Matt Taibbi at Rolling Stone has a farewell to "Manufacturing Consent" co-author Edward Herman - RIP Edward Herman, Who Co-Wrote a Book That's Now More Important Than Ever.

Edward Herman, the co-author (with Noam Chomsky) of Manufacturing Consent, has died. He was 92. His work has never been more relevant.

Manufacturing Consent was a kind of bible of media criticism for a generation of dissident thinkers. The book described with great clarity how the system of private commercial media in America cooperates with state power to generate propaganda.

Herman's work was difficult for many to understand because the nature of the American media, then and now, seemed at best to be at an arm's length from, say, the CIA or the State Department. Here is how the book put it:

"It is much more difficult to see a propaganda system at work where the media are private and formal censorship is absent."

The basic thesis of Manufacturing Consent was that propaganda in America is generated through a few key idiosyncrasies of our (mostly private) system.

One is that getting the whole population to buy in to a narrative requires the sustained attention of the greater part of the commercial media, for at least a news cycle or two.

We don't censor the truth in America, mostly. What we do instead is ignore it. If a lone reporter wants to keep banging a drum about something taboo, like contracting corruption in the military, or atrocities abroad, he or she will a) tend not advance in the business, and b) not be picked up by other media.

Therefore the only stories that tended to reach mass audiences were ones in which the basic gist was agreed upon by the editors and news directors of all or most of the major media companies.

In virtually all cases this little mini-oligarchy of media overlords kept the news closely in sync with the official pronouncements of the U.S. government.

The appearance of dissent was permitted in op-ed pages, where Democrats and Republicans "debated" things. But what readers encountered in these places was a highly ritualized, artificially narrow form of argument kept strictly within a range of acceptable opinions.

Herman's last article had a look at the long history of "fake news" published by The New York Times - Fake News on Russia and Other Official Enemies (though they are from from the only ones guilty of this).

It has been amusing to watch the New York Times and other mainstream media outlets express their dismay over the rise and spread of “fake news.” These publications take it as an obvious truth that what they provide is straightforward, unbiased, fact-based reporting. They do offer such news, but they also provide a steady flow of their own varied forms of fake news, often by disseminating false or misleading information supplied to them by the national security state, other branches of government, and sites of corporate power.

An important form of mainstream media fake news is that which is presented while suppressing information that calls the preferred news into question. This was the case with “The Lie That Wasn’t Shot Down,” the title of a January 18, 1988, Times editorial referring to a propaganda claim of five years earlier that the editors had swallowed and never looked into any further. The lie—that the Soviets knew that Korean airliner 007, which they shot down on August 31, 1983, was a civilian plane—was eventually uncovered by congressman Lee Hamilton, not by the Times.

Mainstream media fake news is especially likely where a party line is quickly formed on a topic, with any deviations therefore immediately dismissed as naïve, unpatriotic, or simply wrong. In a dramatic illustration, for a book chapter entitled “Worthy and Unworthy Victims,” Noam Chomsky and I showed that coverage by Time, Newsweek, CBS News, and the New York Times of the 1984 murder of the priest Jerzy Popieluzko in Communist Poland, a dramatic and politically useful event for the politicized Western mainstream media, exceeded all their coverage of the murders of a hundred religious figures killed in Latin America by U.S. client states in the post-Second World War years taken together. It was cheap and safe to focus heavily on the “worthy” victim, whereas looking closely at the deaths of those hundred would have required an expensive and sometimes dangerous research effort that would have upset the State Department. But it was in effect a form of fake news to so selectively devote coverage (and indignation) to a politically useful victim, while ignoring large numbers whose murder the political establishment sought to downplay or completely suppress.

Forbes has an interesting profile of Donald Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner (of 666 Fifth Avenue) and his "moneyball" tactics for targeting Facebook ads at vulnerable voters in swing states helped Trump win the election (along with some help from the Russians and aggressive vote suppression techniques being applies by state Republican governments of course) - How Jared Kushner Won Trump The White House.

“It’s hard to overstate and hard to summarize Jared’s role in the campaign,” says billionaire Peter Thiel, the only significant Silicon Valley figure to publicly back Trump. “If Trump was the CEO, Jared was effectively the chief operating officer.”

