Oil 4

Collega's, nu niet zeuren, maar jullie huiswerk doen. Dit was in 2003 een van de eerste foto's uit - toen nog door jullie - 'het bevrijde Bagdad' genoemd. Het eerste gebouw dat werd 'bevrijd' en stevig werd bewaakt was het ministerie van ... twee keer raden, het staat er boven, juist olie. En de rest volgt van zelf. Ik heb het onderstaande gemaild gekregen en ik geef het nu weer aan jullie. Doe je best, en vertel je publiek hoe het werkelijk in elkaar steekt.

-----Oorspronkelijk bericht-----
Van: International Justice Watch Discussion List [mailto:JUSTWATCH-L@LISTSERV.BUFFALO.EDU] Namens Garth Cartledge
Verzonden: donderdag 25 oktober 2007 9:14
Aan: JUSTWATCH-L@LISTSERV.BUFFALO.EDU
Onderwerp: [JUSTWATCH] Endgame for Iraqi Oil
It seems that there is a test of honesty coming for the US.

Endgame for Iraqi Oil?
By Jack Miles
TomDispatch.com
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/102407E.shtml
Wednesday 24 October 2007
The Sovereignty Showdown in Iraq
The oil game in Iraq may be almost up. On September 29th, like a
landlord serving notice, the government of Iraq
<http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/30/world/middleeast/30iraq.html>announced
that the next annual renewal of the United Nations Security Council
mandate for a multinational force in Iraq - the only legal basis for
a continuation of the American occupation - will be the last. That
was, it seems, the first shoe to fall. The second may be an
announcement terminating the little-noticed, but crucial companion
Security Council mandate governing the disposition of Iraq's oil revenues.
By December 31, 2008, according to Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari,
the government of Iraq intends to have replaced the existing mandate
for a multinational security force with a conventional bilateral
security agreement with the United States, an agreement of the sort
that Washington has with Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and several other
countries in the Middle East. The Security Council has always paired
the annual renewal of its mandate for the multinational force with
the renewal of a second mandate for the management of Iraqi oil
revenues. This happens through the "Development Fund for Iraq," a
kind of escrow account set up by the occupying powers after the
overthrow of the Saddam Hussein regime and recognized in 2003 by U.N.
Security Council Resolution 1483. The oil game will be up if and when
Iraq announces that this mandate, too, will be terminated at a date
certain in favor of resource-development agreements that - like the
envisioned security agreement - match those of other states in the region.
The game will be up because, as Antonia Juhasz
<http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/13/opinion/13juhasz.html>pointed out
last March in a New York Times op-ed, "Whose Oil Is It, Anyway?":
"Iraq's neighbors Iran, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia?. have outlawed
foreign control over oil development. They all hire international oil
companies as contractors to provide specific services as needed, for
a limited duration, and without giving the foreign company any direct
interest in the oil produced."
By contrast, the oil legislation
<http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/174779/michael_schwartz_the_prize_of_iraqi_
oil>now
pending in the Iraqi parliament awards foreign oil companies coveted,
long-term, 20-35 year contracts of just the sort that neighboring
oil-producers have rejected for decades. It also places the Iraqi oil
industry under the control of an appointed body that would include
representatives of international oil companies as full voting members.
The news that the duly elected government of Iraq is exercising its
limited sovereignty to set a date for termination of the American
occupation radically undercuts all discussion in Congress or by
American presidential candidates of how soon the U.S. occupation of
Iraq may "safely" end. Yet if, by the same route, Iraq were to resume
full and independent control over the world's third-largest proven
oil reserves - 200 to 300 million barrels of light crude worth as
much as <http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n20/holt01_.html>$30 trillion at
today's prices - a politically incorrect question might break rudely
out of the Internet universe and into the mainstream media world,
into, that is, the open: Has the Iraq war been an oil war from the outset?
Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan evidently
<http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/article2461214.ece>thought
so or so he indicated in a single sentence in his recent memoir: "I
am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what
everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil." When asked, Gen.
