Time for an update on the infamous proposed Iraq oil law:

The Guardian reports that the oil law is stalled in Parliament, with oil minister Sharistani admitting there is "no sign of movement".

UPI reports that Ireland's Petrel Resources wants to develop a block in the western desert under a Saddam era law (containing a measly 5 billion barrels or so).

Ireland's Petrel Resources expects a production-sharing agreement for a deal it signed with Saddam Hussein for a block in Iraq's western desert. David Horgan, managing director of Petrel Resources, said the exploration and production deal will give the firm "a net production interest in Block 6 of 25 to 35 percent." "It now looks like the existing hydrocarbon laws will be used with PSA agreements in Southern Iraq," he told the British-based investment news site Proactive Investors. "Any new contracts will include local infrastructure and possibly paying some revenues to local charities." Petrel predicts 5 billion barrels of oil are to be found in the block. ...

The draft oil law remains stuck as Iraq's Kurdistan Regional Government and Baghdad differ on how decentralized control over the oil should be. PSAs themselves are controversial. They are highly favored by international oil companies that are reimbursed for all costs and then get a cut of the oil itself, as well as able to claim the reserves when reporting to Wall Street. Iraq's oil sector is nationalized and Iraq's unions, among others, don't want international oil companies to have the footprint in Iraq PSAs would offer. Iraq's oil fields have excellent find rates for exploration, and the oil is easy to produce and of high quality. "We expect to be invited soon to discuss Block 6," Horgan said, adding the block has shown to have easy to reach oil. "If we sign by summer we will deploy a seismic crew over the winter 2008/9, allowing a well the following winter."

The Washington Post has an article demonstrating its role as the US version of Pravda, piously echoing the party line about the proposed law "helping the Iraqis to share the revenue among themselves" (splutter). The Iraqi administration is trying to just go around parliament it seems - its just like democracy in the US really !

Iraq's cabinet has given the green light to the Oil Ministry to sign agreements with international oil companies to help increase the nation's crude output, a ministry official said Wednesday. The two-year deals, known as technical support agreements, or TSAs, are designed to develop five producing fields to add 500,000 barrels per day to the country's 2.4 million barrels per day output. Last December, Royal Dutch Shell PLC, BP PLC, ExxonMobil Corp. and Chevron Corp. submitted technical and financial proposals for the five fields and received counterproposals from the Iraqi side.

In January, representatives from the companies and Iraq met again in Amman, Jordan, and they will hold a third round of discussions later this month, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to release information. In Vienna, Iraq's Oil Minister Hussein al-Shahristani said Iraq intends to compensate these companies with crude oil rather than in cash, the Dow Jones Newswires reported Wednesday. ...


The oil giants are among more than 70 international firms that met the ministry's deadline of Feb. 18 to compete to help develop Iraq's oil reserves, seen as vital to providing the funds to rebuild the shattered country. Iraq is in dire need of expertise from international oil companies to achieve the Oil Ministry's target of 3 million barrels per day by the end of 2008. The country has been relying on a Saddam Hussein-era natural resources law until Parliament approves a new oil law to regulate the international oil companies' work and share Iraq's oil resources among the country's Shiites, Sunni Arabs and Kurds.

Shameless Democrat Senator Carl Levin is making the bizarre claim that Iraqis should pay for all the damage caused by the US invasion with what little oil revenue they are allowed to keep - which will apparently simply formalise the petrodollar recycling that is already taking place (one of the few remaining supports for the sagging US dollar).

The chairman of the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee said on Tuesday he may try to require Iraq to spend more of its oil revenue on reconstruction instead of investing the money in foreign banks. "What kind of an absurdity is it that we are paying for the reconstruction of Iraq with American taxpayers dollars if Iraqi oil sales, to a significant degree, are going into foreign banks and not being used for their own reconstruction," said Sen. Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat. Before the U.S. invasion of Iraq in early 2003, top Bush administration officials suggested some war costs could be financed through Iraqi oil revenues. That never occurred and U.S. taxpayers have instead seen about a half-trillion dollars of their money spent on the war so far.

In the meantime, there are estimates that Iraq has up to $30 billion in assets invested in U.S. financial institutions. Levin said he would ask Congress' investigative arm, the General Accountability Office, or others in the U.S. government to look into Iraq's use of oil revenues. He said he would decide after such an investigation whether to use this year's appropriations process to force Baghdad to change its financial practices.

Levin said Congress could condition future war funds on Iraq using its own revenues for reconstruction, reducing the burden on U.S. taxpayers. According to government estimates, Congress has given the Bush administration $16 billion for reconstruction and relief efforts in Iraq. "They (Iraq) are selling about $50 billion a year in oil. What are they doing with all the money?", Levin asked.

Sending it straight back to you, mate.

Energy Investment Strategies has an article on a book outlining what few seem willing to publically recognise - Iraq has more oil than Saudi Arabia (Ace at TOD has a scathing look at Aramco's PR practices, by the way).

A new book written by a team of experts provides a field-by-field detailed explication of the thesis that Iraqi oil reserves are substantially greater than previously thought. The proven reserves were officially put at 112 billion barrels in 2007 but the final figure could exceed 300 billion barrels. The proven reserves of the Kurdish region are expected to double within the next two years.

Iraq currently produces just over 2 mb/d, down from 2.5 mb/d prior to the U.S. invasion. The authors believe it could boost production to 3.5 mb/d before the impact of a new oil law is felt. They suggest that a 1980’s-vintage plan to produce 6 mb/d could eventually become realized. An initial investment of $40 billion (Dh146.8bn) is needed to put Iraq’s oil industry back on track, according to a new book.

The country is an oil superpower with the world’s third largest proven reserves – and development programmes could add billions of barrels within a few years, catapulting it to the number one position. But three major wars and more than 12 years of crippling UN sanctions have reduced the Arab state to a minor crude exporter despite the fact it is one of a handful of countries with super-giant oilfields. Meanwhile, other countries with much smaller hydrocarbon resources have become major oil exporters.

“Plans were prepared in the early 1980s to increase the production capacity to six million barrels per day (bpd) had three wars not taken place in 1980-1988, 1991 and 2003,” say the authors of the book, Hydrocarbon Exploration and Field Development in Iraq. “The looting and vandalism that followed the two Gulf wars caused great damage to oil installations. UN sanctions against Iraq added further damage due to the difficulties created in getting spare parts and in performing well services. The pre-2003 production capacity has not recovered.”

Between 1980 and 2005 Iraq suffered a loss of more than $400bn in oil revenues as a result of a massive decline in crude exports. The total loss has risen sharply over the past two years as exports remain far below target, says Fadhil Chalabi, Executive Director of the London-based Centre for Global Energy Studies (CGES), which published the 600-page book. The centre is owned by former Saudi oil minister Sheikh Ahmed Zaki Al Yamanai.
The losses reflect only the decline in oil exports calculated on a monthly price basis since the start of the Iraq-Iran war in 1980 – they do not include damage to the sector caused by conflicts, the UN embargo and looting.

Chalabi, a former senior Iraqi oil ministry official, believes the country has huge undiscovered reserves on the grounds but no major development projects have been undertaken for more than two decades. The proven reserves were officially put at 112 billion barrels in 2007 but Chalabi believes the final figure could exceed 300 billion barrels. “Iraq could have this figure, there is no exaggeration in this,” he said. His view is supported by a Western oil analyst who goes even further by saying Iraq’s real oil potential could surpass that of Saudi Arabia, which controls nearly a quarter of the world’s proven oil deposits.

Colin Lothian, a senior analyst at United Kingdom-based energy consultants Wood Mackenzie, says Iraq has many giant oilfields that have remained undeveloped. “Iraq’s remaining reserves, particularly in the south, are of considerable scale, high quality and most are at a relatively immature stage in their respective development cycles,” said Lothian. There are many fields that each contain billions of barrels of oil.

“On the whole their depletion rate is very low and in several cases these fields have never been in production. If you add to that the possible results of exploration in the Western Desert and in established areas, the potential is enormous. As for whether Iraq’s reserves are larger than those in Saudi Arabia, I would certainly not rule out that possibility.

Jonathan at Past Peak points to a Patrick Cockburn article on the situation on the ground in Iraq, in the wake of the "surge".

Patrick Cockburn, in The Independent, writes that the Turkish invasion of northern Iraq only accelerates Iraq's ongoing disintegration. Excerpts:

Iraq is disintegrating faster than ever. The Turkish army invaded the north of the country last week and is still there. Iraqi Kurdistan is becoming like Gaza where Israel can send in its tanks and helicopters at will.

The US, so sensitive to any threat to Iraqi sovereignty from Iran or Syria, has blandly consented to the Turkish attack on the one part of Iraq which was at peace. The Turkish government piously claims that its army is in pursuit of PKK Turkish Kurd guerrillas, but it is unlikely to inflict serious damage on them as they hide in long-prepared bunkers and deep ravines of the Kurdish mountains. What the Turkish incursion is doing is weakening the Kurdistan Regional Government, the autonomous Kurdish zone, the creation of which is one of the few concrete achievements of the US and British invasion of Iraq five years ago.

One of the most extraordinary developments in the Iraqi war has been the success with which the White House has been able to persuade so much of the political and media establishment in the US that, by means of "the Surge", an extra 30,000 US troops, it is on the verge of political and military success in Iraq. All that is needed now, argue US generals, is political reconciliation between the Iraqi communities.

