Iraq Oil Report

Plus:
*Iraq Oil Ministry, Big Oil to meet in Jordan this week
*Deadline to register for upcoming oil tenders delayed
*2008 budget delayed, Kurd vs. Arab continues
*Iraq Press Roundup
*Is the surge working? A worthless question.
*and more…

You can’t have one without the other, but with many of Iraq’s power plants shut and refineries stopped, Iraqis have neither fuel nor electricity.

Iraq’s Electricity Ministry is blaming the Oil Ministry for cutting fuel supplies and Turkey for ending electricity imports.

The Oil Ministry says continuous power to its refineries will lead to continuous supplies of fuel.

“We hear a lot of promises but we see nothing,” Baghdad resident Amjad Kazim told Gulf News. Blackouts and long lines at the fuel stations are increasing as subsidized, state-controlled supplies run dry and the black market boosts prices.

Read the entire piece by Ben Lando for United Press International. Click HERE.

An Iraqi Oil Ministry delegation will meet in Amman later this week with senior executives from five oil majors to discuss the possibility of signing technical support agreements to help develop five oil fields, an Iraqi oil ministry spokesman said Tuesday, Hassan Hafidh reports for Dow Jones Newswires.

Iraq’s Oil Ministry has pushed back the Jan. 31 registration deadline for oil companies wanting consideration for projects to be awarded this year, Ben Lando reports for UPI.

The Future Importance of Iraqi Oil in The International Oil Market, by Oil Consultant Ali Hussain in the Middle East Economic Survey. “In the future, Iraqi oil can play a very important role in the oil market to the extent that its production, and hence exports, may prove to have a positive impact on the global economy. This will happen provided that the Iraqi oil industry is developed efficiently and the authorities adopt the right and effective policies. In order for the Iraqi oil industry to develop rapidly and oil production to increase substantially this industry must go through two important phases simultaneously, namely rehabilitation and expansion.”

Iraq’s 2008 budget has been delayed as disagreements between Iraqi Kurd and Arab politicians exacerbate. At issue is the funding of the Peshmerga, the Kurdistan Regional Government’s security forces, IraqSlogger.com reports. Of course, the two sides have been escalating animosity for more than a year, as the struggle over who controls Iraq’s oil continues.

Most of the unease, however, stems from a decision to allocate 17 percent of the budget to the oil-rich autonomous Kurdish region and on top of that to pay for its peshmerga security force from the national defense budget, AFP reports.

More from the Alsumaria Iraq TV Network. Also, you can check out Monday’s Iraq Oil Report. Of course, if you’re a regular reader of Iraq Oil Report, you already know what’s going on.

Addax Petroleum Announces Update to Continued Appraisal Program at its KRG field Taq Taq, according to a company statement.

Security, Society & Politics

Violence in the southern – and oil-rich – areas of Iraq spiked, but there have been little definitive answers as to who the perpetrators are. Fierce clashes have been raging in the cities of Basra, Nasiriya and Diwaniya for the third consecutive day, Abed Battat reports for Azzaman, with the government giving conflicting versions for the causes leading to the upsurge in insecurity.

Some 276 people were killed, wounded or captured by government forces fighting a millenarian Shia cult in southern Iraq over the past three days, the Iraqi Ministry of Defence said in Baghdad yesterday, Patrick Cockburn reports for The Independent.

The southern Mahdists speak for themselves, writes Norwegian Institute of International Affairs research fellow Reidar Visser at historiae.org.In an interesting statement, the Adherents of the Mahdi, the group targeted in recent security operations in the southern Iraqi cities of Nasiriyya and Basra, have explained the conflict from their own point of view.

Iraq’s government must rapidly raise its game to cement the country’s fragile new peace, the United States ambassador in Baghdad has declared, Martin Fletcher of The Times reports.

Mahmoud Othman, a Kurdish lawmaker, has an ax to grind with the United States. He’s sick of watching American officials make statements on television every time the Iraqi parliament makes a move, reports McClatchy Newspapers Baghdad Bureau Chief Leila Fadel.“They talk about it as if we are children and they are directing us,” he said, exasperated. “When we passed the accountability and justice law, after one hour Bush said publicly we congratulate you so that everybody will say ‘we told you this is an American law.’”

Read what the Iraqi editorial writers are saying. The Iraq Press Roundup by UPI’s Hiba Dawood.

Rethinking the Future: The Next Five Years in Iraq, a symposium organized by The American University International Law Review and the Public International Law and Policy Group,February 11-12, 2008 in Washington, D.C.

Is the surge working? A worthless question.

The U.S. military has announced the 26th member killed so far this month, Iraq Coalition Casualty Count is reporting. So ends the monthly decrease since August 2007. And there are nine days left in January. Violence in the rest of the country is increasing as well.

Over the past few months, as the numbers of U.S. armed forces killed in action dropped, the common refrain was (a paraphrase) “see, the violence is dropping, the surge is working.” So, if you apply that to this new statistic, one must say “the surge is not, or is no longer working.”

But this is an obtuse debate – held by current presidents and those who aspire to be next year, members of congress and the pundits. It’s one of tunnel vision, lacking context, and puts all of Iraq’s history and U.S. time and money and blood into a time span of days and months.

It reduces Iraqis and their country to terms of armed resistance. And it takes the eyes of everyone – regardless of position on the war – away from the overall goal of long-lasting peace in Iraq. The extent that the U.S. should be involved in Iraq should not be judged by a simple “the surge worked/it didn’t work, pull the troops out/leave them in” debate. It should be judged by establishing a goal based on the moral requirements of starting this war.

As long as there is debate on the efficacy of the surge, the longer it is until real discussions on the future of Iraq – currently not taking place in the White House, the Capitol Buildings or the campaign trail – are ignored.
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