On Oct 22, 9:34 pm, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> Hiroshima,Nagasaki,Genocide in Australia and North America
>
> http://countercurrents.org/holt221007.htm
>
> It's The Oil
>
> By Jim Holt
>
> 22 October, 2007
> London Review Of Books
>
> Iraq is 'unwinnable', a 'quagmire', a 'fiasco': so goes the received
> opinion. But there is good reason to think that, from the Bush-Cheney
> perspective, it is none of these things. Indeed, the US may be 'stuck'
> precisely where Bush et al want it to be, which is why there is no
> 'exit strategy'.
>
> Iraq has 115 billion barrels of known oil reserves. That is more than
> five times the total in the United States. And, because of its long
> isolation, it is the least explored of the world's oil-rich nations. A
> mere two thousand wells have been drilled across the entire country;
> in Texas alone there are a million. It has been estimated, by the
> Council on Foreign Relations, that Iraq may have a further 220 billion
> barrels of undiscovered oil; another study puts the figure at 300
> billion. If these estimates are anywhere close to the mark, US forces
> are now sitting on one quarter of the world's oil resources. The value
> of Iraqi oil, largely light crude with low production costs, would be
> of the order of $30 trillion at today's prices. For purposes of
> comparison, the projected total cost of the US invasion/occupation is
> around $1 trillion.
>
> Who will get Iraq's oil? One of the Bush administration's 'benchmarks'
> for the Iraqi government is the passage of a law to distribute oil
> revenues. The draft law that the US has written for the Iraqi congress
> would cede nearly all the oil to Western companies. The Iraq National
> Oil Company would retain control of 17 of Iraq's 80 existing
> oilfields, leaving the rest - including all yet to be discovered oil -
> under foreign corporate control for 30 years. 'The foreign companies
> would not have to invest their earnings in the Iraqi economy,' the
> analyst Antonia Juhasz wrote in the New York Times in March, after the
> draft law was leaked. 'They could even ride out Iraq's current
> "instability" by signing contracts now, while the Iraqi government is
> at its weakest, and then wait at least two years before even setting
> foot in the country.' As negotiations over the oil law stalled in
> September, the provincial government in Kurdistan simply signed a
> separate deal with the Dallas-based Hunt Oil Company, headed by a
> close political ally of President Bush.
>
> How will the US maintain hegemony over Iraqi oil? By establishing
> permanent military bases in Iraq. Five self-sufficient 'super-bases'
> are in various stages of completion. All are well away from the urban
> areas where most casualties have occurred. There has been precious
> little reporting on these bases in the American press, whose dwindling
> corps of correspondents in Iraq cannot move around freely because of
> the dangerous conditions. (It takes a brave reporter to leave the
> Green Zone without a military escort.) In February last year, the
> Washington Post reporter Thomas Ricks described one such facility, the
> Balad Air Base, forty miles north of Baghdad. A piece of (well-
> fortified) American suburbia in the middle of the Iraqi desert, Balad
> has fast-food joints, a miniature golf course, a football field, a
> cinema and distinct neighbourhoods - among them, 'KBR-land', named
> after the Halliburton subsidiary that has done most of the
> construction work at the base. Although few of the 20,000 American
> troops stationed there have ever had any contact with an Iraqi, the
> runway at the base is one of the world's busiest. 'We are behind only
> Heathrow right now,' an air force commander told Ricks.
>
> The Defense Department was initially coy about these bases. In 2003,
> Donald Rumsfeld said: 'I have never, that I can recall, heard the
> subject of a permanent base in Iraq discussed in any meeting.' But
> this summer the Bush administration began to talk openly about
> stationing American troops in Iraq for years, even decades, to come.
> Several visitors to the White House have told the New York Times that
> the president himself has become fond of referring to the 'Korea
> model'. When the House of Representatives voted to bar funding for
> 'permanent bases' in Iraq, the new term of choice became 'enduring
> bases', as if three or four decades wasn't effectively an eternity.
>
> But will the US be able to maintain an indefinite military presence in
> Iraq? It will plausibly claim a rationale to stay there for as long as
> civil conflict simmers, or until every groupuscule that conveniently
> brands itself as 'al-Qaida' is exterminated. The civil war may
> gradually lose intensity as Shias, Sunnis and Kurds withdraw into
> separate enclaves, reducing the surface area for sectarian friction,
> and as warlords consolidate local authority. De facto partition will
> be the result. But this partition can never become de jure. (An
>