Few demands could be more hypocritical. American success in reducing the level of violence over the last year has happened precisely because Iraqis are so divided. The Sunni Arabs of Iraq were the heart of the rebellion against the American occupation. In fighting the US forces, they were highly successful. But in 2006, after the bombing of the Shia shrine at Samarra, Baghdad and central Iraq was wracked by a savage civil war between Shia and Sunni. In some months the bodies of 3,000 civilians were found, and many others lie buried in the desert or disappeared into the river. I do not know an Iraqi family that did not lose a relative, and usually more than one.

The Shia won this civil war. By the end of 2006 they held threequarters of Baghdad. The Sunni rebels, fighting the Mehdi Army Shia militia and the Shia, dominated the Iraqi army and police, and also under pressure from al Qa'ida, decided to end their war with US forces. They formed al-Sahwa, the Awakening movement, which is now allied to and paid for by the US.

In effect Iraq now has an 80,000 strong Sunni militia which does not hide its contempt for the Iraqi government, which it claims is dominated by Iranian controlled militias. The former anti-American guerrillas have largely joined al-Sahwa. The Shia majority, for its part, is determined not to let the Sunni win back their control of the Iraqi state. Power is more fragmented than ever. [...]

[I]n the long term neither Sunni nor Shia Arab want the Americans to stay in Iraq. Hitherto the only reliable American allies have been the Kurds, who are now discovering that Washington is not going to protect them against Turkey.

Very little is holding Iraq together. The government is marooned in the Green Zone. Having declared the Surge a great success, the US military commanders need just as many troops to maintain a semblance of control now as they did before the Surge. The mainly Shia police force regards al-Sahwa as anti-government guerrillas wearing new uniforms.

Meanwhile, the most any American presidential candidate will say is that the US attack on Iraq was a "mistake," a "strategic blunder," instead of what it is: a vicious crime that has destroyed a nation and inflicted incalculable suffering on its inhabitants. It's happening to real people, in a real place, now, as you read this.

The Huffington Post has a look at the enormous cost of our oil war - now estimated to be around 3 trillion dollars - sure could pay for a lot of renewable energy infrastructure with that money - "The $3,000,000,000,000 War is a Domestic Issue".

As our seemingly endless primary process reaches the homestretch and the focus shifts to the general election, we need to pull the plug on the media's disturbing habit of acting as if foreign policy and domestic policy are completely separate entities -- a pair of high stakes board games that can only be taken off the shelf and played one at a time. To hear the media tell it, combining the two would make about as much sense as using your Monopoly pieces to play Risk.

But while there is almost nothing about the Iraq war that can be labeled a success, we can declare that it has been exceedingly successful in showing how intertwined foreign and domestic policy actually are. In the book The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict, Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, along with co-author Linda Bilmes, argue that, even using "conservative assumptions," the Iraq war will cost at least $3,000,000,000,000, and likely as much as $5,000,000,000,000.

Stiglitz also argues that the war has played a major role in the current subprime credit crisis and our long, hard slog toward recession. Because of the cost of the war, the Fed flooded the system with credit. "The regulators were looking the other way and money was being lent to anybody this side of a life-support system," Stiglitz told The Australian's Peter Wilson.

The book (excerpted here by the Times of London, and here's an interview with the authors at Democracy Now) notes that the cost is 60 times the $50 - 60 billion we were told the war would cost by Don Rumsfeld. The Iraq war is already the second costliest war in American history, trailing only World War II.

Stiglitz makes the case that no country can fight a protracted war without deep and long-lasting effects on domestic policy. Particularly a protracted war paired with tax cuts. Now this doesn't mean a war shouldn't be fought (see World War II), but it does mean that our leaders should be honest about what the real costs will be. And not just in terms of dollars and cents but also in opportunity costs.

The single defining constant of the war over its disastrous, almost-five-years has been the complete and total lack of honesty from those who got us into it and have championed its continued prosecution -- including head war cheerleader John McCain. And although the driver of the 100 Year War Express is fond of offering frequent, empty, and clichéd nods to "sacrifice," he somehow thinks that's all the discussion that's needed about the costs of the war. Note to McCain: your protestations about "out of control" government spending would carry more weight if they weren't accompanied by calls for making permanent the tax cuts you once opposed as "not appropriate" in a time of war.

Maybe Saddam Hussein's head was worth $3,000,000,000,000 -- $5,000,000,000,000, maybe it wasn't (like most of the country, I believe the latter), but if McCain wants us to be there for 100, or 1,000, or a million years, he should be forced to make the case that the benefits outweigh the costs -- foreign and domestic.

As Crooked Timber's Daniel Davies notes, "the cost of the Iraq War could have underwritten Social Security for fifty years."

Or, as Aida Edemariam puts it in the Guardian, it would have paid for "8 million housing units, or 15 million public school teachers, or healthcare for 530 million children for a year, or scholarships to university for 43 million students." Of course, as John McCain himself has told us, he "doesn't really understand economics." But foreign policy does not exist in an economics vacuum.

Yet does anybody doubt that the general election is going to feature article after newscast after editorial extolling McCain's "foreign policy expertise?"

TomDispatch has a column from William Hartnung on "The Cost of a Week in Hell".

How far off were they? Well, it depends on which figure you choose to start with. Here's the range: According to key officials in the Bush administration back in 2002-2003, the invasion and reconstruction of Iraq was either going to cost $60 billion, or $100-$200 billion. Actually, we can start by tossing that top figure out, since not long after Bush economic advisor Larry Lindsey offered it in 2002, he was shown the door, in part assumedly for even suggesting something so ludicrous.

Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz championed the $60 billion figure, but added that much of the cost might well be covered by Iraqi oil revenues; the country was, after all, floating on a "sea of oil." ("To assume we're going to pay for it all is just wrong," he told a congressional hearing.) Still, let's take that $60 billion figure as the Bush baseline. If economists Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes are right in their recent calculations and this will turn out to be more than a $3 trillion war (or even a $5-7 trillion one), then the Bush administration was at least $2,940,000,000,000 off in its calculations.

That definitely qualifies as a ballpark figure for an administration that never saw a budget estimate for one of its imperial dreams that it couldn't hike. Take just one of its major "reconstruction" projects: getting the vast U.S. embassy staff out of a former palace of Saddam Hussein and into a brand-new, almost Vatican-sized "embassy," a genuine mother ship, being built from the ground up inside Baghdad's heavily fortified (and often heavily shelled) Green Zone. Originally scheduled to open in mid-2007, what will undoubtedly be the largest "diplomatic" mission on the planet was initially budgeted for $592 million. Predictably, its price tag soared another $144 million, and now comes in at $736 million, as yet unopened. In December 2007, the State Department officially certified it "substantially complete," but, as with most Bush administration construction projects in that country, it remains in a state of staggering unreadiness; two of the State Department employees who worked on it are now "under criminal investigation"; and the State Department is dragging its feet about handing over relevant documents to Congress. Ho-hum.

Nothing, of course, has been cheap for American taxpayers who are financing the Bush administration's war policies. It's been like putting up money for an administration staffed by shopaholics let loose in Neiman Marcus or gambling addicts freed to roam Las Vegas with no betting limits.

But what does money matter? After all, this administration has been spending as if there were no tomorrow. And now, with tomorrow staring them in the face, the latest scare tactic seems to be claiming that doing anything about present policies will simply be… too expensive. Not long after the price of oil crested above $103 a barrel, Karl Rove, for instance, predicted that any serious "redeployment" from Iraq would mean… $200 a barrel oil.

Sigh… Fortunately, we've got William Hartung, director of the Arms and Security Initiative at the New America Foundation, to try to put Bush spending policies in its wars of choice into perspective. ...

Also at TomDispatch, an article from Noam Chomsky on "Terrorists Wanted the World Over".

One of Noam Chomsky's latest books -- a conversation with David Barsamian -- is entitled What We Say Goes. It catches a powerful theme of Chomsky's: that we have long been living on a one-way planet and that the language we regularly wield to describe the realities of our world is tailored to Washington's interests.

Juan Cole, at his Informed Comment website, had a good example of the strangeness of this targeted language recently. When Serbs stormed the U.S. Embassy in Belgrade, he offered the following comment (with so many years of the term "Islamofascism" in mind): "…given that the Serbs are Eastern Orthodox Christians, will the Republican Party and Fox Cable News now start fulminating against 'Christofascism?'"

Of course, the minute you try to turn the Washington norm (in word or act) around, as Chomsky did in a piece entitled What If Iran Had Invaded Mexico?, you've already entered the theater of the absurd. "Terror" is a particularly good example of this. "Terror" is something that, by (recent) definition, is committed by free-floating groups or movements against innocent civilians and is utterly reprehensible (unless the group turns out to be the CIA running car bombs into Baghdad or car and camel bombs into Afghanistan, in which case it's not a topic that's either much discussed, or condemned in our world). On the other hand, that weapon of terror, air power, which is at the heart of the American way of war, simply doesn't qualify under the category of "terror" at all -- no matter how terrifying it may be to innocent civilians who find themselves underneath the missiles and bombs.

It's with this in mind that Chomsky turns to terror of every kind in the Middle East in the context of the car bombing of a major figure in Lebanon's Hizbollah movement. ...

The Asia Times has an excellent article on Iraqi oil minister Hussain al-Shahristani, now taking on "the decider" role given the failure of the proposed oil law to pass through Iraq's parliament, and his role in determining who gets to exploit the greatest prize of all. The report notes that the new mechanism for handing over the oil is almost as unpopular with the Iraqi population (ie. the owners) as the legislated handing over of the oil...