“Jared Kushner is the biggest surprise of the 2016 election,” adds Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google, who helped design the Clinton campaign’s technology system. “Best I can tell, he actually ran the campaign and did it with essentially no resources.”

No resources at the beginning, perhaps. Underfunded throughout, for sure. But by running the Trump campaign–notably, its secret data operation–like a Silicon Valley startup, Kushner eventually tipped the states that swung the election. And he did so in manner that will change the way future elections will be won and lost. President Obama had unprecedented success in targeting, organizing and motivating voters. But a lot has changed in eight years. Specifically social media. Clinton did borrow from Obama’s playbook but also leaned on traditional media. The Trump campaign, meanwhile, delved into message tailoring, sentiment manipulation and machine learning. The traditional campaign is dead, another victim of the unfiltered democracy of the Web–and Kushner, more than anyone not named Donald Trump, killed it.

This wasn’t a completely raw startup. Kushner’s crew was able to tap into the Republican National Committee’s data machine, and it hired targeting partners like Cambridge Analytica to map voter universes and identify which parts of the Trump platform mattered most: trade, immigration or change. Tools like Deep Root drove the scaled-back TV ad spending by identifying shows popular with specific voter blocks in specific regions–say, NCIS for anti-ObamaCare voters or The Walking Dead for people worried about immigration. Kushner built a custom geo-location tool that plotted the location density of about 20 voter types over a live Google Maps interface.

Soon the data operation dictated every campaign decision: travel, fundraising, advertising, rally locations–even the topics of the speeches. “He put all the different pieces together,” Parscale says. “And what’s funny is the outside world was so obsessed about this little piece or that, they didn’t pick up that it was all being orchestrated so well.”

For fundraising they turned to machine learning, installing digital marketing companies on a trading floor to make them compete for business. Ineffective ads were killed in minutes, while successful ones scaled. The campaign was sending more than 100,000 uniquely tweaked ads to targeted voters each day. In the end, the richest person ever elected president, whose fundraising effort was rightly ridiculed at the beginning of the year, raised more than $250 million in four months–mostly from small donors.

The Observer has a look at the right wing propaganda and analytics machine that enabled Kushner's tactics to be so effective - Google, democracy and the truth about internet search.

The constellation of websites that Albright found – a sort of shadow internet – has another function. More than just spreading rightwing ideology, they are being used to track and monitor and influence anyone who comes across their content. “I scraped the trackers on these sites and I was absolutely dumbfounded. Every time someone likes one of these posts on Facebook or visits one of these websites, the scripts are then following you around the web. And this enables data-mining and influencing companies like Cambridge Analytica to precisely target individuals, to follow them around the web, and to send them highly personalised political messages. This is a propaganda machine. It’s targeting people individually to recruit them to an idea. It’s a level of social engineering that I’ve never seen before. They’re capturing people and then keeping them on an emotional leash and never letting them go.”

Cambridge Analytica, an American-owned company based in London, was employed by both the Vote Leave campaign and the Trump campaign. Dominic Cummings, the campaign director of Vote Leave, has made few public announcements since the Brexit referendum but he did say this: “If you want to make big improvements in communication, my advice is – hire physicists.”

Steve Bannon, founder of Breitbart News and the newly appointed chief strategist to Trump, is on Cambridge Analytica’s board and it has emerged that the company is in talks to undertake political messaging work for the Trump administration. It claims to have built psychological profiles using 5,000 separate pieces of data on 220 million American voters. It knows their quirks and nuances and daily habits and can target them individually.

“They were using 40-50,000 different variants of ad every day that were continuously measuring responses and then adapting and evolving based on that response,” says Martin Moore of Kings College. Because they have so much data on individuals and they use such phenomenally powerful distribution networks, they allow campaigns to bypass a lot of existing laws.

“It’s all done completely opaquely and they can spend as much money as they like on particular locations because you can focus on a five-mile radius or even a single demographic. Fake news is important but it’s only one part of it. These companies have found a way of transgressing 150 years of legislation that we’ve developed to make elections fair and open.” ...

