Oil continues to flow from Kirkuk to Turkey, despite Kurdish separatist threats to blow it up as a tactic against Turkey, Simon Webb reports for Reuters.
Iraq was pumping around 400,000 barrels per day of Kirkuk crude to Turkey on Thursday for the seventh consecutive day, the shipper said.
“The flow is about 18,000 barrels per hour,” he said. “They are having some success at keeping it going. …Iraq has moved to market about 7.5 million barrels of crude from Ceyhan storage through ships and another pipeline in Turkey so far in October, the shipper said. A vessel was booked to load another million barrels on October 27, he added.
Smugglers are succeeding as government officials in the Iraqi oil capital of Basra are turning their cheek to stolen oil taken to Iran, Azzaman reports.
Smugglers in Diwaniya were busted as well, the Voices of Iraq news agency reports.
Iraq’s Electricity
The Electricity Ministry has been active and optimistic of late. Hampered by a lack of investment (though criticized by the Electricity Union for not utilizing its expertise) and uncooperative bureaucrats from other ministries, it has signed deals with Iran and China to build power plants and boasts of increased power to the country.
The Institute for War and Peace Reporting project has issued another series in their ongoing EXCELLENT coverage of the Iraq war.
Despite vast investment, Iraq’s sclerotic electricity network shows little sign of improvement, to the despair of residents and businesses alike, writes Tiare Rath.
Baghdad Suffers Worst Cuts and corruption, violence, mismanagement leave the capital with severely restricted supplies.
Kurds Struggle to Generate Own Supplies, writes Frman Abdul-Rahman, and most power projects have not been completed or made little or no impact.
Scams Enrage Karbala Residents with politicians and militia accused of stealing electricity supplies.
The Iraqi Oil Controversy
There is hardly a more recognized slogan summing up the Iraq war critics’ position: the war was about oil.
Regardless, the war took place, and continues to do so.
Amidst it all, there are very well-meaning technocrats in the U.S. government who are working hard to improve the Iraq oil sector.
However, the oil sector is the most important of Iraq’s total economy, and the U.S. government’s stated goal (of many) in Iraq immediately after the invasion was to “reform” that economy – i.e. less of a nationalized style and more of a free market.
The bottom line, however, is that there are other people deciding, at least at first, and now helping the Iraqi government decide what to do with the varying economic sectors, including the oil.
Greg Muttitt, co-director of the British-based group Platform and on the forefront of the non-Iraqi campaign against the proposed oil law, lays out his take thus far.
The USA justifies its pressure on grounds that an oil law would help bring reconciliation.
Even if that account fitted the facts (which it doesn’t - their oil law barely mentions the revenue sharing they claim is so important), even if the USA were not responsible for sponsoring the sectarianism that is now tearing at the country, the very concept of the US benchmarks is based on a racist premise: that Iraqis are not able to sort out their politics themselves, that they need US pressure to get the country on track. That is a premise almost unanimously accepted by the media.
And White Men continue to pontificate on what’s best for Iraqis. Noteworthy was an opinion piece in the Financial Times entitled “Oil for peace”, by Nick Butler, former Policy Director of BP and New Labour confidante. He argued that “the most useful parting gift that the coalition could leave [...] is a practical model for renewal of the oil sector”.
But the spin is now wearing thin.
It is a matter of record that until 2002 the USA and UK publicly identified their strategic interests in Iraqi and Middle Eastern oil. Equally, both countries do not deny that they have played a central role in shaping Iraqi oil policy, albeit with claims of noble motives.
Turkey’s Invasion
Today’s Iraq Press Roundup by Hiba Dawood for UPI discusses the media’s take on the Turkey-Iraq showdown.
It’s not so easy going for the U.S. on the “tightrope” between allies in the Turkey-Kurdish dispute, Jim Lobe writes for Inter Press Service.
There may not be unbreakable brother and sisterhood between Iraq’s Kurds and Turkish Kurds when it concerns the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), Tim Butcher writes for The Telegraph.
More on the PKK’s sister organization, the PJAK, by Farideh Farhi in Informed Comment: Global Affairs.
Kudos to Richard A. Oppel, Jr. of the New York Times for bringing attention to the conflict between the Kurdish guerrillas and Iran during the time attention is on the Turkish- Kurdish imbroglio and the possible US connection. …
But Oppel’s story is significant for reasons that go beyond front-page attention to a largely neglected issue by the mainstream media. First, the story sheds light on the extent of the operation, involving relatively large numbers of Iranian casualties (the claim is 150 since August) as well as some captured (one even interviewed by Oppel).