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 [Grand Ayatollah 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.

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. ...

Yetiv and Feld, with much hesitancy, proceed to make an absolutely unthinkable suggestion that the Saudi reluctance might be borne out of a possibility that Riyadh is "getting global markets ready for the possibility that they may not have enough oil to be a long-term fuel pump to the world".

After all, it merits attention that the US Energy Information Administration (EIA) significantly has revised its earlier 2000 prediction about how much oil Saudi Arabia would produce in 2010. The EIA scaled back the figure from 14.7 million barrels per day to just 11.4 million barrels per day. That is a major reduction. (Feld, incidentally, worked for 17 years for the US Department of Energy.)

In the current circumstances of the world energy scene, the above underscores why any plan to hasten the US effort to achieve greater oil independence translates in political terms as taking control of Iraq's oil reserves. There is simply no other viable alternative open to the US. Essentially, it boils down to the 20 words that the former US Federal Bank chief Alan Greenspan wrote towards the end of his memoir, The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World, "I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: The Iraq war is largely about oil." ...

Therefore, it becomes imperative that Iraq plays a major role in meeting the additional global demand of 30 mn b/d during the coming two decades. There is yet another side to it. Peak oil - when global oil production will reach a peak and then begin to fall - is a real possibility sooner or later. It has happened in the US; it is happening in Britain, the North Sea and Indonesia; it is expected to happen in Mexico and some other major oil producing countries during the coming five-year period.

In this scenario, the criticality of Iraqi oil production cannot but be overstated. Furthermore, Iraq is particularly blessed in certain other ways. Apart from its massive reserves of oil and gas, the cost of oil production in Iraq at US$1 to $2 per barrel is very low. Second, the oil fields are dispersed evenly across the country. Third, Iraq's location itself is a boon. Unlike, say, the Caspian, Siberia or the Arctic, it is easy to develop oil export routes out of Iraq heading in several directions simultaneously - the Persian Gulf, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Jordan, Syria and Turkey. All this means that rapid expansion of Iraq's oil production and the arrival of substantial amounts of Iraqi oil - exceeding 10 mn b/d - in the international market is an attainable objective. ...

In sum, as Ben Lando, United Press International's energy editor put it, "Big Oil's big dreams are close to coming true ... According to insiders, Shell, which produced a technical study of Kirkuk in 2005, wants a deal for the field. BP wants one for Rumaila, which it studied last year. Shell and BHP Billiton are angling for the Missan field in the south. ExxonMobil is interested in the southern Zubair field while the Sabha and Luhais fields are being targeted by Dome and Anadarko Petroleum. ConocoPhillips is talking with the [Iraqi] ministry about the West Qurna oil field ... Chevron and Total have teamed up in a bid for the Majnoon field."

No doubt, it is pay-off time for the four majors who didn't make an issue of the US military occupation of Iraq or the ensuing mess-ups during Paul Bremer's rule or the ensuing acute security situation, but kept going with their nose on the ground and worked with the Iraqi ministry during the past four years in conducting reservoir surveys, assisting in the drawing up of work plans and in training personnel. These oil majors simply chose to be around in Baghdad even when much of the oil industry was idling. Lando adds, "While service contracts would be highly profitable for companies, Big Oil wants risk contracts. Such deals are usually long term, covering its exploration costs and guaranteeing a profit if oil is found, and allowing them to put the reserves it discovers on the books, a boon in Wall Street's eyes." ...

Of course, Shahristani is skating on thin ice. His moves, despite the robust backing by the Bush administration, are political and highly controversial. The point is, Shahristani is virtually in a position to hand out jackpots to the oil majors. Everyone knows that apart from the security factor, the risk in exploring for crude in Iraq is virtually nil. "Historically it [oil] has been easy to find, inexpensive to produce and top quality", Lando points out.

Washington counts on Shahristani to push the oil deals through despite the vehement opposition within Iraq. First, about 70% of Iraqis firmly oppose what Shahristani is attempting. The Iraqis see what is happening as a capitulation of their national sovereignty. Iraqis look back at the nationalization of their oil industry in 1972 as a source of pride and empowerment. Second, there is vehement opposition from the labor unions in the Iraqi oil industry. They say that Iraq could increase its oil production by investing its own money and there is no pressing need at this juncture to solicit foreign investment.

Indeed, in 2006, the Iraqi Oil Ministry could only utilize 3% of its $3.5 billion reconstruction budget. The US Defense Department in a December 2007 report acknowledged, "The lack of capacity in contracting, the lack of trained budget personnel, concern about corruption and numerous other systemic structural impediments hamper faster execution."

Iraq's oil exports in 2007 brought in $35.5 billion, according to the US State Department. But a study by the Washington Times newspaper in January concluded, "Increased oil revenues stemming from high prices and improved security are piling up in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York rather than being spent on needed reconstruction projects."

To be sure, the Iraqi labor unions have a point when they say that foreign investment is not the real need for the oil industry currently, but rather the ability to invest the surplus budget. Again, the labor unions are questioning the need of foreign expertise. They insist that national expertise is available within Iraq. The fact remains that in spite of Saddam's gross mismanagement of the oil industry, Iraq had built up over the years a significant reservoir of manpower with a range of technical expertise.

"If they [Oil Ministry] are prepared to allocate more funding and spend the resources that already exist, there would be improvement and we could recruit more workers," Hassan Jumaa Awad, president of the umbrella Iraqi Federation of Oil Unions recently told the United Press International news agency. Awad alleged that Shahristani is following a "deliberate" policy of shunning domestic investment with a view to make Iraqi oil workers look incapable.

The labor unions have now sought the help of the international labor community to their demands, which also question Shahristani's intentions in awarding to international oil firms concession or risk contracts such as production-sharing agreements. Awad calls for an Iraqi oil law, "but we need to gain our full sovereignty before such a law is enacted", and he insists that if a law is to be passed, it should be approved by Iraqi voters in a referendum.

Iraq's oil unions and civil society organizations have joined hands in alleging that Washington and the present authorities in Baghdad, especially the Oil Ministry, are conspiring to hand over control over Iraq's oil to oil majors. The news agencies reported that protesters who fear that Iraq's oil wealth might be squandered met at a Middle East oil conference on February 5 in London where Iraqi and British oil industry leaders attended.

Gulf News has a column claiming that there is growing opposition to the proposed oil law in Iraq - who would have thought it...

Access to and control of Middle East oil has figured prominently in the strategic thinking of American policy makers. In the Bush administration, State Department policy planners discussed scenarios for taking over by force the oilfields of the Middle East and internationalising them.

Jane Mayer revealed in the New Yorker that a secret Bush National Security Council (NSC) document dated February 3, 2001, instructed NSC members to cooperate with Vice President Dick Cheney's Energy Task Force for "reviewing international policy towards rogue states" and "actions regarding the capture of new and existing oil and gas fields."

The Bush administration has denied that the Iraq war was for oil, and proclaimed its commitment to the preservation of Iraq's sovereignty and Iraq's territorial integrity.

Recent events, however, indicate that oil is playing a role in the looming threat to Iraq's sovereignty and territorial integrity. Sovereignty under occupation is at best nominal anyhow.

Support for Iraq's territorial integrity offered the prospect of a strong central government able to contain the conflict from spreading into a wider regional war.

It also offered the best guarantee of achieving two of Washington's important goals in Iraq: access to Iraqi oil and an 'enduring' relationship with Iraq that gave Washington, through an Iraqi national oil law, the access and control it sought.

Shortly after Bush announced in February last year his new military strategy of escalation of the war in Iraq, then US Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad welcomed progress towards an Iraqi oil law, and explained its importance in American strategic thinking about the future of Iraq.

Far from unifying Iraq, however, American pressure for an oil law is dividing the Iraqis, weakening the central government, and strengthening the separatist tendencies.

Growing opposition to the oil law at the national level in Iraq, and the failure of Bush's strategy of military escalation to stamp out the insurgency, or to secure compliance from Baghdad with Washington's agenda, could not be denied in Bush's "progress" report to the Congress in September.

Bush seems to have given up hope that a strong central government in Baghdad could ever help him achieve his goals in Iraq.

Partitioning

Last September, the US Senate voted in favour of carving up Iraq into separate autonomous regions. Senator Joseph Biden, author of the bill, stated in a television programme that failure in Iraq was inevitable and that: "there is no possibility - no possibility - of a central government governing Iraq in any near term."

A year and a half ago the Bush administration had dismissed the Bidden proposal for partitioning Iraq as "as an unworkable and irresponsible prescription for breaking apart Iraq."

The adoption of the bill by the Senate in September met with no similar condemnation from the White House.

That is because the Bush administration, as Iraqi analyst Raed Jarrar has shown in a co-authored analysis, is backing the separatists, the Iran's hardliners and the Sunni fundamentalists: "All are working - separately, but towards the same ends - against the wishes of a majority of Iraqis, who polls show want a united, sovereign country in control of its own resources and free of meddling by Washington, Tehran and other foreigners."

This has emboldened the Kurds in Northern Iraq who proceeded to act as if they were an independent state and signed their own contracts with foreign oil companies. A noticeable beneficiary of these contracts is Hunt Oil of Dallas. Hunt Oil is owned by Ray Hunt who has close ties to the Bush White House.

Past Peak has an interesting update on the surge in Iraq and the fake calm it has created.

Meanwhile the US keeps calling for their Iraq oil law (its for their own good !) to be passed, and the Iraqi parliament continues its dogged resistance, citing irreconcilable differences.

