Plus:
*Oil Majors get special crude instead of cash deal for upcoming oil deals
*Iraq-Jordan oil import deal solidifies
*Smugglers near Baiji set pipeline ablaze
*Oil union leader keys British anti-war tour
*Iraq sends delegation to Qatar for gas cooperation
*Italy’s Edison, Shell want into Iraq gas too
*Turkish op-ed denies cutting N. Iraq’s electricity
*Security, Society & Politics
*America in Iraq
Iraq’s Foreign Ministry says it has passed on a letter of warning to Tehran regarding accusations Iran is illegally pumping Iraqi oil, United Press International reports. Accusations started over the weekend that Iran is stealing Iraqi oil, and actually forced Iraqis off the oil fields. The deputy chief of Iraq’s Commission on Public Integrity also says Iran is behind smuggling of oil and fuel products, and blames Iraq’s Oil Ministry for not doing enough. He also named the Fadhila Party, which controls the southern oil province of Basra and the southern oil protection force, as well as the current head of the CPI, also a Fadhila Party member, of being complicit in the smuggling.
Smugglers sparked a fire when trying to steal oil from a pipeline sending Kirkuk oil to Baiji, Iraq’s largest oil refinery. Reuters reports the refinery is still operating and oil has been routed around the affected line.
Iraq will pay with oil instead of cash to oil majors that sign special technical service agreements aimed at short-term increases in oil production, UPI reports. ExxonMobil, Chevron, ConocoPhillips and Shell are firms targeted for the deals, The Times of London reports. In exchange for the oil, the companies would direct training of Iraqi workers and equipment to Iraq’s largest oil and gas fields.
Jordan and Iraq revive their roller coaster deal for discount oil deliveries, The Associated Press reports. Iraq Finance Minister Bayan Jabr met with Jordan’s king and prime minister during a visit to Amman and struck a deal to provide 40,000 barrels per day of oil. Jordan has no oil proven oil reserves and special terms for Iraqi oil have been hampered by violence in Iraq. The AP also says Jabr talked about building a pipeline from Haditha, in western Iraq, to Aqaba, the Jordanian Red Sea port and other alternatives to Persian Gulf routes – where most of Iraq’s oil heads to market – fearing U.S.-Iranian upheaval.
The President of the Iraqi Federation of Oil Unions, Hassan Juma Awad, will begin a British anti-war tour later this month, according to the Stop The War Coalition website. He’s been a vocal opponent of the draft oil law, has an arrest warrant pending, though inactive, by the Iraq national government, and in an interview with UPI’s Ben Lando in London in November, blamed Iraq’s government for not investing enough of its own money in the oil sector and blamed the war for many factors affecting Iraq’s oil production.
Iraq will send a delegation to Qatar to talk gas development cooperation, Natalie Pearson reports for Dow Jones Newswires. Shell has been courting Iraq’s Oil Ministry to develop Iraq’s southern gas infrastructure, which is largely associated gas burned off. Shell also wants in on the large Akkas gas field in western Iraq, as is Italy’s Edison, Thomson Financial reports.
ExxonMobil is eyeing Iraq but a top official said it’s is “a ways down the road,” Dow Jones Newswires reports.
There is no Turkish electricity embargo on north Iraq, Ilnur Cevik writes in The New Anatolian. “Turkey is aware of the sensitivities of the Kurdish people of northern Iraq and does not want to lose their friendship. Thus Turkey has no intention of imposing an electricity embargo in northern Iraq that will actually hurt the ordinary Kurd. The halt of Turkish electricity to northern Iraq is due to the electricity shortage because of the lack of natural gas from Iran.” Iraq says Turkey is in part to blame for recent bouts of blackouts.
Society, Security & Politics
Quality of life issues continue to dominate Iraqi lives, and without these issues being resolved in any sustainable manner, there’s no hope of any sustainable economy. Especially the oil sector.
This Agence France-Presse article explains it from the get-go: “Baghdad is drowning in sewage, thirsty for water and largely powerless, an Iraqi official said on Sunday in a grim assessment of services in the capital five years after the US-led invasion.”
And clean drinking water is more important than a mere thirst quencher. Among the consequences, cholera, which last year Iraq was hit harder by than the past 40 years, Emad al-Shara’ reports for the Institute for War & Peace Reporting. The disease is unable to survive in winter, but even the relatively-prosperous Kurdish region fears yet another outbreak this summer, Ben Lando reports for UPI.
Political parties pay only lip-service to women’s demands for greater political clout, IWPR’s Barham Omar reports of the Kurdish woman’s glass ceiling. “Despite a reputation for courage on the battlefield, Kurdish women are unable to penetrate the upper echelons of power in the region’s top parties and government, according to politicians and women’s activists.”