Second, the story does not beat around the bush and rightly states that PJAK is essentially the same as PKK (“they share leadership, logistics, and allegiance to Abdullah Ocalan, the PKK leader imprisoned in Turkey”). This is an important point because PKK is on US’s list of terrorist groups and precisely for this reason the United States would like to avoid any hint of association with the group, particularly now that Turkey is demanding the US to bring pressure on the Kurdish Regional Government to clamp down on the activities of PKK.
Society, Security and Politics
Iraqis are increasingly suffering from mental health and stress problems, the United Nations says.
America in Iraq
Generalizations are dangerous, especially when various political sides use them to abuse U.S. soldiers’ role in Iraq. But information about the coalition forces is important in understanding the war effort and what may come.
Dahr Jamail, author of the new book Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches From an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq, writes for Inter Press Service about the decreasing morale of U.S. soldiers.
A quick 15 page report sums up the overall U.S. failure thus far in Iraq: it is too U.S. heavy and had little Iraq input.
In an interim report on U.S. efforts to modernize the Iraqi financial management system, the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction is clear that the tens of millions of dollars poured into the project have largely been wasted.
Why? Because it was imposed on Iraqis, not an organic Iraqi solution to the failures of the Saddam regime and the post-Saddam problems it posed.
This is a drop in the bucket for the overall Iraq war costs. The Congressional Budget Office tossed out an estimate this week that the Iraq and Afghanistan wars would top $2.4 trillion.
Here’s an exchange between reporters and White House Spokeswoman Dana Perino:
Q Dana, I wanted to ask you about the CBO estimate for the cost of Iraq and Afghanistan. Why is that $2.4 trillion figure wrong?
MS. PERINO: Well, part of it is that when you start having all — just a ton of speculation. It’s a hypothetical that was created based on questions that Democrats in Congress who don’t want us to be in the war asked the Congressional Budget Office to provide. Our force structure in Iraq and Afghanistan has fluctuated. Already this year, the President said that 5,700 troops would come home by December. We don’t know what the costs are going to be over the years, and so because that fluctuates, it’s just wildly premature to put out a number like that.
Q Okay, so what might be a more reasonable estimate? I’m sure folks at OMB have their own counter.
MS. PERINO: Look, spending to fight the global war on terror is an investment in our security and it is something that the President is committed to prioritizing in the budget. We hope that Congress would agree. We don’t know how much the war is going to cost in the future. We do our best to try to provide those projections, as we did last February when we sent up the budget and we said we think this is how much we’re going to need, $146 billion — $149 billion. We added $46 billion to that in the supplemental that we asked for last week.
You can’t project that far into the future. We are starting to see good signs of success — I’m sorry — signs of progress in Iraq. We want those trend lines to continue. We want our troops to have the force protection they need, the equipment that they need, and the care for our wounded warriors and their families need to be factored into this, as well. But $2.4 trillion is pure speculation.
Q If you can say it’s inaccurate and others can say it’s wildly inaccurate, surely there must be some kind of quantifiable sense as to what this –
MS. PERINO: I think what they looked at 10 years ago — the answer is we just don’t operate that way in terms of providing a federal budget. We provide as much information as we can, but there are changing conditions on the ground and it’s just — it would not serve the public well to put out numbers that we don’t have any confidence in.
Q Is that number — if that number turned out to be somewhere close to accurate, do you think that would be a reasonable amount of money to be spending on the war –
MS. PERINO: You’re asking me another hypothetical question; if that were to be true. I’m not going to answer that.
Q — that doesn’t strike you as –
MS. PERINO: Look, what I can tell you is that I’m not going to worry about the number. What I’m worried about is making sure that the President gets what he needs in order to provide the safety and security for the country. And we have spent a lot of money on the global war on terror. I think we’re spending it smartly and we are going to continue to do that. And whoever comes in as President is January of 2009, I’m sure when they sit down and have their first briefing is that they’re going to feel the same way.
Roger.
Q Dana, could I follow up on that?
MS. PERINO: Sure.
Q For fiscal ‘09, there’s a $50 million placeholder for it. Given the fact that the supplemental –
MS. PERINO: $50 million?
Q — $50 billion, I’m sorry.
MS. PERINO: Go again.
Q Given the fact that the request for ‘08 in the supplemental is now $250 billion, is $50 billion for ‘09 seem realistic?
MS. PERINO: Again, what we try to do is, as we said back in February, we’re going to try to provide Congress with as much information as we possible can, but it’s — and I believe Rob Portman, who was the OMB Director at the time, said it’s too difficult to project that far into the future because we don’t know what the commanders on the ground are going to need. One of the reasons that we’ve asked for an additional $46 billion is because General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker came back, gave their congressionally-mandated testimony, reported to the President, and the President said, carry on, fulfill this plan, and come back in March and tell us how it’s going, provide a progress update. So it’s just — it’s difficult to try to project this too far into the future.
The National Priorities Project breaks down the cost of war in an interactive way.
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