There's no denying that US troop deaths are down in Iraq. Is peace breaking out? Don't believe the hype, says Pierre Tristam:

When Kuwait was liberated in 1991 — a strange concept, Kuwait having been free neither before being invaded by Iraq nor since — its citizens lined up the streets of their capital and waved thousands of American flags as troops drove by. "Did you ever stop to wonder," a man called John Rendon proudly asked during a speech to a government agency, "how the people of Kuwait City, after being held hostage for seven long and painful months, were able to get hand-held American, and for that matter, the flags of other coalition countries?" He answered his own question: "That was one of my jobs then."

The first Bush administration hired Rendon to produce the television show known as the first Gulf War. With the Rendon Group, his public relations firm, Rendon won multi-million dollar contracts to make the American occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan look good, and do the same on behalf of the Afghan and Iraqi governments. Propaganda has been a lucrative business in these wars. It gave us such classics as the fabricated toppling of Saddam's statue in Baghdad early in the war, the taxpayer-supported Pentagon effort to plant positive stories in the Iraqi press, and the more recent mini-series about the successes of the American "surge."

The propaganda controls are clearly in effective hands today. There's been no need, as there is in more discriminating Iraq, to plant positive stories in the domestic press. For the most part the mainstream news media here seem as willing as they were in 2003 to buy the Bush administration's latest recasting of the Iraqi catastrophe as a country on the mend. But caveats grow as lush as date palm in Iraq. Here's this season’s crop.

Al-Qaida was routed. Not exactly. The semi-mythical invention of "al-Qaida in Mesopotamia" was never a force as potent as its Iraqi enemies. One thing Iraqi Shiites and Sunnis agree on is rejection of foreign meddling, be it bin Laden's or Bush's. Iraqis reviled al-Qaida before the invasion and had no connection to 9/11. They revile al-Qaida more today, now that Bush's invasion made its brand of terrorism possible on Iraqi soil. Absent American troops, ironically, al-Qaida would have faced an unrestrained assault from Shiite and Sunni militants, to whom tribe comes before religion, and religion before caliphate.

That's just as true in the rest of the Arab world. A Brookings Institution survey of Arab opinion in six countries last year showed bin Laden’s popularity never breaking 5 percent. Bin Laden's popularity in the Middle East is itself an invention, convenient to the Bush administration's offensive posture there, inconvenient to Arabs who must pay its price. Bin Laden is the Arab world's Timothy McVeigh, a fringe loon, but one lucky enough to be constantly re-validated by Bush's monomaniacal war on Islamowhatever.

Refugees are coming back: The return of 25,000 refugees from abroad, out of a total of 2 million, is deceptive. News reports have generally neglected to mention that Syria, where most of Iraq's refugees have gone, shut its door to them two months ago and is now requiring refugees already there to apply for visas — through the Syrian embassy in Baghdad. In other words, Syria is booting them out.

Our friends the Sunnis. The Bush administration says the new alliance with former Sunni insurgents is a benefit of the surge's supposed rout of al-Qaida. But those Sunni insurgents had themselves began routing al-Qaida before their alliances with American troops, and well before the "surge" peaked. The Pentagon reversed the chronology to make itself appear as the new strategy's broker — and to obscure the deeper reason the Bush administration is aligning itself with Sunnis anew. Osama or a free Iraq are not it.

Our former friends the Shiites: Southern Iraq is already a fiefdom under the control of Moqtada al-Sadr, the radical Shiite who got rid of most of the British presence, and is biding his time before being rid of the American. Sunnis dread a Shiite take-over unrestrained by American occupation. So does Bush, because so do oil-rich Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the Emirates, where militant, resentful Islam is the shifty sands under those authoritarian, unelected, lavishly corrupt and American-backed sheikhdoms. In Iraq, the Bush administration is rediscovering that a Sunni-dominated authoritarian regime wasn't such a bad thing after all. Lacking that, Sunnis as a proxy force against Shiite hegemony will have to do.

Peace isn't breaking out in Iraq. A colder, longer war is. It's further miring the United States in the shards of the Sunni-Shiite divide. And it's confirming once again in Arab eyes that America's end game is control of the Middle East's authoritarian houses of cards. If Enron was an emirate, Bush would be its principal shareholder right now, with America's foreign policy as collateral.

Seldom mentioned is the fact that Muqtada al Sadr unilaterally called a halt to attacks by his Mahdi Army. That had nothing to do with the "surge."

Past Peak has a follow up post called ""Iraq Doesn't Exist Anymore"".

From an excellent interview with Nir Rosen:

Question: Is the "surge" working as Bush claims or is the sudden lull in the violence due to other factors like demographic changes in Baghdad?

Nir Rosen: I think that even calling it a surge is misleading. A surge is fast; this took months. It was more like an ooze. The US barely increased the troop numbers. It mostly just forced beleaguered American soldiers to stay longer. At the same time, the US doubled their enemies because, now, they're not just fighting the Sunni militias but the Shiite Mahdi army also.

No, I don't think the surge worked. Objectively speaking, the violence is down in Baghdad, but that's mainly due to the failure of the US to establish security. That's not success.

Sure, less people are being killed but that's because there are less people to kill.

The violence in Iraq was not senseless or crazy, it was logical and teleological. Shiite militias were trying to remove Sunnis from Baghdad and other parts of the country, while Sunni militias were trying to remove Shiites, Kurds and Christians from their areas. This has been a great success. So you have millions of refugees and millions more internally displaced, not to mention hundreds of thousands dead. There are just less people to kill.

Moreover, the militias have consolidated their control over some areas. The US never thought that Muqtada al Sadr would order his Mahdi Army to halt operations (against Sunnis, rival Shiites and Americans) so that he could put his house in order and remove unruly militiamen. And, the US never expected that Sunnis would see that they were losing the civil war so they might as well work with the Americans to prepare for the next battle.

More importantly, violence fluctuates during a civil war, so people try to maintain as much normalcy in their lives as possible. It's the same in Sarajevo, Beirut or Baghdad — people marry, party, go to school when they can — and hide at home or fight when they must.

The euphoria we see in the American media reminds me of the other so-called milestones that came and went while the overall trend in Iraq stayed the same. Now Iraq doesn't exist anymore. Thats the most important thing to remember. There is no Iraq. There is no Iraqi government and none of the underlying causes for the violence have been addressed, such as the mutually exclusive aspirations of the rival factions and communities in Iraq. [...]

Question: The media rarely mentions the 4 million refugees created by the Iraq war. What do you think the long-term effects of this humanitarian crisis will be?

Nir Rosen: Well, the smartest Iraqis — the best educated, the professionals, the middle and upper classes — have all left or been killed. So the society is destroyed. So there is no hope for a non-sectarian Iraq now.

The refugees are getting poorer and more embittered. Their children cannot get an education and their resources are limited. Look at the Palestinian refugee crisis. In 1948 you had about 800,000 Palestinians expelled from their homes and driven into Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and elsewhere in the Middle East. Over time, they were politicized, mobilized and militarized. The militias they formed to liberate their homeland were manipulated by the governments in the region and they became embroiled in regional conflicts, internal conflicts and, tragically, conflicts with each other. They were massacred in Lebanon and Jordan. And, contributed to instability in those countries.

Now you have camps in Lebanon producing jihadists who go to fight in Iraq or who fight the Lebanese Army. And this is all from a population of just 800,000 mostly rural, religiously-homogeneous (Sunni) refugees.

Now, you have 2 million Iraqi refugees in Syria, a million in Jordan and many more in other parts of the Middle East. The Sunnis and Shiites already have ties to the militias. They are often better educated, urban, and have accumulated some material wealth. These refugees are increasingly sectarian and are presently living in countries with a delicate sectarian balance and very fragile regimes. Many of the refugees will probably link up with Islamic groups and threaten the regimes of Syria and Jordan. They're also likely to exacerbate sectarian tensions in Lebanon.

They're also bound to face greater persecution as they "wear out their welcome" and put a strain on the country's resources.

They'll probably form into militias and either try go home or attempt to overthrow the regimes in the region. Borders will change and governments will fall. A new generation of fighters will emerge and there'll be more attacks on Americans. ...

Links:

* Salon - Blackwater in Baghdad: "It was a horror movie"
* Middle Earth Journal - Iraq - Reduced Violence

The history of Iraqi oil is one subject I'm fascinated by (especially since I realised just how often history has repeated itself) - while most treatments are fairly dry, people have tried a few variations, like Rob Newman's classic "History Of Oil". There is now a graphic novel on the subject as well - described by Olivia Snaije in "American artist Jon Sack's new graphic novel 'sexes up' history of Iraqi oil".

Housmans, London's 62-year-old "premier radical bookshop," was warm and animated on a rainy Friday night for the launch of a new graphic novel entitled "Iraqi Oil for Beginners." Auspiciously, Hassan Jumaa, president of the Iraq Federation of Oil Unions, was in London to speak at a conference and made a quick appearance at the launch party. Jumaa also happens to be one of the only sympathetic characters in the book.

Written and illustrated by Jon Sack, a young London-based American artist and musician, the 31-page paperback comic book may feel light to the touch but is so densely packed with information that it is more like a historical pamphlet, albeit a droll and caustic one. "I wanted to sex up history a little," says Sack, whose interest in the history of oil in the region was piqued several years ago when he became involved in an organization called Corporate Pirates, which keeps tabs on major corporations - in this case Western firms in Iraq.