John Abizaid, former CENTCOM commander who oversaw three and a half
years of the American occupation of Iraq,
<http://www.juancole.com/2007/10/gen-abizaid-iraq-about-petroleum.html>agree
d.
"Of course it's about oil, we can't really deny that," he said during
a roundtable discussion at Stanford University. These confessions
validated the suspicions of foreign observers too numerous to count.
Veteran security analyst Thomas Powers
<http://www.nybooks.com/articles/20597>observed in the New York
Review of Books recently:
What it was only feared the Russians might do [by invading
Afghanistan in the 1980s] the Americans have actually done - they
have planted themselves squarely astride the world's largest pool of
oil, in a position potentially to control its movement and to coerce
all the governments who depend on that oil. Americans naturally do
not suspect their own motives but others do. The reaction of the
Russians, the Germans, and the French in the months leading up to the
war suggests that none of them wished to give Americans the power
which [former National Security Adviser Zbigniew] Brzezinski had
feared was the goal of the Soviets.
Apologists for the war point out lamely that the United States
imports only a small fraction of its oil from Iraq, but what matters,
rather obviously, is not Iraq's current exports but its reserves.
Before the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, media mogul Rupert Murdoch
<http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F05E4D9163CF934A35756C0A962
9C8B63&n=Top%2FReference%2FTimes%20Topics%2FSubjects%2FI%2FInternational%20R
elations>said,
"The greatest thing to come out of this for the world economy, if you
could put it that way, would be $20 a barrel for oil." In the
twenty-first century's version of the "Great Game" of nineteenth
century imperialism, the Bush administration made a colossal gamble
that Iraq could become a kind of West Germany or
<http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/174807/>South Korea on the Persian
Gulf - a federal republic with a robust, oil-exporting economy, a
rising standard of living, and a set of U.S. bases that would
guarantee lasting American domination of the most resource-strategic
region on the planet. The political half of that gamble has already
been lost, but the Bush administration has proven adamantly unwilling
to accept the loss of the economic half, the oil half, without a
desperate fight. Perhaps the five super-bases that the U.S. has been
constructing in Iraq for as many as 20,000 troops each, plus the
<http://www2.ljworld.com/news/2007/oct/07/problems_plague_new_embassy/>ill-b
uilt
super-embassy (the largest on the planet) it has been constructing
inside the Green Zone, will suffice to maintain American control over
the oil reserves, even in defiance of international law and the
officially stated wishes of the Iraqi people - but perhaps not.
Blackwater and the Sovereignty Showdown
In any case, a kind of slow-motion showdown may lie not so far ahead;
and, during the past weeks, we may have been given a clue as to how
it could unfold. Recall that after the gunning down of at least 17
Iraqis in a Baghdad square, Prime Minister al-Maliki demanded that
the State Department
<http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-blackwater20sep20,0,589
1686.story?coll=la-home-center>dismiss
and punish the trigger-happy private security firm, Blackwater USA,
which was responsible for the safety of American diplomatic personnel
in Iraq. He further demanded that the immunity former occupation head
L. Paul Bremer III had granted, in 2004, to all such private security
firms be revoked. Startled, the Bush administration briefly grounded
its diplomatic operations, then defiantly
<http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/22/world/middleeast/22iraq.html?ex=134811360
0&en=1162c4e4950a0a1a&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss>resumed
them - with security still provided by Blackwater. Within days,
though, Bush found himself face-to-face in New York with al-Maliki
for discussions whose topic National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley
revealingly named as
<http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-iraq26sep26,1,5486955.s
tory>"Iraqi
sovereignty." Who would blink first?
