The whole war for oil accusation? Pretty much agit-prop. Iraq recently auctioned off seven major oil fields, guess which country was absent from the purchase?
The auction was to award service contracts rather than the production-sharing agreements that the major corporations prefer. The price was set at between $1.15 and $1.90 per barrel, as opposed to the $4 that the bidders originally proposed. And American corporations were generally not the winners in an auction where consortia identified with Malaysia, Russia, and even Angola did best. (ExxonMobil and Occidental have, in previous negotiations, been awarded contacts in other Iraqi oil fields.)
If Iraq was indeed an exercise in militant imperialism, why not take them all? Maybe because that was never the intention.
But what is beneficial to us, and especially to Iraqis, the impact on the foreign market a free and stable Iraq has on the oil industry. As of now, Iraq is capable of 2.5 million barrels of production a day, but senior officials within the country believe that could be 12 million by 2016.
What this means is that Iraq could quite soon be in a position to rival the output of Saudi Arabia and Iran. This is precisely what many of us in the regime-change camp used to point out: the huge, glittering prize of a democratic and federal Iraq situated between two parasitic theocracies and capable of challenging their oil duopoly.
This could explain some of the Saudi and Iranian support for the the ever-shrinking insurgency – pure and simple economics. Whether Islamic fundamentalist, fascist or Marxist – truth is, at heart we’re all capitalists. Think IEDs meet Wall Street.
Even more optimistic is the numbers. Hitchens puts the 12 million-per-day mark as the low-end of the scale. With the regime gone, new oil has been discovered, and throughout the country. This is a huge factor in a unified and stable Iraq for two reasons. One, tribalism doesn’t stand up well to the all-mighty dollar.
The last time I was in Baghdad, I stayed in the house of a Kurdish member of the government—a man who had spent hard years of his life fighting for, at minimum, an autonomous Kurdistan within Iraq. “But now I sit on the budget committee,” he told me, “and I see how incredibly wealthy this country could be. I tell my friends back home in the north: Don’t walk out on your share of this.”
Two, vast discoveries on various turf gives a regional feel to the populace, not a religious one. All the marks of a type of federalism.
In the barbaric days of dictatorship and aggression, Saddam Hussein’s Sunni minority of a minority in Tikrit had to exert despotism over the Shiite and Kurdish majority because it was mainly under their soil that the country’s chief resource was located. Now, in bold contrast, there is a petrochemical basis for federalism, a federalism not defined by religion or ethnicity but by province and region.
All the more reason not to walk out on what has the makings of a major success story.
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Next stop: Mexico. As some comedian I know whose last name rhymes with “filet it,” they’ve got tons of oil and who’s gonna stop us? They’re all here!
The Mexican government is swallowing nearly every profit from its oil industry, at a rate of 75-percent plus, empowering a few billionaires while virtually extinguishing any hope for a burgeoning middle class. As bad as corruption is in its police force in regard to drugs, it’s nearly as bad in the oil industry. Clean up the corruption, liberalize the government and the economy (I mean “classical” liberalize, in the Adam Smith context), you end the immigration problem.
Well, we ARE going to need a new state, after Cali goes back to being a territory.
I blame George Bush.
So do I.
As stupid as the “blood for oil” argument is and was, check this out. I was lurking around Democratic Underground when Obama announced the surge in Afghanistan, just to see the reaction on the left. They were as sullen and all complainey as only Dems can be, and there was a significant portion of them blaming it on corporate interests getting to BHO and convincing him to continue the occupation so they could continue to bleed Afghanistan dry.
Because, you know, Afghanistan is famous for its huge supply of exploitable natural resources.
God bless the DU – who could dare think of questions like “how do we extort resources from country with the geography of Tatooine” when there is boilerplate rhetoric to toss around. It’s always as simple as a Law and Order episode with these dopes.
LOL Jeff!
It’s wonderful news to hear that Iraq’s economy is on the rebound; I don’t really care if the U.S. benefits financially from it or not. Those 25 million people have suffered enough the last 30 years, and they deserve some measure of peace and prosperity, for God’s sake.
And it would be nice if we had a genuine ally in the Middle East to buy our oil from, for a change.
Having said that, you can forget about the anti-war Left ever admitting that their “War For Oil” conspiracy theory was wrong. It’s not based in fact or reality and it never was, so why should they admit they were wrong now? This is the “JFK Assassination” of the ’00s, and disproven or not, the Left will never let it die.
As Reagan pointed out, they know so much that isn’t so. The blood for oil becomes a dogma, as well as corporate greed being a major problem and Iraq being invaded because Bush was getting even, etc. Global cooling gives way to global warming and then to climate change because the dogmas are still a reality. And if dogmas conflict, they are merely combined. None of it gets tossed, because how could so much effort and emotion be lost in something that wasn’t true. It accumulates like a huge Santa sack that they tote around. Carrying so much baggage is bound to make one bitter and miserable. You’re right, JimmyC. They won’t let any of it die.