He also spent time with Platform, a UK-based social and environmental organization that carries out research on the oil industry. "I take myself as a case in point," says Sack. "I had no idea of the role played by oil companies in Mesopotamia and then Iraq." Funded by the human-rights group Voices in the Wilderness, Sack began his project by piecing together accounts of the British occupation of Iraq in the 1920s, which led to evident parallels with the situation today. ...

Sack's graphic novel begins, perhaps inevitably, with the attacks of September 11, 2001, but then it quickly moves back 90 years to 1911, when Britain's Royal Navy converted its warships from using coal to oil, a pivotal point and catalyst for a growing and ever-increasing hunger for crude.

At the time, Britain had control of one of the first oil refineries in the world in western Iran, then known as Persia. A few years later, in 1914, Britain invaded and occupied Basra in southern Iraq. Sack leads his readers through the complicated creation of oil companies, the British determination of Iraqi borders after World War I and the maneuvering of multinational oil companies to obtain concessions in Iraq. The remaining third of the comic book is dedicated to the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq and the situation today, and in particular, the impending oil law.

Sack worked double-time to finish "Iraqi Oil for Beginners" because he felt it was essential to publish it before the hydrocarbon law passes, which will effectively privatize Iraqi oil reserves, giving control of Iraqi oil to foreign interests and in particular, to US oil companies. (Hassan Jumaa and others have played a central role in thus far successfully opposing US and British moves to privatize Iraq's oil.) ...

Over the years, watching at the search terms that result in people reading this blog has provided me with quite a bit of entertainment.

Someone at the Pentagon was looking for information about "strategies for approval of iraq hydrocarbon law" this morning - what he made of "The Iron Butt Strategy" I'm not sure (perhaps he would have been better off reading "The Greatest Prize of All" and "Iraq, Oil, Law And Order", though I guess they already know all this stuff).

Here's a suggested strategy for you guys - why not leave and let the Iraqis sort out how they manage their own property, instead of working out ways that you can steal it while hiding behind some fig-leaf of legality ?

CNN Money reports that the US is still waiting to cash in on Iraq's oil. The talk about Iraq being able to produce 4 - 6 million barrels a day (under the right conditions) still understates the reality - fully exploited, Iraqi oil fields would be producing more than Saudi Arabia does today.

Iraqi lawmakers attempted earlier this year to pass a law governing the way oil contracts and revenues are managed. But the law got bogged down in parliament after Kurds objected to the greater control it gave the central government in allotting oil contracts and doling out royalties. The Iraqi public - and many lawmakers - also saw it as giving away the county's oil reserves to foreign firms.

Critics of the proposed oil law said it gave foreign firms control over production on individual fields and did not require them to hire Iraqi workers or share technology. "It really is a dream law for the companies," said Antonia Juhasz, a fellow at the research and advocacy group Oil Change International. "And privatization is not viewed as a good thing by most Iraqis."

But the law could impose high royalties, such as the 90 percent tax on oil profits in places like Russia and Libya, which would return most of the money to the Iraqi people. Some analysts say passing a national oil law and opening up the country to foreign firms is essential. ... But others say the Iraq national oil company could do the job themselves, given the resources to invest, renewed training overseas, and, of course, a more peaceful environment.

"They don't need investment by big oil companies," said James Placke, a senior associate at Cambridge Energy Research Associates who specializes in the Middle East. "They need to fix the present oil infrastructure." Placke said war, lack of investment, and a shortage of properly trained technicians is leading to production declines of 200,000 barrel per day a year. Under the right conditions, he thinks the national oil company could produce four million barrels a day in five or six years time.

Kurt at Resource Insights has a post noting "None dare say it was for oil". Presumably he means no one in a position of power or influence. I've said it a million times, as have many others.

It must have seemed puzzling to many when the Bush administration put a full court press on former Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan recently after the release of his memoir. In it Greenspan wrote that the administration had gone to war in Iraq over oil. That's hardly a blockbuster. The search for weapons of mass destruction (WMD) had ended in failure. The connection between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda had long since been debunked. And, any hope of establishing a stable democracy in Iraq had already been dashed by the wildly incompetent execution of the war.

WMD, the al Qaeda connection and the introduction of democracy in Iraq had all been at various times justifications for the war. One would think that under such circumstances a competent public relations adviser would have counseled the administration to just let Alan Greenspan's assertion pass. After all, the former central banker would soon be completing his book tour, and then he would fade from the news. Why respond, when doing so would only fan the flames?

But the counterattack came quickly on the Sunday morning talk shows and in the White House press room. Under bombardment from the administration Greenspan quickly "elaborated" on his views in order to deflect the return fire.

All of this could be seen as a relatively minor dustup over what is now broadly believed by the American public to be at least one of the major reasons for going to war. But, the assertion that the military mission in Iraq is primarily a raiding party for oil is more than just an embarrassment to the administration. Naturally, the collapse of the other justifications for the war led to a more widespread acceptance of this assertion. But, even more important, this assertion has implications which, if discussed and properly understood, would thunder through the public mind.

Admitting that the invasion of Iraq was about oil opens the door to a very troubling conversation. If the invasion was about oil, then it must mean that the supply of imported oil was somehow threatened. The supply could be threatened, of course, for two reasons: 1) Someone was threatening it, in this case Saddam Hussein, or 2) something was threatening it, possibly depletion. ...

This is something of a false dichotomy of course - if we aren't at the peak oil point yet (or if Bush and Cheney don't believe we are) then it could be for the same reason we've always invaded Iraq - controlling the oil.

The Atlantic Free Press says the mainstream Democrats (not pointing the finger honest folk like Kucinich) are complicit in the oil grab - "The Treason of the Mainstream Democrats".

The “War on Terror” is a conscious and ingenious masquerade for the geostrategic pursuit and control of Middle Eastern oil and gas resources. The facts place this beyond dispute. Mr. Bush’s claim of “taking the fight directly to the terrorists…and the states that harbor them” was yet one more intentional deception, as subsequent events fully demonstrated. In Afghanistan the state was overthrown instead of apprehending the terrorists—Osama bin Laden remains at large—and in Iraq, when we invaded, there were no terrorists at all. But today both “states” are fitted with puppet governments and dotted with permanent U.S. military bases in close proximity to their hydrocarbon assets.

Only the Bush Administration continues to natter about a bogus “War on Terror.” Others are more candid:

o Republican Senator Senator Charles Hagel: “People say we’re not fighting for oil. Of course we are. They talk about America’s national interest. What the hell do you think they’re talking about? We’re not there for figs.” (Speaking at Catholic University, 9/24/07)

o Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, in his book The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World: “I’m saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.”


o Democratic Senator Jon Tester: “We’re still fighting a war in Iraq and people who are honest about it will admit we’re there over oil.” (Associated Press, 9/24/07)


o General John Abizaid, retired CENTCOM commander: “Of course it’s about oil, we can’t really deny that.” (Speaking at Stanford University, 10/13/07)

The criminal fraudulence of the “War on Terror” is fully documented (see http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/63632/ ), but the contemporary press has been derelict in failing to expose the mega-lie and publicize it. The mainstream Democrats are equally derelict in ignoring it. ...

Why can’t the mainstream Democrats speak sublime truth to demonic power? Doing so, they claim, would be too “divisive” and jeopardize the party’s success in next year’s election.

This strategy is politically suicidal. A Democratic sweep in 2008 grows dimmer every day.

The rank-and-file Republicans who continue to believe Mr. Bush’s lies about the “war on terror” will not vote for a Democrat. The rank-and-file Democrats who see through the lies are increasingly enraged by the insipid waffling of their mainstream candidates. And roughly half the American people don’t bother to vote at all, repelled by the tawdry attack ads and negativity of bitterly partisan, superficial, sophomoric, and issue-avoidance politicking.

If the mainstream Democrats do nothing to change this, they will wind up where they’re headed—disappointed and defeated in 2008—and they will deserve it. Only by exposing and acting on the truth about the war can they change any Republican minds, regain the support of disenchanted Democrats, and attract the politically inert, indifferent Americans. A new style of politics needs badly to be engaged, one that is dedicated not merely to winning elections, but to a genuine concern for truth, for justice, for the rule of law, and for integrity in public service.

The most direct and honorable way of invoking such a style is by impeaching George Bush and Richard Cheney. Never in our history have the high crimes and misdemeanors been so flagrant, and the people of our country know it.

Yes, Congressman Kucinich sought with a “member’s privilege” motion to initiate an impeachment proceeding on the floor of the House of Representatives. But Democratic Majority Leader Steny Hoyer moved immediately to kill the initiative, only to be thwarted by a Republican trick. Finally Nancy Pelosi, desperate to avoid a floor debate, managed to have the matter referred to the Judiciary Committee—where Chairman John Conyers has been sitting on the original bill since last April. The giving of aid and comfort to the enemies will, seemingly, continue.

That line about not being there for the figs isn't bad.

"The Walrus" has an article by Linda McQuaig on candidate Kucinich - "Mission Not Yet Accomplished" - and his accurate take on the Iraq war and its oily underpinnings.

There’s a reason I’m chasing Kucinich — and it’s essentially the same reason he’s no more likely to win the Democratic nomination than Miss Saudi Arabia is to be the next Miss Universe. Kucinich has been speaking out about a rather remarkable set of developments going on inside Iraq. Amid all the death and mayhem, the Iraqi government is under intense pressure from Washington to implement a proposed new law that would begin the process of parcelling out Iraq’s vast undeveloped oil reserves.

