Iraq Oil Report

While Turkey’s government decides whether to enter Iraq in response to ongoing attacks blamed on Kurdish separatists hiding in the northern Iraq mountains, Iraq’s oil sector pumps, and waits. Oil skyrocketed to $88 at one point Tuesday, before declining a few dollars, as concerns over global oil supplies and a new Iraq war strike nerves.

The pipeline from Kirkuk, Iraq, to Ceyhan, Turkey, has largely been offline because of Sunni insurgents’ successful sabotage tactics. The country, then, relied on the south to shoulder the 1.6 million barrels per day of exports, which brought in nearly the entire federal budget last year.

That pipeline has been working for the past two months, Simon Webb reports for Reuters. That’s a bright spot for Iraq.

But the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or the PKK, is drawing a U.S. and Iraqi ally, Turkey, into a possible invasion. Ankara blames the United States and Iraq for not doing enough to stop the attacks from the PKK, a separatist group advocating for an independent country of Kurdistan, including the Kurdish areas of Turkey, Syria and Iran. And Turkey particularly blames the Kurdistan Regional Government, the autonomous and relatively secure area of Iraq in the north, with the same, although less public, aspirations as the PKK.

Turkey’s Parliament is set to give war authority as early as Wednesday, and as Daniel Dombey, Demetri Sevastopulo and Vincent Boland report for the Financial Times, Iraqi Vice President Tariq al-Hashimi has flown to Turkey to try to ease tensions.

Turkey’s prime minister says a war resolution doesn’t mean an invasion will take place, Christopher Torchia reports for the AP.

If Turkey does launch an attack, it could either send in ground troops or make it a more precise incursion from the air, though the bombs and missiles will still result in unknown amounts of civilian deaths.

Al Jazeera has a reporter at the border. Watch the report HERE.

The U.S. badly needs a new game plan in Iraq, writes Leah Bower in Gulf News. (Bower is a former Business Editor at Gulf News, and has covered energy issues in Central and Eastern Europe, the Baltics and the Middle East.)

Sadly, and much like the war against the spread of communism in Vietnam, the US has not only bungled any chance of getting Iraqi oil, it has shot itself in the foot and driven prices up too.

Fouad Ajami is a little more optimistic, writing for U.S. News and World Report there’s A Decent Outcome For Iraq.

But optimism and good news/analysis are a rarity, not regular, for Iraq. Robert Dreyfuss writes about Iraq: The Other Surge for The Nation.

The war in Iraq has multiplied the terrorist threat by seven, write Peter Bergen and Paul Cruickshank in Mother Jones Magazine.

The Senate’s ‘Rebuke’ to Bush’s Iraq Policy Is a Blueprint for Ethnic Cleansing, write Joshua Holland and Raed Jarrar for Alternet.

And back in the states, the war will be felt for generations. It is immortalized in new literature, and the best books are by the grunts, NPR reports.

Troy Turner and his family’s life will be forever marked, however, by an aspect of war the United States is not ready to deal with, Anne Hull writes in an amazing piece for the Washington Post.

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