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.
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.
With all eyes on the Nasdaq and the DOW industrial average while we await the next Tina Fey impression of Sarah Palin, little attention is being paid to happenings in Iraq. Day before last coordinated suicide bombers targeted Shi'ite worshipers killing 50 and injuring dozens more at Baghdad mosques. The attacks took place as Iraqi Shi'ites marked the first day of Eid, a three-day celebration that follows Ramadan, Islam's month of fasting. The previous day three women and two children were killed and a minibus driver and another woman were injured when gunmen in a speeding car opened fire on a minibus. Today we learn that eleven Iraqis including three women and three children were killed by U.S. troops during a raid in Mosul. The U.S. military claims the men were terrorists.
There is a comforting narrative regressed to the background that says if Barack Obama becomes President we will see the end of the disastrous Iraq occupation. Not, mind you, that we can look forward to seeing our troops finally start to come home-- apparently Senator Obama believes at least two of those brigades are needed in Afghanistan. Yet if one looks at what is taking place between Basra and Kurdistan despite the ongoing violence and political stalemate it is hard to foresee us leaving the Iraqis to govern themselves anytime soon.
As we learned back in June the original partners in the Iraq Petroleum Company-- Exxon, BP, Shell and Total along with Chevron and a number of smaller oil companies-- were negotiating a deal with Al-Maliki's puppet government to secure no-bid contracts to service Iraq’s largest oil-fields. The highly unusual agreements won out despite better offers from more than 40 other companies, including oil firms in Russia, China and India. The New York Times would later report that "a group of American advisers led by a small State Department team" had played an integral part in brokering the sell out.
But as AlterNet's Nick Nurse explains, in reality, there had long been ample evidence that the Bush administration had been engaged, along with those same European firms, in pressuring the Iraqis to accept what amounted to a daylight robbery. In their usual obsequious fashion the Times and other major media outlets also failed to expose the financial ties between our military occupation and the major oil giants who all regularly show up on the Pentagon's payroll. In the last year alone, those five aforementioned firms took home more than $4.1 billion from U.S. taxpayers with Shell leading the way with $2.1 billion.
But while the Times' piece did not cover the symbiotic relationship between the oil companies and the Pentagon and a cabal in the U.S. State Department, its expose on the no-bid deal drew an immediate international outcry. Foiled in their attempt at a "stick-up" in daylight, the oil giants withdrew to their boardrooms and fashioned a Shell game as they normally would, quietly out of sight.
First they pacified the Chinese by offering them the rights for Iraq oil "development", then, instead of insisting on keeping six separate inside deals, had Royal Dutch Shell openly offer its bid (no doubt packaged with help from their co-conspirators) of $4 billion "to establish a joint venture with [Iraq's] South Gas Company in the Basra district of southern Iraq to process and market natural gas."
Time will tell how this sits with the average Iraqi but opponents of the Maliki government see the deal as having been pushed through U.S. military blackmail.
However,the engorgement of Iraq is not limited to its oil and gas resources. Now that there is relative stability major corporations are being wooed to carve out their stakes. Consider this sales pitch from the IFP's "Project Iraq" set to take place at Erbil International Fair Ground, Erbil – Kurdistan this November:
Launched in Silicon Valley California, Iraq Project is Marketplace and Business Development firm dedicated to the reconstruction and economic development in Iraq. We bring in together corporations, lending institutions, entrepreneurs, suppliers, and contractors from inside and outside Iraq.
Our services include Consulting, Project Management, and Investment Promotion in Iraq. We provide customized studies and forecasts on different segments of Iraq economy.
Iraq Construction Drive Offers Billions of Dollars in Business Development Prospects
That was genius of the neocon plan: tear up a country completely, foment anarchy then rebuild it from scratch. When Colin Powell warned before the invasion that once we broke Iraq-- we would "own it" Cheney must have chuckled. Did Powell not know that was the plan all along? The problem that Powell and the rest of us in the reality-based world understood was that even if Iraq might be "worth it" how the devil were we going to "keep it"?
When John McCain talks about victory what he means is making Iraq a safe enough place to earn fortunes for his friends who dine on yachts and fly their own jets. It matters not to him that to create the Iraq that he dreams of will sink the United States and the remains of our democracy along with it. And yet how is Obama going to risk Iraq regressing into another Somalia when General Electric and Verizon are chafing to do business in Tikrit and Kirkuk?
The Iraq Investment and Reconstruction Task Force
This was the first U.S. government trade mission to Iraq in 20 years and the first official mission to the Kurdistan Region.
The Government of Iraq, led by the Iraqi Ministry of Industry and Minerals (MIM) is currently in the process of evaluating investor proposals to enter into joint venture partnerships between many of Iraq’s lucrative State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs) and international companies. These partnerships will permit investors to acquire production output from Iraq’s productive factories in exchange for investment of expertise and capital to improve and rehabilitate these assets.
The problem a President Obama will face is that after five years of chaos and sectarian strife even as the violence subsides Iraqis are left struggling without any viable income. As McClatchy Papers report, for almost two years the Pentagon was paying Sunni militiamen at least $300 a month each to fight al Qaida and other Sunni extremist groups. Up to now the only secure commercial centers are next to U.S. military bases and even there it is dangerous for local entrepreneurs to operate.
The outcome of all this is as one would expect. Iraq's oil revenues are being doled out to pacify its citizens and the few decent jobs there are can only be had through bribery, cronyism or official corruption. That makes for a volatile mix in and of itself without the added complication of foreign occupiers handing out sweetheart deals to vulture capitalists grown fat on what many Muslims perceive to be a corporate Western 'crusade' against Islam.