Read what the Iraqi editorial pages say in the Iraq Press Roundup by UPI’s Hiba Dawood.
A breakaway faction of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s Dawa Party calls for removing sectarian quotas, the Voices of Iraq news agency reports.
An Iraqi Sunni secular leader announced on Monday that his political bloc has merged with the Independents bloc and will be represented in the parliament under the name “Arab Bloc For National Dialogue, the Xinhua news agency reports.
A new provincial election law is to be open-list, not the closed-list style that is a factor in the religious and ethnic factionalization of the Parliament now. But it is stalled because of dispute between legislators over the 2008 budget Al Sabaah reports.
If U.S. Congress is upset at the pace of Iraq’s legislative process, well, at least Iraq has ratified the Kyoto Protocol on climate change, as AFP reports.
America in Iraq
The “Great Mystery” of Iraq’s WMDs? The media watchdog Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting takes issue with the Jan. 27, CBS 60 Minutes interview with Robert Piro, the FBI agent tasked with interrogating Saddam Hussein, by reporter Scott Pelley.
Pelley (opening monologue): What happened to the weapons of mass destruction? Was Saddam in league with Al-Qaeda? Why did he choose war with the United States? …
PELLEY: And what did he tell you about how his weapons of mass destruction had been destroyed?
PIRO: He told me that most of the WMD had been destroyed by the U.N. inspectors in the ’90s, and those that hadn’t been destroyed by the inspectors unilaterally destroyed by Iraq.
PELLEY: He had ordered them destroyed?
PIRO: Yes.
PELLEY: So why keep the secret? Why put your nation at risk? Why put your own life at risk to maintain this charade?
But in Feb. 2003, in an interview with CBS’ Dan Rather:
RATHER: Saddam also rejected Bush administration allegations that besides the missile delivery system, he still has weapons of mass destruction.
HUSSEIN: I think America and the world also knows that Iraq no longer has the weapons. And I believe the mobilization that’s been done was, in fact, done partly to cover the huge lie that was being waged against Iraq about chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. That is why, when you talk about such missiles, these missiles have been destroyed. There are no missiles that are contrary to the prescription of the United Nations in Iraq. They are no longer there.
And two months earlier, CBS’ Bob Schieffer:
“Saddam Hussein says he has no weapons of mass destruction, but should we believe him?” Schieffer asked a visiting senator on Face the Nation what would happen if U.S. experts “conclude that Saddam Hussein is once again lying, as he has so often in the past, claiming he doesn’t have the weapons, when in fact we know that he has.”
FAIR concludes:
Before the invasion, CBS’s line was that Iraq was hiding prohibited weapons, and Saddam Hussein was lying about it. Now it maintains that Iraq did not have those weapons…and Saddam Hussein was lying about it. Is it really too much to ask that the network look back at their own coverage of five years ago before announcing that it’s solved one of the “great mysteries” of that era?
Former U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad: Iran benefits from U.S. wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, according to a report by the AP’s John Heilprin reports. He writes “The 2003 invasion of Iraq removed a key rival of Shiite Iran with the ouster of Saddam Hussein’s Sunni-dominated government. Iran has friendly ties with the Shiites now in power in Iraq … Whether or not U.S. actions have increased Iran’s power, the country also has been playing a greater role in Iraq’s economy, supplying Iraqis with electricity, household goods and food. Iraqi leaders from the Shiite bloc that are now in power have said their ties with Iran’s governing Shiite Persians will grow.”
The United States’ military and political ambition in Iraq is enormous and undiminished, but a true examination of what’s happening on the ground is still needed, Paul Rogers, professor of peace studies at Bradford University, writes for ISN Security Watch.But if what is happening in Iraq has been to a great extent sidelined in the US media and political argument, the country’s military situation and political problems still hold the capacity to upset the US’ calculations.
This means there’s a “False Sense of Security in Iraq,” Michael Shank writes in Foreign Policy In Focus.”The Pentagon ushered in the New Year with seemingly welcome news: Iraq’s security is improving. Attacks across the country fell 62% and, according to aid organization Iraqi Red Crescent, 20,000 Iraqi refugees returned home from Syria in December alone. The U.S. troop surge must be working. Even the Democratic opponents of President George Bush’s agenda in Iraq are befuddled by the news, unclear how to proceed. But wait, before America breathes a much wanted sigh of relief, do these measurements have merit? A closer look reveals that the refugee numbers, in context, are misleading and that security in Iraq remains ever elusive.”
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