and two the law needs to be refined. Iraq is missing out on billions of dollars worth of profit. Billions of dollars that could be used to improve the oil refineries and pipelines that will lead to trillions of dollars in the future and help Iraq become a model Middle Eastern country.