In the Western media, the proposed law has generally been described as an “oil revenue–sharing law” — that is, a law that sets out how Iraq’s potentially massive oil revenues will be split among its warring ethnic factions, the Shiites, Sunni Arabs, and Kurds. But the law is actually about much more than that. It’s also about creating a legal framework for foreign investment in Iraq’s oil sector, thereby potentially reviving a dominant role for big multinational oil companies — a role they’ve been excluded from since a powerful wave of oil nationalism swept the Middle East in the 1970s and left the region’s bounteous reserves in the hands of national governments. Ultimately at stake is who will end up as chief beneficiaries of the immense treasure trove of black gold stored beneath Iraq’s sand: the country’s 27 million largely destitute citizens, or the owners of the wealthiest corporations on earth, otherwise known as Big Oil.

Dennis Kucinich suspects it’s going to be the latter, and he’s been trying to draw attention to what he calls “one of the biggest heists in the history of the world.” One clue that he may be on to something is the very high priority the Bush administration, with its notoriously close ties to Big Oil, is attaching to the Iraqi oil law. In May 2007, Vice-President Dick Cheney made a trip to Baghdad, and, as media reports indicated, his central message was the urgency of passing the oil law.

Yet Kucinich has had no luck stirring up opposition on this front in Washington. Even his efforts to get his fellow Democrats onside against the administration’s apparent attempt to privatize Iraq’s oil has been met with indifference, even hostility. Despite the unpopularity of the war, Democrats have been hugely reluctant to level accusations that hint at a nefarious US motive in connection with Iraq’s oil.

So even as powerful US and British oil companies sit poised to take control of the largest unharvested oil bonanza left on earth — with some 165,000 US troops standing helpfully by — the watchdogs on Capitol Hill and the media seem uninterested. The elephant stands knee deep in oil in the middle of the room, attracting no more attention than Dennis Kucinich in the halls of the Rayburn building. The Bush administration may have botched just about everything it’s touched in connection with its misadventure in Iraq, but it has pulled off one master stroke: it has somehow managed to banish to the margins of public debate any suggestion that it has ever cast a covetous eye on Iraq’s oil.

Reuters reports that the Iraqi parliament is still avoiding handing over the oil.

Iraq's political leaders are in intensive talks to resolve lingering disputes over a draft law that will decide control of the world's third-largest oil reserves, Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki said on Sunday. ... Maliki said the bill, which will provide a legal framework for foreign firms to do business in Iraq, had since been sent back to cabinet for more talks to iron out the disputes. The prime minister said there was still disagreement over the exploration of undeveloped fields and production-sharing agreements, as well as contracts that had already been signed with some foreign companies.

Oh yeah - the "undiscovered" oil - I was wondering when they'd get around too quibbling about who decides which bits haven't been "discovered" yet.

The Dallas Morning News points out that Iraq's troubles have pushed oil costs up - the result of "a war gone awry". I guess that's one possible interpretation...

The spike in oil prices shaking the U.S. economy right now is something of a self-inflicted wound stemming from a war gone awry.


An oil drilling rig is installed at the Taq Taq Operating Co. in Iraqi Kurdistan. Iraq's oil production has been crippled since the start of the war, amounting to one of the biggest disruptions in world oil supplies since World War II, according to statistics compiled by the U.S. Department of Energy.

Bush administration officials predicted Iraqi oil production would soar after Saddam Hussein was gone, to levels of 6 million barrels a day or more, and that Iraq would be able to rebuild with its own oil revenues. Instead, Iraqi oil production remains in the doldrums – 2.2 million barrels a day, below pre-war levels of 2.7 million barrels – because of a rat's nest of sabotage, theft and mismanagement so stark that oil is paying for insurrection rather than reconstruction. "Our people, we are living on a sea of oil but we're facing a very big crisis in all of Iraq, not only in Kirkuk," said Mayor Abdul Rahman Mustafa. "We have the shortage and the crisis of the fuels."

International economic sanctions, war damage dating to the early 1980s and a failure to invest in the oil industry had made a mess of things well before the U.S.-led invasion in 2003. But the crippling of Iraq's oil production since the start of the war amounts to one of the biggest disruptions in world oil supplies since World War II, according to statistics compiled by the U.S. Department of Energy.

Without this disaster, oil prices would be much lower today, said David Kirsch, a former State Department energy analyst who now manages oil market intelligence for PFC Energy consultants in Washington. "If not for the war, we'd have cheaper oil, and more of it," he said. ...

Ashti Hawrami, minister of natural resources with the Kurdistan regional government in northern Iraq, estimates oil theft averages 300,000 barrels a day – worth about $8 billion a year. Nearly all of this oil is diverted from the south to organized crime syndicates operating in the Persian Gulf. "We have to cut out the smuggling nonsense," he said. "I am supposed to have 17 percent of that" for the Kurdistan regional government. "How do I get my money?"

Bad management has also played a role.

The gigantic Kirkuk field has produced for 50 years and still holds more than 9 billion barrels of oil. It was damaged under Saddam Hussein's last years in power when he ordered more oil than engineers could deliver without using techniques that robbed years from the productive life of the reservoir. Iraqis pumped thick, greasy fuel into the field to pressure more oil out of the ground, but the remaining crude oil became harder to recover.

Finally, there was widespread alarm among Iraqis and the political left around the world that the war would lead to a carve-up of Iraq's oil among big U.S.- and British-based international oil companies. "There was no recognition that Iraqi notions of sovereignty were tied up with oil, and Iraqis would not want to see wholesale privatization," said Mr. Kirsch.

Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan made news recently by writing in his memoirs, "I'm saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows – that the Iraq War is largely about oil."

President Bush and others in his administration have repeatedly denied oil was a motive. But the war came at a time when there was growing concern worldwide about surging demand for gasoline and other fuels in fast-growing nations like China and India, as well as in the United States. The bulk of Iraq's 115 billion barrels of proved reserves (some oil consultants say there is probably twice that amount) were kept out of the market by U.N. economic sanctions. ...

In 2003, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz testified before Congress that Iraq had so much oil it could rebuild out of its own pocket. "It has one of the most valuable undeveloped sources of natural resources in the world. And let me emphasize, if we liberate Iraq those resources will belong to the Iraqi people, that they will be able to develop them and borrow against them," he said. "We are dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction and relatively soon," he added.

Iraq is an OPEC member subject to the cartel's rules about production and prices, but OPEC has left Iraq without a quota for many years because of its economic weakness. In the months before the U.S.-led invasion, there were meetings at the White House and Pentagon to decide how to put Iraq's oil industry back on its feet once Saddam Hussein was gone. The Halliburton Co., Vice President Dick Cheney's former employer, was chosen to come in behind U.S. troops to restore production in southern Iraq.

As U.S. forces were nearing Baghdad, Mr. Wolfowitz said, "The oil revenues of that country could bring between $50 [billion] and $100 billion over the course of the next two or three years" – an estimate that suggested oil production of 6 million barrels a day or more.

Links:

* UPI - Iraqi Kurds give oil deals to own oil firm
* Oil Change International - Iraq: Exposing the Corporate Agenda
* New York Times - The Coup at Home
* Globe And Mail - How many billion barrels in Saudi Arabia ?
* George Monbiot - Biofuels Could Kill More People Than the Iraq War. George really doesn't like biofuels - and the Swaziland example really doesn't look very good.
* The Guardian - Iraqi fighters 'grilled for evidence on Iran'
* Youtube - Ron Paul On Face The Nation, Veteran's Day 2007. "I think our policy on Iran is the threat. ... We have 700 military bases in 130 countries - we should bring the troops home".
* Cryptogon - US Official: Privacy Is a Soviet Style Bureaucracy That Knows Everything About You
* Mises.org - Freedoms and Foes.

H.R. 1955 is an absolute attack on the freedom of speech. Not only does it assault my right to question government, it also assaults the right of ardent Marxists to speak their minds. So, I am at a loss at both ends.

You see, I value the ability to speak as much as the ability to read nonsense from those such as the writers and curators over at Marxists.org. Should H.R. 1955 become law, no longer will I be able to read articles like "Trotsky or Deutscher? On the New Revisionism and Its Theoretical Source" from James P. Cannon, Fourth International, Winter 1954. The logical gymnastics of such articles will be gone from the web. A very sad day indeed.

I do not fear the idiocy of Cannon and his fellow travelers. But I do fear the agenda of those who proudly strut the halls of DC, American flag pin displayed loudly on lapel or blouse.

These folks aren't simply debating historical and epistemological positions, they are conspiring to subvert the remaining vestiges of Liberty and Property. They are not some group of fanatic windbags. No, they are modern day Brownshirts fighting over whose match ignites the Reichstag -- the Constitution.

The freedom of speech is about to be turned on its head. Fight H.R. 1955 as if it's your life. For without Liberty, your life is no longer yours anyway.

Michael Weiss at Slate has a roundup of articles on the now doomed Iraq oil law - "Oil Over but the Shoutin'". Looks like they aren't going to hand over the oil quietly - I guess the next move is put the pressure on to break up the country into 3 more easily intimidated pieces or start "persuading" some of the legislators out of hours...

Cyberspace judges the all-but-kaput Iraqi oil law as the final indicator that political reconciliation in Iraq is impossible.

Oil Over but the Shoutin': Once cited as a major benchmark for political compromise, Iraq's drafted "oil law," which would have controlled the management of the nation's oil fields and determined revenue-sharing, appears doomed. Problems arose between Iraqi Oil Minister Hussain al-Shahristani and the Kurdistan Regional Government, which has already begun selling oil exploration contracts to Western companies.

