Killing For Oil? Tragedy, Comedy or Farce?

Less than a fortnight after the Iraqi parliament agreed on a Status of Force Agreement (SOFA) calling for U.S. forces to leave Iraq's cities by mid-2009 and withdraw from the country altogether by the end of 2011 a suicide bomber kills 55 people dining in Kirkuk.

Official reports say Arab tribal leaders were lunching with members of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan and were there to discuss ways of defusing tensions among Arabs, Kurds and Turkomen in the oil-rich province.

Cui Bono?

Mere hours after the fatal blast Ali al-Dabbagh, a spokesman for Iraq's Shia-dominated government led by Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, announces that some residual U.S. forces will be needed for at least 10 more years. Curious since before the vote in parliament the Maliki government had been insisting that its military would be ready to take over security by the summer of 2009.

The SOFA agreement (without which any continued U.S. military presence would be in violation of international law) had only been achieved after drastic compromise. The Sunni Arabs seeing themselves as the vulnerable (oil-free) minority under a Shia-Kurdish government were determined to wring major concessions as a condition for their support (such as the release of Sunni political prisoners being currently detained by U.S. troops). And despite the ongoing ethnic and tribal tensions, most Iraqis remain firmly nationalistic so that anything less than the assurance of a complete American withdrawal would have doomed the Sadrists along with the current government in Iraq's upcoming provincial elections.

So Who Gets To Be Rich?

“We believe that oil and gas belong to the Iraqi people, to all the Iraqi people,” Wael Abdul Latif, an independent member of the Iraqi parliament and a former magistrate.

Good luck with that...

Iraqi oil dispute bubbles to the surface December 09. 2008 9:26PM UAE

Iraq has put the squeeze on private investors by saying it will not give preferential treatment to Kurdistan crude. Nabil al Juran / AP Photo

Prospects for settling a protracted Iraqi feud over regional oil development have once again receded, following an apparent breakthrough last month over negotiations to export crude from the country’s autonomous Kurdistan region.

Late last month, in a surprise visit to the north-eastern regional capital of Erbil, the Iraqi oil minister, Hussein al Shahristani, agreed in principal to allow two recently discovered oilfields in Kurdistan to be connected to the state-owned pipeline that exports crude from northern Iraq to the Turkish Mediterranean port of Ceyhan.

That constituted a major concession that seemed to break a deadlock in oil discussions between Iraqi central authorities and the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG). The snag is that Baghdad last week made clear that it still planned to treat Kurdistani crude developed with private-sector investment in the same way as oil from state-owned fields.

It is both perverse and all too common to hear the Iraqi conflict described in terms of Islamic terrorism or sectarian strife, but just as in the tragedy that occurred in Mumbai, the antipathies of race and religion are merely the nurtured fuel being fed to the oil-war's consuming fire.

Ironically, just as the ill-conceived Iraq invasion has contributed to the United States becoming fiscally bankrupt, the fight for Iraq's resources has left the country's infrastructure so badly damaged, its leadership so steeped in corruption, its greedy occupiers will be hard-pressed to profit.

"While Iraq's oil industry will continue to face problems with security in 2009, the country's crumbling production and pipeline systems are more likely to disrupt crude exports"
-- the London-based Exclusive Analysis (EA).

"[T]he two 50-km subsea oil pipelines that transport the crude to the terminals are at imminent risk of failing due to severe corrosion and vulnerability to rupture"
--October report from the U.S. Congress.



There are but fine lines between comedy, tragedy and farce.