Iraq's Crude Awakening - lots of oil stuff....

[bbchris]

Taken from TIME 19 May 2003 - Those of you with a TIME online subscription can go here



My bro subscribes to the mags and passes them onto me when he's done. I found this article AMAZING! I can't type it all out so here's some interesting sections that I'll highlight here:



U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has been firm and consistent on what the war in Iraq is not about. "It has nothing to do with oil, literally nothing to do with oil," he says

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When US forces rolled into downtown Baghdad, they headed straight for the Oil Ministry building and threw up a protective shield around it. While other government buildings, ranging from the Ministry of Religious Affairs to the National Museum of Antiquities, were looted and pillaged, while hospitals were stripped of medicine and basic equipment, Iraq's oil records were safe and secure, guarded by the U.S. Military. General Richard Myers, U.S. Chairman of the Joint Cheifs of Staff, had an explanation: "I think it's, as much as anything else, a matter of priorities."

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The amount of oil that Iraq brings to market will not just determine the living standards of Iraqis but affect everything from the Russian economy to the price Americans pay for gasoline, from the stability of Saudi Arabia to Iran's future.

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The U.S.

For more than half-century, American foreign policy involving oil has been cloaked in intrigue and deception, from the overthrow of the Premier of Iran in 1953 to the arming of Afghan rebels through the 1980s, from the permanent establishment of a military presence in the Persian Gulf to the early support of Saddam Hussein in Iraq. If Iraq is now handled openly - meaning the war really was about liberating Iraq from a dictator and the rest of the world from a security threat, as the Bush Administration asserts, and not about gaining control of oil reserves, as much of the rest of the world believes - it will be a historic first.

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But would the U.S. actually throttle a country's production to keep the peace? In Iraq, restricted production is an old story. It has often been the victim, ever since oil was discovered near Kirkuk in 1927, within miles of the biblical fiery furnace of Nebuchadnezzar. The Iraq Petroleum Co., jointly owned by U.S., British, French and Dutch oil giants, drilled the first well. It gushed at a rate of 100,000 bbl. a day. That much cheap oil was the last thing the international oil companies wanted. They clamped a lid on the well and sat on the field through the 1930s because the world was awash in oil, and prices were already depressed. Texas crude had falled from $1.30 per bbl. to 5 cents.

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Iraq could produce as much as 12 million bbl. daily, easily making it the worlds' No.1 producer.

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That's something that the House of Saud cannot afford. The midpoint of the so-called acceptable selling-price range for world oil, $25 per bbl., is pegged to meet the essential demands of the royal family, whose corruption is so pervasive it would make Saddam Hussein envious.

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Despite all the oil billions, poockets of poverty have emerged, and debt has soared out of control. ..... Much of the population is poorly educated....."Most young Saudis are not equipped when they graduate from school to perform the jobs necessary to operate a modern economy. Instead many are employed, if that is the right word, as religious police. Young Saudis' anger based on their lack of useful work and their indoctrination is palpable."

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|Blah Blah|Thinking Out Loud|Jane Eliz||Talk Soup |

[Rev9Volts]

as memphis mike said every war has a propaganda machine. whether rumsfield was simplifying things or not i can not say. perhaps he meant "it is not about oil it is saddam and freeing the people", and left off "well if they have oil an added benefit.



go back to even if it was a lot about oil, still the iraqi people are better off. look at africa and the hundreds of thousands killed betwee tutsies and hutues (sp?). clinton and the un ignored them because no one would benefit from sending troups.



remember in another post i wrote about in bush's state of the uniion speech. he said something like.... we will cut off the funding of terrorists and also the countries that fund them. if saudi arabia does indeed fund terrorism and many nations start buying iraqi oil instead of saudi oil the the saudies will not be able to afford to fund terrorism and thus the world is a better place.



by the way time magazine is a very liberal one. read anything you can find and they will always be for democrats and against republicans.

[NRKofOver]

Rev, I think with the current state of affairs there are unfortunately more questions than answers. How are the Iraqi people better off? They are not yet reaping the benefits of their oil reserves. If any money is coming from oil it's being used to pay American and European companies to rebuild Iraq. I would respect this administration a lot more if they said that the first order of business in Iraq would be to rebuild the country and the first companies to be hired will be Iraqi whenever possible.



But of course, we don't hear things like this. We hear about multi-billion dollar contracts being awared to privately owned American companies. And in the meantime, we're spending American taxpayer dollars at a massive rate for the continued war in Iraq. Little of which will come back to the average American in any form.



It would be nice to believe that Iraq could bring oil prices down with opening their reserves, but once again that's unlikely. Political pressure from their middle-east neighbors and American pressure will insure that Saudi Arabia maintains it's high standards of living through bloated oil prices. Texans want to keep oil prices bloated.



And imagine being an Iraqi. After decades of seeing your nations natural resources used to benefit someone other than the people of the nation, he's gone and replaced by a whole bunch of new non-Iraqis who want to benefit from the natural resources. I'm guessing if I was Iraqi, I'd be pretty pissed off too. Unfortunately, if you don't tow the US led party line, you will not be a part of any reformed Iraqi government. We are establishing a puppet 'democratic' regime. Interesting approach. Democracy with expectations.

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