We don’t understand it. It is not bound by terrestrial laws. And it’s in the hands of two massive, all-powerful corporations. It’s their experiment, not ours. The technology that was supposed to set us free may well have helped Trump to power, or covertly helped swing votes for Brexit. It has created a vast network of propaganda that has encroached like a cancer across the entire internet. This is a technology that has enabled the likes of Cambridge Analytica to create political messages uniquely tailored to you. They understand your emotional responses and how to trigger them. They know your likes, dislikes, where you live, what you eat, what makes you laugh, what makes you cry. ...

For the nearly 20 years that Google has been in existence, our view of the company has been inflected by the youth and liberal outlook of its founders. Ditto Facebook, whose mission, Zuckberg said, was not to be “a company. It was built to accomplish a social mission to make the world more open and connected.”

It would be interesting to know how he thinks that’s working out. Donald Trump is connecting through exactly the same technology platforms that supposedly helped fuel the Arab spring; connecting to racists and xenophobes. And Facebook and Google are amplifying and spreading that message. And us too – the mainstream media. Our outrage is just another node on Jonathan Albright’s data map.

With all the recent kerfuffle about "fake news" contributing to Trump's election I found this story about the old "Mockingbird" / Watergate days of official fake news entertaining - The CIA and the Press: When the Washington Post Ran the CIA’s Propaganda Network.

Last week, the Washington Post published a scurrilous piece by a heretofore obscure technology reporter named Craig Timberg, alleging without the faintest evidence that Russian intelligence was using more than 200 independent news sites to pump out pro-Putin and anti-Clinton propaganda during the election campaign.

Under the breathless headline, “Russian propaganda effort helped spread ‘fake news’ during election, experts say,” Timberg concocted his story based on allegations from a vaporous group called ProporNot, run by nameless individuals of unknown origin, whom Timberg (cribbing from the Bob Woodward stylesheet) agreed to quote as anonymous sources. ...

In the meantime, here is a brief historical note on how at the height of the Cold War the CIA developed it’s very own stable of writers, editors and publishers (swelling to as many as 3000 individuals) that it paid to scribble Agency propaganda under a program called Operation Mockingbird. The disinformation network was supervised by the late Philip Graham, former publisher of Timberg’s very own paper, the Washington Post.

WA Today has a good summary of Exxon's long PR campaign against climate science - Who is behind climate change deniers ?.

When the tobacco industry was feeling the heat from scientists who showed that smoking caused cancer, it took decisive action.

It engaged in a decades-long public relations campaign to undermine the medical research and discredit the scientists. The aim was not to prove tobacco harmless but to cast doubt on the science.

In May this year, the multibillion-dollar oil giant Exxon-Mobil acknowledged that it had been doing something similar. It announced that it would cease funding nine groups that had fuelled a global campaign to deny climate change.

Exxon's decision comes after a shareholder revolt by members of the Rockefeller family and big superannuation funds to get the oil giant to take climate change more seriously. Exxon (once Standard Oil) was founded by the legendary John D. Rockefeller. Last year, the chairman of the US House of Representatives oversight committee on science and technology, Brad Miller, said Exxon's support for sceptics "appears to be an effort to distort public discussion".

The funding of an array of think tanks and institutes that house climate sceptics and deniers also worried Britain's premier scientific body, the Royal Society. It found that in 2005 Exxon distributed nearly $3 million to 39 groups that "misrepresented the science of climate change by outright denial of the evidence that greenhouse gases are driving climate change". It asked Exxon to stop the funding and its protests helped force Exxon's recent retreat.

The chief scientist of New Zealand's National Institute of Water and Atmospheric research, Dr Jim Salinger, knows all about misrepresentation. Two months ago, he was named by an Exxon-funded group, the Heartland Institute, as a scientist whose work undermined the theory that burning carbon was a cause of global warming.

The Heartland Institute - essentially a free market lobby - emphasises that "the climate is always changing". Salinger's research studied variation in climate, so his research was enrolled in the denial campaign.

Variations in the climate are normal, Salinger said, but this did not in any way weaken conclusions about the dangers of burning oil and coal. "Global warming is real," he said, and demanded reference to his work be removed. The institute refused. The Heartland Institute received almost $800,000 from Exxon, according to Greenpeace's research based on Exxon's corporate giving disclosures. ...