Kyle E. Moore at lefty blog Comments From Left Field says the not-so-invisible hand of U.S. privatization is behind the stalled legislation: "In truth, this is a classic example of setting the Iraqis up for failure. At a time when political reconciliation is absolutely, positively the single most important thing in regards to fixing Iraq, we are balancing that reconciliation on a highly divisive bill that undermines our own position by tipping our hand on 'why we're really there.' "

Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo sees cronyism leading all the way back to Texas: "The story though connects up with another one … the decision of the Kurdistan regional government to sign an oil exploration deal with Dallas-based Hunt Oil, run by Mr. Ray L. Hunt. …[R]emember, Hunt, ... is also a pal of the president's. Indeed, President Bush has twice appointed Hunt to his Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. So while the president is striving to get the Iraqis to meet these benchmarks one of his own pals -- and more importantly, political appointees -- is busy helping to tear the whole thing apart."

Lefty "RFK Lives" at Daily Kos cites a much-discussed Paul Krugman editorial, which mentions the Hunt connection and concludes that the marketplace has already decided in favor of Iraq's dissolution: "While I've never worshipped at the altar of the Mighty Market, on this occasion, the markets offer the most accurate reflections of existing reality. It is extraordinarily ironic that a country that largely does worship there remains so ignorant of the fact that the markets have spoken on this literal life and death issue."

Liberal journalist Brian Beutler laments what even the Bushies knew was a major determinant for Iraq's success: "This was in some ways an insight the Bush administration got exactly right. Without some widely agreed upon method of distributing resources (a reconciliation, if you will) the people of Iraq would be left with little choice but to battle with each other over oil wealth. Oil is perhaps the key incentive warring factions have to stop fighting and take an interest in the stabilization of their country. That it wasn't enough says something important."

Something important ? Perhaps that they don't want to hand over "the greatest prize of all" (and the only real economic asset the country possesses) to a bunch of foreigners who have killed or made refugees of a significant percentage of the population. Is that really such a difficult a concept to grasp ?

There are other ways of sharing the oil wealth that don't involve handing it over to big oil and being allowed a small share of the revenues. Here's a very simple one: Iraqi National Oil Co created with ownership of all discoevered and "undiscovered" (cough) oil reserves in Iraq - oil company then privatised with every Iraqi receiving one share in company - hey presto, a free market solution that shares the oil wealth. You'll never see this discussed as an option (or the left wing alternative which doesn't include the privatisation step).

Instead, all the framing I'm seeing (even on "liberal" blogs) is a simple (and false) choice between "pass this US drafted oil law" or "Iraqis don't want national reconciliation - breakup and civil war awaits". What a crock.

From the same post, a look at some of the reactions to Bush's latest incoherent ravings.

Honey, change the channel: President Bush delivered a speech Thursday in which he affirmed that the surge is indeed working and that, as a sign of its success, he's now ready to recall about 21,700 troops from Iraq. Bloggers aren't having it.

Andrew Sullivan notes that Bush is a "humbled" president: "He seemed almost broken to me. His voice raspy, his eyes watery, his affect exhausted, his facial expression almost bewildered. I thought I would feel angry; but I found myself verging toward pity. The case was so weak, the argument so thin, the evidence for optimism so obviously strained that one wondered whom he thought he was persuading."

Wonkette had better things to do, but read the transcript. Kind of: "Did he mean to say that Iraq's government was 'getting things done' and then list things that they specifically weren't getting done? Like 'oil revenue sharing' and 'not getting blown the fuck up'? The Post lists other examples of Bush's speech contradicting government reports and shit Bush said himself like a week ago."

"The surreal timeline of the Iraq war is littered with moments like these—too many about-faces and nonsensical blunders to keep a firm grip on reason," writes Peter Scheer at lefty site TruthDig. "And now, the one goal supporters of the war seem determined to realize is to achieve some vague, if delusory, sense of victory."

Naomi Klein's new book "The Shock Doctrine" (which also discussess the proposed Iraqi oil law) is getting lots of attention this weekend, with The Guardian having a huge roundup of excerpts and commentary.

I wish people would distinguish between "free markets" and the worst excesses of neoliberalism and neoconservatism (at the risk of sounding like the libertarian equivalent of some 1950's leftist complaining that Stalin wasn't a real socialist). Free markets are just a way of allocating resources efficiently, and in most cases they are a very good tool for achieving the desired outcome. They shouldn't be made into some form of religion or dogma, and nor should they be used as a convenient strawman to thrash and blame for all the world's evils because some people have used them as a fig leaf for imperialist or neocolonialist adventurism. What is happening in Iraq isn't a "free market" at work, its militant mercantilism. There is a difference.

The Huffington Post has a review of the book and some thoughts on the Republican party as a form of gang. In recent years I've also come to think of the neoconservative elite as a modern day band of brigands - stealing from foreigners with one (usually heavily armed) hand and the local populace (via the treasury) with the other...

You might have read the piece in Salon the other day where John Dean laments the passing of the Republican Party as a positive, or, even, a non-damaging force in American life. The party he has known for forty years, and the party he says that his friends now know, is a hateful, entirely corrupt, and self-interested body composed of those who take revenge and those who fear having revenge taken upon them. Every current candidate for the presidency is "authoritarian" in an extreme and unAmerican way that Dean thinks would have in earlier decades been "corrected" by the political system, but the Republicans, according to Dean, have broken the political system precisely so that it won't correct them. Sounds like the financial markets, doesn't it?

Personally, I would have put things slightly differently. The Republican Party now seems to work like a gang, in which the most valued qualities in members are loyalty to the gang and the leader, obedience to authority, and violence toward outsiders. The gang is constantly having to prove its dominance, and so candidates for leadership vie with one another for the most tyrannical or violent rhetoric, rhetoric which simultaneously demonizes those who don't accept the authority of the gang and the leader and removes all rules and laws for the gang and the leader. No one is exempt from the wrath of the gang. In this case, the Republican party has now separated itself fairly clearly from the general American population, and as Americans support it less, they come to seem to the Republicans to be more and more the enemy. The far away enemy is one thing, in terms of threat (think Al Qaeda, Shiites, Sunnis) but the enemy close at hand is more threatening because their enmity is seen as a "betrayal." ...

John Dean should start reading Naomi Klein's new book, The Shock Doctrine, which is being published next week, simultaneously in the US and in Britain. As Karl Marx pointed out, history and politics are not only psychological, they are also material. This week, the Guardian is running not only four excerpts from Klein's book, but also several commentaries both disagreeing and agreeing with her thesis. Her thesis is this (and if I am slightly inaccurate, blame me, not Naomi): In the fifties and sixties in the US, at least two lines of thought converged. One was about how to change people's minds without leaving marks and the other was about what was the best way of organizing a given economy. The first grew out of experiments in psychological torture (whoops, I mean electrocshock therapy) run by Ewen Cameron in the late 1940s. The theory was that patients could be rid of mental illnesses by "regressing" them to an infantile state, attaining a "clean slate" upon which new patterns of behavior and thought would be etched. Cameron used both electroshock and powerful drugs to attain his clean slate, having no actual knowledge of the chemistry of the brain or how it works -- in other words, he was operating in accordance with a metaphor. The result of Cameron's experiments, for the patients, was often considerable loss of short term and even long term memory and a subsequent lifelong feeling of "blankness" on the part of the patients (apparently, later refinements of electroshock techniques have mitigated these effects). In the 1950s, the CIA redirected these techniques toward torture of political opponents, allegedly to find out information, but really to test the techniques themselves (hello, Jose Padilla!).

At the same time, Milton Friedman was coming up with the idea that if only an economy could be purified of any kind of restraints on the free market (for example labor unions or socialized medicine or history), then the free market would be able to perfectly gauge the value of any type of good or service, and therefore an economy would balance itself, and, most importantly, inflation would be controlled (also, as you can see, a metaphor, or, perhaps, an extended analogy).

According to Klein, it soon became apparent that all powerful shocks to a system had a similar effect, whether the system was a human body or a national body, and this was to temporarily disable the system's defenses. The US government, the CIA, and the free market economists began to act on this insight, to collude in larger experiments. The first of these was the right wing coup, in Chile, led by Augusto Pinochet, in 1973. At the time, Chile had a functioning leftish government and economy, and the voters had already rejected Friedman's pure free market troika: privatization of government functions, an end to social spending, and deregulation.The new economy was dependent upon outside investors and highly profitable to them -- let's call that the allure of globalization. Pinochet set about instilling terror in the population (that's the shock therapy) using death squads, exemplary killings, and torture. Taking advantage of this, the economists installed the new free market way of doing things within days of the coup. But Friedman's ideas did not work -- inflation rose. In the eighties, the Chilean government tried again, this time by inducing a profound economic crash -- essentially impoverishing the populace in order to bring them to heel. Ultimately, the Chilean "miracle" (Friedman's term) did nothing for the population, but it did enrich the top ten per cent and put 45% below the poverty line. It turns out that as far as the economists were concerned, this was a good thing.

The Shock Doctrine traces what the US, the CIA, the economists, the Neocons, and the multinational corporations learned from the Chilean experiment and subsequent ones (Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, Poland, Russia, China, England) and finally makes its way to Iraq (this is a 590 page book, and the print is small). Essentially, they learned that a small economy is easier to "regress" than a large one, that the shock has to be brutal, and that the free market doesn't work as Friedman said it would (automatically assigning appropriate value), but that it sure does make a few people rich beyond their wildest dreams, and that these people were Friedman's (and his students') benefactors and paymasters. They also learned to lie lie lie in order to sell what amounts to a program of inhuman greed to voters who have other needs, wishes, and ideas.