We're still waiting to see, but in the wake of an Iraqi investigation
ended with a demand for
<http://www.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/meast/10/08/iraq.main/index.html>$8
million compensation for each of the 17 murdered Baghdadis,
Blackwater is reportedly
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/18/AR200710180
0260_pf.html>"on
its way out" of security responsibility in Iraq, probably by the
six-month deadline that al-Maliki has demanded. Despite its disgrace,
the well-connected private security company continues to win
lucrative State Department security contracts. Blackwater expert
Jeremy Scahill
<http://www.pbs.org/Bmoyers/journal/10192007/profile.html>told Bill
Moyers that losing the Iraq gig would only slightly affect
Blackwater's bottom line, but could grievously inconvenience U.S.
diplomatic operations in Iraq. In forcing such a crisis on the State
Department, the al-Maliki government, whose powerlessness has been an
assumption unchallenged from left or right (in or out of Iraq),
suddenly looks a good deal stronger.
But oil matters more to Washington than Blackwater does. In
September, when the effort to enact U.S.-favored oil legislation - a
much-announced "benchmark" of both the White House and Congress -
<http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/13/world/middleeast/13baghdad.html>collapsed
in Iraq's legislature, the coup de grace seemed to be delivered by a
wildcat agreement between the Kurdistan Regional Government and Hunt
Oil of Dallas, Texas, headed by Ray L. Hunt, a longtime Bush ally and
a member of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. This
agreement, undertaken against the stated wishes of the central
government, provides for the separate development of Kurdistan's oil
resources and puts the Kurds in blatant, preemptive violation of the
pending legislation. It makes, in fact, such a mockery of that
legislation that the prospect of its passage before the Development
Fund mandate expires is now vanishingly small.
Endgame for Iraqi Oil?
If the mandate expires and the law is not passed, then what? Then
others in Iraq may well seek to follow the Kurdish example and cut
comparable deals with whomever they wish. The central government,
even if it has lost effective control of the Kurdish north and the
Sunni west, could well ratify resource-separatism by contracting for
the development of the oil resources in the territory generally
remaining under its control. Thus, a new, Iran-allied, oil-rich,
nine-province Shiite Iraq could match Kurdistan's deal with one of
its own, perhaps even with ready-and-willing China. Will any
combination of American military and diplomatic pressure suffice to
stop such an untoward outcome?
Clearly, some in Washington still think so. Shortly before the
collapse of the Iraqi oil legislation effort, Bush's Commerce
Department began quietly
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/09/09/AR200709090
1398.html>advertising
for an Arabic-speaking legal advisor to help it in "providing
technical assistance to Iraq to create a legal and tax environment
conducive to domestic and foreign investment in Iraq's key economic
sectors, starting with the mineral resources sector." (Read: starting
with oil.) As it happens, the job description overlaps heavily with
that of the Development Fund for Iraq's existing International
Advisory and Monitoring Board, whose responsibility, according to
U.N. Security Council Resolution 1483, has been to see to it "that
all export sales of petroleum, petroleum products, and natural gas
from Iraq?. shall be made consistent with prevailing international
marketing best practices." Is the Commerce Department already
planning for the demise of this board? Like the super-embassy and the
super-bases, this bit of Commerce Department staffing-up bespeaks the
urge to continue an invasive American presence in Iraq, including
Iraq's energy sector, long after December 31, 2008.
But if the occupation is shut down legally after that date and if
Iraqi control over Iraqi oil reverts - legally, at least - to
something close to pre-war status, that Commerce Department expert
may find him or herself playing a less-than-major role in Baghdad.
Instead, expect a new role for Iraq's hitherto excluded pool of
domestic expertise. The Iraq National Oil Company began operations
back in 1961; its legacy includes a skilled work force of trained oil
workers. Notable, in fact, among those opposed to the failed oil
legislation is the Iraqi Federation of Oil Unions. Its members
<http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/56301/>object to provisions in the
legislation that permit the hiring of foreign oil workers rather than
Iraqis and - in classic Bush Administration fashion - exclude the
union from any participation in contract negotiations. The
Federation's protests have attracted a letter of support signed by
<http://www.nobelwomensinitiative.org/news.php?WEBYEP_DI=129>six
Nobel Peace Prize laureates.