In his recent book Heat, George Monbiot gives the example of the TV presenter and botanist, David Bellamy, who is also a climate sceptic. He told the New Scientist in 2005 that most glaciers in the world are growing, not shrinking. He said his evidence came from the World Glacier Monitoring Service in Switzerland, a reputable body. When Monbiot checked the service they said that the Bellamy claim was "complete bullshit". Glaciers are retreating.

In Australia, the main group that tries to undermine the science of global warming is the Lavoisier Group. It maintains a website with links to the Competitive Enterprise Institute (over $2 million from Exxon), Science and Environmental Policy Project ($20,000) and the Centre for the Study of Carbon Dioxide (at least $100,000).

The Lavoisier group is certainly influential in the Federal Opposition. A senior figure in the group told Guy Pearse, author of High and Dry, a study of climate policy in Australia, that there "is an understanding in cabinet that all the science is crap".

But perhaps the oil companies' PR campaign is not the main reason for the success of the climate change deniers. There are at least three others. First, the implications of the science are frightening. Shifting to renewable energy will be costly and disruptive. Second, doubt is an easy product to sell. Climate denial tells us what we all secretly want to hear. Third, science is portrayed by the free market right as a political "orthodoxy" rather than objective knowledge.

The tide slowly turned on tobacco denial and the science was accepted in the end. But climate is different. There are no "smoke-free areas" on the planet. Climate denial may turn out to be the world's most deadly PR campaign.

Dave Roberts at Grist has a post on the PR campaign to try and sell the "clean coal" mirage - 'Clean coal' non-debate produces fake rift among lefties!.

Wow, this is one craptastic piece of journalism. It's about "the clean coal debate," but you can get all the way through it without stumbling across a single fact about the purported subject. Al Gore and environmentalists "portray" "clean coal" as a mirage. Is it? Are there clean coal power plants somewhere? The reader never knows.

Dumber than that is the whole frame of the article, which pits Al Gore against Barack Obama, despite the fact that they recommend identical approaches to "clean coal" -- research it, but don't rely on it, and don't build dirty coal plants while waiting for it.

The fact is, the average citizen trying to find out more about "clean coal" by consuming U.S. media is likely to emerge from that effort knowing and understanding less. Nice job, media.

The SMH reports that public demonstrations of atheism are being suppressed by advertising companies like APN Outdoor who clearly don't care much about creating shareholder value, even in tough economic times - Atheist message misses local bus.

BRITISH atheists have been celebrating the appearance of flippant slogans on London buses this week but atheists in Australia have been barred from launching a similar advertising campaign on the nation's public transport systems.

The Atheist Foundation of Australia was knocked back by Australia's biggest outdoor advertising company, APN Outdoor, on its proposal for a nationwide campaign featuring atheist slogans.

The campaign - with slogans such as "Sleep in on Sunday mornings" and "Celebrate reason" - follows successful attempts by the British and American Humanist Associations to raise awareness for atheism in London and Washington.

APN Outdoor cited no reason for rejecting the $16,000 public transport campaign, and declined to comment.

"The intention was to demonstrate to the public that there is an alternative to religion that is rational, reasonable and worthy of thought," said the president of the Atheist Foundation of Australia, David Nicholls.

"It took three weeks for APN Outdoor to come to a decision, after they initially told me there'd be no problem. The final discussion by phone to an executive ended with an abrupt message that they were not going to take our business."

APN Outdoor refused to comment on whether the company's clients include religious organisations, but Mr Nicholls said buses in Adelaide had been adorned with religious messages such as "John 3:16". He also approached bus advertisers in Hobart, with the same result.

"Australia is in desperate need of a human rights and equal opportunities act," Mr Nicholls said. "It's clear that western Europe, the US and Britain have better laws than we do when it comes to … respecting freedom of speech."

The BBC has a report on a damaged wind turbine, focusing on claims it was caused by a UFO - UFO claim over wind farm damage. Of course, it could have just been wind shear...

UFO enthusiasts are claiming damage to a Lincolnshire wind farm turbine was caused by a mystery aircraft. The turbine at Conisholme lost one 66ft (20m) blade and another was badly damaged in the early hours of Sunday. County councillor for the area Robert Palmer said he had seen a "round, white light that seemed to be hovering".

Ecotricity, which owns the site, said while investigations continued they were not ruling anything out - but the extent of damage was "unique". The turbine is one of 20 at the Conisholme site, which has been only been fully operational since April 2008. The broken blade has been recovered and is being examined.