For our purposes, the more interesting section of Klein's book is about Iraq, where she traveled in the first year after the invasion, and this section forms part of her series of posts at the Guardian. She believes that the Iraq War was intended to not only steal Iraqi oil, but also to impose a radical free market on an unwilling populace, and that that was what was behind the installation of Bremer as the capo of Iraqi reconstruction. She believes that, thanks to the resistance of the Iraqis and their deep resentment at being used and exploited by the Americans, this effort has failed. However, a parallel effort, to shock the US economy into absolute deregulation, privatization, and an end to social spending, has been and is succeeding. What this amounts to is the fleecing of the American taxpayer in order to enrich the war making industries. The byproduct, as in Chile, is the gutting of the rule of law and the American political system as we have known it. Why did Bush and Cheney go to war? Well, where do they get their fortunes? The Shock Doctrine works perfectly for them. As for that 45% below the poverty line, well, once the globalizing manufacturers exported the well-paying US jobs, then the globalizing financiers moved in and sold the newly impoverished working class a few sub-prime mortgages guaranteed to take whatever else they had. Then the financiers screamed for a bailout, and Bernanke gave it to them.

Simon Jenkins at The Guardian has an article which is part "Power of Nightmares" and part Eisenhower's ominous farewell speech - Oh! What a Lovely War on Terror - it's the number the arms dealers love - asking "I admit it is a grim question for a fine autumn weekend, but is liberty in decline ?". I think its fair to say liberty is facing some determined resistance at the present time but hopefully it will prevail in the not too distant future.

The philosopher AC Grayling is in no doubt of the answer. He has produced the sort of book that meets Chesterton's test of "forcing a man to change philosophies and religions" through a sharp blow to the head. His weapon is history, presented 18th-century style as a sustained tract - Towards the Light: The Story of the Struggles for Liberty & Rights that Made the Modern West. Grayling argues gloomily that the Whig view of history as a steady progress towards human freedom no longer applies. It reached its climax in the second half of the 20th century with the defeat of fascism and communism. We all cheered and declared that history would die.

No chance, says Grayling. Though much about the world continues to improve - like yesterday's reported fall in child mortality - "we are beginning to descend the far side of Parnassus". Our parents would be amazed that, in peacetime Britain, every public space is monitored by police cameras; private movement is traceable by satellites that follow cars and phones; misbehaving citizens can be imprisoned on the say-so of neighbours; easily readable government ID cards will carry a mass of personal information; suspects are incarcerated indefinitely without trial; and torture has returned to the armoury of the state. They might also find it incredible that 21st-century Britain has revived the 19th-century invasion of distant lands because it dislikes their regimes, or "to spread western values".

Grayling's case is that this swelling infringement of personal liberty is not a minor tweaking of law and order but a loss of freedoms that "cost blood and took centuries" to acquire. They drove Milton to war, Paine to exile and Cobbett to jail. Thousands were slain, burned or tortured to death in their cause. Each retreat from such liberty is defended by home secretaries since "the innocent have nothing to fear". Tell that to the Britons who were held in Guantánamo, none of whom has ever been charged.

The justification for all this is the threat of attack from religious fanatics. Yet, as Grayling points out, this is a criminal menace rather than anything on a par with past strategic threats. While the Islamists may declare their ambition to be a "western caliphate", this is as ludicrously implausible as the dreams of 19th-century anarchists. Modern cities are always vulnerable to explosions, but the west is surely robust enough to withstand any serious threat to the character or constitution of its states. The rantings of Osama bin Laden cannot justify reversing the tide of western liberty. Indeed, while arming against communism helped defeat communism, arming against terrorism only feeds the beast.

The noblest testament to freedom is the American constitution, yet, as Grayling points out, the latest statute passed under its aegis runs contrary to its ethos. The mission of the Patriot Act is "to deter and punish terrorist acts in the United States and around the world, to enhance law enforcement investigatory tools, and for other purposes". Montesquieu and Madison would have been appalled at such generalised statism. Nor are the act's powers temporary, wartime ones; they are permanent, as are Britain's myriad terrorism laws. By extending state power to curb civil liberty they do the terrorist's job (such as it is) for him. Never was Franklin's maxim more apt, that he who would put security before liberty deserves neither. Freedom cannot be strengthened by being weakened. That is the sophistry of dictatorship.

Commentators have ascribed the chaotically belligerent aftermath of 9/11 to weak western leaders craving popularity in the glamour of war. Tony Blair said he "believed passionately that we are at mortal risk" from Islamism. It was the sort of threat that the risk theorist Ulrich Beck describes as "always an elixir to an ailing leader".

I think more sinister forces are at work: those on display in the Royal Docks. In 1953 America's last true soldier/president, Eisenhower, warned of a "military/industrial complex" in danger of running amok. Its wealth could bend democracy to its will, using paranoia to seize control of budgets and policies alike. The outcome would be "a tragic waste of resources ... humanity hanging on a cross of iron", with armies seeking war for their employment. Elected leaders, said Eisenhower, fed such a complex at their peril.

The growth of Islamist terror, always described as "al-Qaida linked" (as international crime was always "mafia-linked"), meets Eisenhower's thesis. With the threat of communism gone, the military/industrial complex needs a new cause. Allied to a booming police and intelligence bureaucracy, it has grasped eagerly at terrorism. It has no interest in keeping that threat in proportion, and every interest in exaggerating it. To cover the bungles that led to 9/11, this security/industrial complex portrayed the terrorists as awesome and ubiquitous, capable of building vast bomb-proof bunkers in the Hindu Kush, fake plans of which were dumped on a gullible press. State security agencies dance to the tune of Oh! What a Lovely War. They enslave the language of freedom in the cause of repression.

Seen in the light of history, I do not find Grayling's alarmism out of order. It is simply true that in Britain and America arms dealers, in league with security bureaucrats, have fuelled public debate with extreme paranoia. Those who defend liberty are accused of appeasing an unseen enemy. Those who plead democracy are accused of threatening the state. If the freedom show is to get back on the road, some battles must clearly be fought over and again.

Newsweek has an article on Iraq Veterans Against The War (which has branded the surge a failure) and spokesman Adam Kokesh.

As a week of antiwar activities kicks off in Washington on Saturday, Marine Corps veteran Adam Kokesh will be a familiar face. The 25-year-old former sergeant was in the news earlier this week when he was escorted out of the House Armed Service Committee’s hearing for Gen. David Petraeus. Dressed in a black anti-Iraq War T shirt and a desert camouflage hat, Kokesh unfurled a small sign that said GENERALS LIE, SOLDIERS DIE and was summarily escorted out of the room while House aides struggled to get the general’s microphone working.

Kokesh wasn’t arrested, but if he had been it wouldn’t have been the first time. In the eight months since he joined Iraq Veterans Against the War, a Philadelphia-based nonprofit, the telegenic Kokesh has become a fixture on the antiwar scene giving speeches, blogging, staging mock military patrols and being arrested in cities all over country. He was on Larry King's CNN show Thursday night, and Wonkette snarkily reports sightings of Kokesh in cafes around D.C.

Kokesh, who did an eight-month tour in Fallujah in 2004, is one of a growing number of both active and veteran military members who are publicly opposing the continued occupation of Iraq. In January, Appeal for Redress, a group of active-duty, Reserve and National Guard personnel presented a petition of 1,000 signatures to Congress calling for withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq. And in August, seven active-duty soldiers took the almost unprecedented step of writing an editorial in The New York Times criticizing the military leadership and calling U.S. forces an occupying force that “long ago outlived its welcome.” (Two of those soldiers died in an accident in Iraq this week.) ...

And to close, a Bush joke from Past Peak.

On Labor Day enroute to a summit in Australia, President Bush made an unannounced stop in Anbar province, Iraq, stopping at the Anbar Province Regional Airport. Why Iraq? Why now? Well, as the president explained, "I have come to see with my own eyes the remarkable changes that are taking place in Anbar province." He's not looking with other people's eyes, he's looking with his.

In all, Bush was in Iraq for a total of six hours, all of it within the 17-mile perimeter of the highly-secured Al Asad airbase. His take away? [on screen: Bush saying, "When you stand on the ground here in Anbar and hear from the people who live here, you can see what the future of Iraq can look like"] — a giant, heavily-armed U.S. military base surrounded by a bloody sectarian free-for-all.

He's a dreamer. — Jon Stewart

Links:

* Professor Smartass - Iraq oil law NOT theft for big oil says Bushie Khalilzad, former big oil consultant
* Index Research - Iraq: New U.S. Base - Wasit
* Democracy Now - Michael Klare on the Internal War For Control of Iraq's Oil
* Lew Rockwell - What the Warfare State Really Costs
* Asia Times - Behind the Anbar myth . "Petraeus, the iPod general - a player of what is fed by his master's voice, the White House".
* Alternet - CentCom Chief Fallon: Petraeus Is "An Ass-Kissing, Little Chickensh*t"
* Past Peak - 1.2 Million Iraqis Killed By The War
* Past Peak - Bush Missing ?
* Huffington Post - War Critics Barack Obama, Ron Paul Get Most Military Donations
* Tom Paine - Failure of Energy Policy. Failure of Foreign Policy