Why are we spending $100 billion a year in Iraq while their government could pay a substantial portion of this bill?  Cheney told us that the Iraq invasion would pay for itself with oil revenue.  I don't think it's fair for us to steal their natural resources as this quote implies he intended to, but Iraq is now nearing the point where they could finance their own reconstruction.  I do think we should be asking Maliki tough questions about why the government we essentially installed to rebuild Iraq is not spending the money they have on that purpose, or on anything at all.

Like so many statistical measures from Iraq, the ones in the new report are likely to be used to support diametrically opposite positions on how much the United States should continue spending and how long it should stay in the country, said Ryan Alexander, president of Taxpayers for Common Sense in Washington.

The figures could be used to argue that because the Iraqi ministries still do not have the capacity to spend their own money, further assistance from the United States is called for, Ms. Alexander said. Or the huge oil revenue surpluses could be seen as proof that Iraq has the resources to solve its own problems if it would only use the money.

I think the latter is far more plausible.  Oil is only going to be more expensive in the future, so this revenue stream is solid.  Even if Halliburton and Blackwater retained a substantial presence in Iraq after we pull out, which is highly unlikely, They'll take Iraq's money as easily as they'll take ours.  The point remains that Iraq can't just magically turn money into a professional military like ours, but they already want us to leave the country, and their wealth makes it hard to believe that this view is naive.  This is just another nail in the coffin of the McCain/Bush argument that we need to remain in Iraq indefinitely.

The existence of this stash raises humanitarian issues as well.  Iraq's 2007 GDP was $102 billion.  This means that their current budget surplus is more than 75% of their country's yearly economic output.  This surplus is $2,700 for each of the 30 million Iraqis, whose median annual income is only a few hundred dollars.  By comparison, the United States carries $31,000 in debt for each of our citizens.  Maliki could pay out an extra year's salary to each Iraqi and barely dent the pile he's sitting on.  Imagine the impact if Bush had given each of us a $40,000 rebate instead of $300-600.

This bears repeating: The average Iraqi lives in poverty, yet their government is hoarding what is, from his perspective, unimaginably vast sums of money that could save millions of lives and spare countless more from hunger and suffering.  We were supposed to have invaded Iraq to liberate its citizens from dire oppression and inequality; to stop Hussein from stealing his country's oil and to make the country's natural wealth available to all.  

One measure of the inequality in a country is to compare the median income to the per capita GDP.  In first world countries, this ratio is somewhere near one, meaning that the average person gets something like a proportional share of his economy's output.  In Saddam-era Iraq, like other corrupt resource-rich countries like Equatorial Guinea, this ratio was tiny: most economic output being funneled into a very small number of hands.  Yet our invasion hasn't changed this measure at all.  Spiraling oil profits aren't being distributed to the people who truly need and deserve them.  We know what our invasion has done for companies like Exxon: given them record-breaking profits.  Now the question remains: what has our invasion done for Iraq's citizens, besides killing hundreds of thousands of them?