Local ufologists said they had received many reports of activity in the area and had teams searching for clues.

Crikey thinks that local media coverage of the conflict in Gaza has been less than objective (something one look at the leading articles in The Australian's international news section will immediately confirm) and notes that a number of commentators have been flown to Israel as part of the propaganda war - Oz correspondents flown to Israel as part of PR offensive. Crikey also has a column by Guy Rundle noting, Power Of Nightmares style, who created Hamas and who is benefiting from the conflict - The comic tragedy of Gaza.

When you consider the current attack on Gaza, now in its seventeenth day, it's hard to know whether to emphasise the horror or the absurdity, the viciousness or the kitsch. There's no lack of the last of these, the most recent being the arrival of Sam Wurzelbacher, i.e. "Joe the Plumber", briefly made famous by John McCain, and now resurrected by Pajamas Media, a right-blog/online TV op as a war correspondent. Joe's first thought after arriving in Sderot, principal target of Hamas rockets? That there shouldn't be war correspondents.

Sam/Joe told Associated Press TV:

To be honest with you, I don’t think journalists should be anywhere allowed war [sic]. … I liked back in World War I and World War II, when you’d go to the theater and you’d see your troops on the screen and everyone would be real excited and happy for them. Now everyone’s got an opinion and wants to down soldiers -- our American soldiers, our Israeli soldiers. I think media should be abolished from reporting. You know, war’s hell, and if you’re gonna sit there and say ‘Well look at this atrocity’ -- well you don’t know the full story behind it half the time. So I think the media should have no business in it.

Can anyone top that? Oh yes, here's CNN from a few days ago:

PRESENTER: Well we wanted to report from inside Gaza on this developing conflict to get the full story, but Israel won't permit journalists to enter. (pause). So instead here's an interview with Israel Defence Minister Tzipi Livni, from Jerusalem...

Wonderful stuff, and all we need is Sarah Palin sent as special envoy, to sort out, you know, them gazelles to get the whole team back together. Meanwhile, for the tragedy there's burning schools and mass death. And for both tragedy and absurdity there's the whole Israeli attack itself.

At the heart of Israel's justification for the Gaza attack is a paradox. On the one hand Israel claims that the rockets that have been raining down on southern towns represent an intolerable attack on sovereignty, harbinger of an existential threat etc. On the other hand, the fact that this has been tolerated for six years is pointed to as evidence of Israel's forbearance, etc. Which leads to the obvious question -- if the rockets represent an existential threat, why not do what is being done now three, four, five years ago? Yet if they can be tolerated for six years, how can the wantonness of the current attack possibly be justified?

Inflicting mass civilian casualties -- including the use of terror -- is morally justifiable only in situations of defensive total war, a struggle for survival. By the very fact of six years of inaction, Israel has shown what everyone knows: that these attacks are no threat to the country at all.

That is not to minimise the effect of rockets falling relentlessly on a civilian population, nor the meaning of the relatively small number of deaths. To say as one commentator did, that the rockets have "nagged" Israelis to misidentify the act (even if you consider the rockets legitimate resistance). But it is to point out that of all the people who really haven't given a damn about what was happening to southern Israel, Tel Aviv has been uppermost. The low-level fire has been useful to a sense of embattlement, and effectively kept as an ace-in-the-hole by successive Israeli governments, to be played whenever things got desperate -- politically, that is.

For what makes the Gaza attack such an abomination is that it is being conducted almost entirely for domestic political purposes, just as every crisis in the last five years -- Lebanon 2006, Ariel Sharon's waddle across the Temple Mount -- has been about the projection of domestic Israeli politics into external conflict. People are dying in Gaza for no other purpose than so Tzipi Livni and Ehud Barak can prevent themselves being politically outflanked by Netenyahu and Likud on national security credentials in the February elections.

Like one of those Penn and Teller magic tricks done in plain sight, Tel Aviv barely bothers to pretend that it believes the official justification -- Lipni has repeatedly said that the attack won't stop the rockets, merely lessen their number. How on earth can such a pitiful aim even on its own terms, be presented as a justification for the carnage currently underway?