Even with Iraqi expertise duly factored in, oil remains a complicated
business, and foreign expertise and capital will remain indispensable
in Iraq. Still, for the Shiite-dominated central government, the most
trusted foreign supplier of supplementary expertise, manpower, and
even capital would seem to be Iran. For now, the United States is
paying many of the salaries in Baghdad; but Iran's president,
predicting an American withdrawal, has lately declared his
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,,2157718,00.html>readiness to
"fill the [regional power] gap, with the help of neighbors and
regional friends like Saudi Arabia, and with the help of the Iraqi
nation." This invitation to regional collaboration will surely strike
the less populous, militarily more vulnerable Saudis as disingenuous
in the extreme, but Iran may be hard to stop. As former ambassador
Peter Galbraith has
<http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/174838>explained: "Since 2005,
Iraq's Shiite-led government has concluded numerous economic,
political, and military agreements with Iran. The most important
would link the two countries' strategic oil reserves by building a
pipeline from southern Iraq to Iran, while another commits Iran to
providing extensive military assistance to the Iraq government." On
Oct. 17, the al-Maliki regime flexed its supposedly non-existent
muscle yet again by
<http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/18/world/middleeast/18grid.html?_r=1&hp=&ore
f=slogin&pagewanted=print>awarding
$1.1 billion in contracts to Iran and China to build enormous power
plants in Baghdad's Shiite Sadr City and between the two Shiite holy
cities of Najaf and Karbala.
The prospect that, in the endgame for Iraqi oil, the victor might be
Shiite Iran (and indirectly Communist China) may help explain recent
American calls for the replacement of the devoutly Shiite Prime
Minister al-Maliki. Yet, even if American pressure leads to
al-Maliki's ouster, the Iraqi parliament cannot be ousted with him.
The prime minister's announcement that the next renewal of the
multi-force mandate would be the last came, in fact, in response to a
binding resolution in parliament that the next renewal, unlike
previous ones, may not be at the request of the prime minister alone,
but only with the advice and consent of parliament. It has voted once
already, in a <http://www.alternet.org/story/51624/>non-binding
resolution, to require the United States to set a timetable for withdrawal.
Fragile as it is, the government of Iraq enjoys international legal
recognition, and the underestimated al-Maliki is evidently not
without resources when it comes to asserting Iraqi sovereignty over
American autonomy within Iraq's borders. In "Blackwatergate," he
found a remarkable pressure point, declaring that no new law would be
passed in Iraq until the Blackwater matter was resolved to his
satisfaction. Nor was al-Maliki necessarily whistling in the dark
when he
<http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-maliki23aug23,1,5680051
.story?coll=la-headlines-world>warned
his American critics, "We can find friends elsewhere."
The expiration date that Iraq has now set for the operation of a
multinational force on its territory coincides almost exactly with
the end of the Bush administration. As that date nears, the endgame
question may become: How far can the administration go in repudiating
its own erstwhile agenda and returning Iraq to its pre-war status -
that is, to U.S.-backed Sunni domination of Iraqi domestic politics.
That would, of course, result in armed Iraqi hostility to the
administration's enemy of enemies in the region, Iran, and a resigned
return to collaboration with the Saudi-dominated Organization of the
Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) in the management of the world
oil market, all under a largely offshore U.S. military umbrella. Will
the fallback dream now be the one the President's father entertained
after Gulf War I - the creation in Baghdad of a kinder, gentler
Saddam Hussein with whom, to use the classic phrase, the U.S. can "do
business"?
Time will tell, but not too much time. The eerie silence of the Bush
administration about oil grows all the more deafening as the price of
crude climbs toward $100 a barrel. Blood for oil may never have been
a good deal, but so much blood for no oil at all may seem a far worse one.
----------
Jack Miles is senior fellow for religious affairs with the
Pacific Council on International Relations and professor of English
and religious studies at the University of California, Irvine. He is
the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning
<http://www.amazon.com/dp/0679743685/ref=nosim/?tag=nationbooks08-20>God:
A Biography, among other works.'