Plus:
*Iraq oil ends ‘07 with good and it’s-been-worse news
*Oil law update
*What Turkey wants
*Iraqi solutions, U.S. problems
*much more….
Turkey’s president made it clear during his visit to Washington this week that his country will continue a hard-line approach in dealing with the Kurdish guerrilla campaign in his country and ensuring Kirkuk, Iraq’s oil-rich northern city, doesn’t fall under control of Iraq’s Kurds.
After meetings with top officials, including President Bush, President Abdullah Gul exposed the fault line between U.S.-Turkey and U.S.-Kurd relations. …
Bulent Aliriza, director of the Center for Strategic & International Studies’ Turkey Project, said Turkey basically holds a three-point position on keeping Kirkuk from the KRG: “the city and the oil resources around it belong equally to Turkomen, Arabs and Kurds who live there; its incorporation by the Kurds would provide the economic underpinning of an independent Kurdish state, which Turkey opposes; and it’s contrary to the vital interest of the Turkomen who are ethnically related to the Turks.”
Read the entire article by Ben Lando for United Press International. Click HERE.
The future of Iraq’s oil-rich Kirkuk will be decided by the Constitutional Court, despite a new U.N. process, as the Kurds’ dispute with Baghdad continues, UPI reports.
NPR and WAMU host Diane Rehm spends a well-deserved hour discussing the issue, which you can listen to here.
Good news and not as bad bad news for Iraq oil
Iraq ended a deadly year by steadily increasing oil production, but about $1.4 billion in revenue was taken by the still booming black market, UPI reports.
Apparently Turkey and the U.S. will help deliver Iraq’s oil to the world market, at least that’s what Reuters is reporting based on a CNN Turk interview with Turkish Energy Minister Hilmi Guler, who was part of Gul’s delegation.
This is, however, on its face, a totally ABSURD story. Iraqis, like other normal people, would never turn their energy sector over to other countries. A proper explanation is more likely Guler is restating Turkey’s prerogative to be a continued and increase transporter of Iraqi oil to market, as well as provide an established energy transit route for Iraq’s natural gas, which will be a major European feed in the future.
Iraq’s Oil Law
The leader of the Iraqi Parliament’s Energy Committee has accused Iraq’s Kurdish leadership and the national ministerial council of holding up a draft oil law, UPI reports.
Turkey’s president says Turkish companies are ready to enter Iraq’s oil sector when a new oil law – which Gul backs — is passed, dodging a question on Iraqi Kurds’ oil deals, Ben Lando reports for UPI.
Legal and logistical questions remain for Iraq, despite talks with Shell and Total to develop the Akkas field, which may feed gas to both Syria and Europe, UPI reports.
Security, Society & Politics
Security Improvements May Not Produce National Reconciliation, the must read analysis by Eurasia Group Middle East Analyst Rochdi Younsi.
Read what the editorialists in Iraq’s press are saying: the Iraq Press Roundup UPI’s Hiba Dawood.
“Iraqi solutions for Iraqi problems.” That’ the new buzz phrase for the Bush administration in Iraq, Thomas E. Ricks and Karen DeYoung write in The Washington Post. It has evolved not from some altruistic breakthrough, but because a year ago President Bush outlined the infamous “benchmarks,” and very few have been met.
And it’s both correct, and grossly wrong.
“Iraqi solutions” is very respectable. Perhaps, even as far back as 2003, when people who had been away from Iraq for decades were propped up into power, and when the United States began its economic reformation of Iraq like a child playing with Legos, this phrase would have been more useful.
What are now being termed “Iraqi problems” are, for sure, problems Iraqis must face the consequences of. But it’s largely the handiwork of U.S. post-invasion, pro-sectarianism policy: The political discourse in Iraq is so religion/ethnicity-based that a meeting between Dennis Kucinich and Karl Rove would look like a love fest; a variety of armed forces and militias – some supported by the United States to varying degrees – are taking up arms against each other, the government and coalition troops; and, most importantly, an economy wrecked by U.S. policies of ignoring state enterprises and opening the floodgates of cheap import goods since 2003, Iraqi citizens lacking clean water, electricity, food, fuels, and an educational and healthcare system worse now than during Saddam Hussein.
So, it is up to the United States – politicians and citizens – and the world to decide how best to comply with a moral obligation of providing all the necessary support to Iraqis as they figure out the solution.
Of course, you can take the words of Sens. John McCain and Joe Lieberman, who wrote The Surge Worked in a Wall Street Journal op-ed.
But can anyone just claim the surge led to a decrease in violence in, say, Baghdad? Tell that to my friend who’s brother-in-law was just killed in a suicide bombing at a funeral he was attending for a friend killed in a suicide bombing. A respectable look at just the demographics shows a HUGE shift from an ethnically diverse Baghdad in April 2006 to a mostly Shiite Baghdad in November 2007. There’s no one left to target after an area is ethnically cleansed – under U.S. occupation and the international law that governs it, no less.
A map of the demographics can be found in the review by Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies of the 2007 patterns of violence and casualties in Iraq.
He cautions for “strategic patience,” and lists a set of challenges that need to be met. They likely won’t, however, because it takes realistic and thoughtful engagement and planning, which neither the Bush administration nor the Republican or Democratic parties are capable of.
I’ll end by recommending another read of an op-ed by Revenue Watch Institute Middle East director Yahia Said in the International Herald Tribune.
Oh, and go ahead and visit the analysis by Ben Lando for UPI, Deeper than an oil law in Iraq.
——