Within this cynical process there's another act of massive bad faith by many of Israel's supporters, which turns on Israel's official desire to both assert its triumphal status and simultaneously use a status of special victimhood to give a moral gloss to indiscriminate killing. On behalf of a country with dozens of submarine-mounted nuclear warheads trained on Arab and Iranian cities, a conscript army, a domestic armaments industry and billions in US military aid, the defence of the Gaza attack is conducted as if it were being undertaken by a beleagured Zionist militia c.1948, with a few borrowed guns.

Thus, one noxious lunatic at a Florida demonstration yells out "Jews to the ovens", and the comment flashes round the world, as a prelude to mutterings of "never again". Hamas, this pitiful force that Israel helped establish (thinking that a Muslim fundamentalist group would disrupt the ideological unity of the pan-Arabic/Marxist PLO) whose only success has been in intra-Palestinian conflict, is constructed as one step away from being the Wehrmacht eighth army, because its official constitution contains all the dross and kitsch of nineteenth century European anti-semitism.

The weird and self-defeating thing about this pose is that the whole point of Zionism was not that this sort of stuff would disappear, but precisely that it wouldn't. Founded in the wake of the Dreyfus affair, Zionism's point was that anti-semitism would never cease, so the only answer was to create a society which meant that it didn't matter. To have that entity armed to the teeth and in absolute control, and still claiming that any dumb talk of blood drinking Jews or whatever somehow represents an existential threat would seem to defeat the purpose of the whole exercise.

At some level a lot of the world understands this, which is why Israel's Gaza attack has been greeted with something beyond outrage -- something approaching disgust. It is the same disgust marshalled against the US bombings in Vietnam and Cambodia -- the utter asymmetry of the conflict opens up the space where the superior party becomes first evil and then nihilistic. Thus what plays well to the Israeli electorate -- the cold precision of the IDF -- and to the world: harm minimisation, treating Palestinian wounded -- seems not merciful, but sadistic, the affectless precision of the killer in one of the Saw movies. Israel often claims that it is judged by higher standards than other state actors. At the moment it is falling below not merely the ethical, but the gut instincts of fairness, mercy, the avoidance of cruelty.

Why are Israel's supporters so willing to aid and abet it down this track, to fill out the picture of the thug weeping at past slights as it deals out mass death against a trivial challenge? You can see the answer in something like John Spooner's Saturday cartoon of a bloodspattered school playground, which was so unctuously desperate to make sure we got a pro-Isrel message that the drawing was footnoted with a ref to Hamas's beliefs in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Or go back to Sam/Joe's comments about seeing "our Israeli" soldiers fighting and making us "feel happy".

For millions in the West, watching the east rising, seeing the failure of the Bush years, the moral confusion and futility of western actions, Israel is a dose of existential V-agra, since it combines both concrete aims -- defend your people -- and a purported belief in the abstract ethical stands of the West. Live in a country where everyone goes to Gallipoli but no-one joins the army? There's plucky little Israel? Pointyheads offering multiple perspectives on your own society? Israel's resolve is unitary.

It isn't of course, but it's the best thing going. Which is how mass death with no clear strategic aim, compromised by cynical party politics becomes the vehicle by which people can approve a massacre in which every adult Gazan male death is officially counted -- by Israel -- as a "military casualty". And why Ehud Olmert today spoke of the next wave of attack as an "iron fist". Or why today Arab Israeli parties were banned from standing in the February elections. Because once you start on this road it only leads to one place.

And finally, Cryptogon notes that a demented Washington Times columnist (ah, but I repeat myself) is calling for the reintroduction of the draft so the US can invade Pakistan, and also noting that Emmanuel Goldstein - ooops, I mean Osama Bin Laden - has made one of his rare and mysterious media appearances to call for a new jihad.

A Washington Times columnist has claimed that a universal military draft is a key necessity if America is to survive throughout and beyond the 21st century. Tony Blankley, also a former Reagan speechwriter, a former Newt Gingrich press secretary, and currently a Fellow at right wing think tank the Heritage Foundation, makes the call in his new book American Grit.

Blankley says that the US needs a “new nationalism that puts America’s survival first.”

In his opinion this equates to subjecting all eighteen year olds to two years of required military service. “If we don’t do a lot of things smart and tough, we could get overwhelmed by the rise of China, the rise of India, the rise of radical Islam.” Blankley told the hosts of Fox & Friends on Monday.

