O ja, hier ging het de Westerse terroristen om: olie, de rest was allemaal propaganda voor de commerciele journalisten om aan hun publiek te verkopen.
'The door to Iraq's oil opens
By M K Bhadrakumar
The cynosure of Western eyes at the meeting of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, commonly known as OPEC, in Abu Dhabi, the United Arab Emirates, last December 5 was an unexpected personality - Iraqi Oil Minister Hussain al-Shahristani. But that wasn't a chance occurrence. By the time OPEC gathered in Vienna six weeks later, it was beyond doubt that Shahristani was on the way to becoming a celebrity in the West. Shahristani is "a rare thing" in politics, to quote Toby Lodge, the well-known scholar on Iraq at the International Institute of Strategic Studies in London - "not too religious, not too political, not too secular, not too pro-American Shi'ite who [GrandAyatollah Ali] Sistani would talk to". But for the ease with which Shahristani traversed in his later years the dividing line that separates religiosity and idealism from worldliness and pragmatism, Shahristani would have become a cult figure for human-rights activists, given his extraordinary background as a top nuclear scientist who turned a stubborn dissident, and then a reckless jail breaker from Saddam Hussein's Abu Ghraib prison where he was tortured and tucked away in solitary confinement for an impossibly long 10 years till 1991. But in Abu Dhabi, if Shahristani became a rising star for the Western media, that was for an entirely different reason. It was hardly metaphysical. Plainly speaking, the media had good enough reason to flatter him and pamper his vanities. Iraq's 'super giants' Of course, the soft-spoken, English-speaking Iraqi Shi'ite dissident leader was a familiar face in Western capitals through the 1990s. But today, he is no longer a political fugitive. He is no longer an Iraqi dissident seeking patronage. On the contrary, Shahristani finds himself in an enviable position as a creator of wealth for the Western world. He holds the key to the door that opens out to the magical world of Iraqi oil. Iraq's proven reserves of oil are only smaller than those of Saudi Arabia and Iran - and Iraq is only about 30% explored. Experts are generally of the view that Iraq's actual oil reserves could well turn out to be at least double the 115 billion barrels of proven reserves. Beyond that, it is anybody's guess as to the scale of Iraq's as-yet-untapped gas reserves. And Shahristani is visibly getting ready to negotiate the contracts for Iraq's "super giants". In the idiom of Big Oil, "super giants" are fields with at least five billion barrels of oil in reserve. Iraq's super giants are Kirkuk (in Kurdistan), Majnoon (bordering Iran), Rumaila North and South (in the south), West Qurna (west of Basra) and Zubair (in the southeast) fields, and, possibly, the Nahr Umr and East Baghdad fields. In addition, Iraq is estimated to have 22 "giant" fields, each having more than 1 billion barrels of oil. In fact, Iraq may host the largest untapped reserves in the world. There is a strong likelihood that Iraq's reserves may turn out to be exponentially higher than the current estimations, which are based on old-style seismic surveys. All said, unsurprisingly, the world oil market is in a tizzy when Shahristani says something, anything. He is about to sign the contracts for these and many other large Iraqi oil-producing fields.'
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