“We’ve failed to exploit our energy. We’re not paying enough attention to what our kids are learning — Bill Ayers is actually a senior person in guiding the curriculum design of America.” he said.

“I don’t like it, I love the volunteer army … but we don’t have enough troops,” Blankley stated.

“When George Bush wanted to have the surge, he was told by the senior generals we didn’t have the extra 20,000 troops to finish the war. … Now Obama wants to go to Afghanistan … but he says we don’t have the troops unless we pull them out of Iraq. What happens if Pakistan goes jihadi? We don’t have the troops to go in there and stop them from taking over the nuclear weapons.”

If you've studied the history of Iraqi oil in some detail you'll realise just how dodgy and self-serving this latest piece from the Economist is - whitewashing our oil grab and blaming the current state of the Iraqi oil industry on misfortune and the Iraqis themselves - rather than the seven sisters' policy of restricting Iraqi oil production for many decades. From An oil saviour?:

Iraq has the potential to supply much more oil

The growing concerns in the world energy market about the risks of a supply crunch have been a critical factor behind the recent surge in oil prices to a new record of US$135/barrel. Speculators are betting huge sums on the assumption that the oil market (and other primary energy markets) will remain tight for many years to come, owing to the inelasticity of demand and to the constraints on long-term supply. Saudi Arabia, the world's largest oil exporter, is doing its bit to allay these concerns, but has acknowledged that once its current crop of oilfield projects is complete in around 2013, there will be little scope for further capacity increases. Similar strains are evident in most of the other major oil-producing countries. One significant exception is Iraq, which holds (at least) 10% of the world's proven reserves, but accounts for only 2.5% of total production. Iraq has the potential to furnish a long-term solution to the oil market's long-term supply problem, but it will need to improve dramatically on its recent performance before buyers of oil futures will be convinced that it can deliver.

All about oil

If history had been kinder, Iraq could now be producing at a comparable level to Saudi Arabia. Instead, three wars, 13 years of sanctions and five years of internal conflict have eroded Iraq's oil infrastructure and human capital. However, Iraq also has a history of recovery. Production peaked at over 3.5m barrels/day (b/d) in 1980 on the eve of the Iran-Iraq war, but then averaged less than half that level during the eight-year war. It had nearly recovered to 3.5m b/d in 1990, after which the invasion of Kuwait and the subsequent UN sanctions severely limited exports, and hence production. In the five years before the US-led invasion of 2003, the sanctions regime gradually permitted greater exports, and production was often above 2.5m b/d. However, it fluctuated considerably due to the impact of years of underinvestment, restrictions on the import of spare parts and isolation from the international oil industry.

This volatility in production has continued in post-Saddam Iraq, although the average level has usually been below 2m b/d, and only exceeded the immediate pre-war level of 2.3m b/d for the first time at the end of 2007. Operations have been frequently disrupted by events ranging from the bombing of pipelines to the murder of oil workers. Moreover, the competition between political factions for influence at every level in the industry—as well as widespread corruption—has not provided suitable conditions for a revival of the industry. There is even concern that damage may have been caused to some fields in order to maintain production at modest levels.

Things may be changing. Iraq's deputy prime minister, Barham Salih, said in April that Iraq's total reserves, could be as high as 350bn barrels, triple the 115bn that has been its officially stated level for many years. The figure is aspirational and should be treated carefully but, given that there has been barely any new exploration of Iraq's promising geology in 30 years, an upward revision of the official reserves figure seems long overdue. This underlines Iraq's uniquely large reserves-to-production (RP) ratio, which was already the world's highest and, based on Mr Salih's estimate and at the expected production level of 2.3m b/d in 2008, would stand at a remarkable 415 years (compared with a world average of about 40 years). If Iraq were able to achieve the average Middle East RP-ratio of 80 years then it would be pumping 4m b/d based on the current reserves, and 12m b/d based on Salih's aspirational estimate. Getting there would take some time, around five years for 4m b/d and probably more than 20 years for the most optimistic level. It would also require Iraq to achieve a sufficient degree of stability. However, if there are promising signs of progress over the next 18 months, then it might be enough to mitigate fears of shortages next decade and dampen the futures market.