Iraq Oil Report

A Pentagon report says four key oil-related laws in Iraq are “stalled” in political gridlock while gains in oil and power production could be lost, Ben Lando reports for United Press International. The quarterly report to Congress, “Measuring Security and Stability in Iraq,” released Tuesday, said the law commonly known as the oil law is the furthest along the political process — it made it to Parliament but is stuck in the Energy Committee.

Iraqi government officials on Wednesday expressed “regret” about what U.S. officials said was mismanagement of oil revenues, Sinan Salaheddin reports for The Associated Press. Iraq oil production and the price of oil itself increased over the past year, meeting the budget. “The government expresses regret over the statements of the U.S. government auditing office and some congressmen about how Iraqi government invests its money,” said Iraqi government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh, responding to the concerns raised by key U.S. Senators, in a story broke by Ben Lando from United Press International and reported by Iraq Oil Report last Friday.

“How much has Iraq and the United States, respectively, spent annually during that time period on training, equipping and supporting Iraqi security forces, and on Iraq reconstruction, governance, and economic development?” Committee Chairman Carl Levin, D-Mich., and member John Warner, R-Va., wrote Friday to the U.S. Government Accountability Office. “We believe that it has been overwhelmingly U.S. taxpayer money that has funded Iraq reconstruction over the last five years, despite Iraq earning billions of dollars in oil revenue over that time period that have ended up in non-Iraqi banks.”

The Pentagon’s head of U.S. Central Command and the State Department’s Iraq coordinator were grilled by members of Congress this week who took the decidedly “blame Iraq” tone — not wholly unwarranted, some say — in expressing frustration with progress in the country five years after the invasion.

The reconstruction is to repair damage caused by the 2003 invasion and resulting war, as well as rebuilding Iraq from harm caused by Saddam Hussein. The funds not in Iraq are in the United States. …

The Army is preparing to deploy to Iraq two 4-ton biomass refineries designed to turn piles of trash into electricity. Each can run for 20 hours on a ton of trash, producing enough power to light a small village, Rick Callahan reports for The Associated Press.The water bottles, plastic foam plates and other trash discarded by American troops in Iraq’s mess halls may soon be serving double-duty — as an unlikely power source to illuminate barracks and power up laptops.

Iraqi President Jalal Talabani held a meeting on Monday with Kurdistan’s President Massoud al-Barazani in Salah el-Din resort in Arbil, the Voices of Iraq news agency reports.

Turkey’s government is planning a broad series of investments worth as much as $12 billion in the country’s largely Kurdish southeast, in a new economic effort intended to create jobs and draw young men away from militancy, Sabrina Tavernise reports for The New York Times. The program is intended to drain support for the militant Kurdish group, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, by improving the lives of Turkey’s impoverished Kurdish minority. As part of the push, the government will dedicate a state television channel to Kurdish language broadcasting, a measure that Kurds in Turkey have sought for years. The Turkish state has imposed severe restrictions on the use of Kurdish, arguing that allowing that freedom would strengthen the Kurds’ desire to form a separate state.

Turkey’s economic plan is apparently not impressing leaders of the Kurdish community, UPI reports.

U.S. sees long fight to oust Al Qaeda in Mosul, Sam Dagher reports for The Christian Science Monitor. American soldiers say the battle for the northern Iraqi city is a complicated mix of counterterrorism, economic incentives, and political solutions.

Journalists defy death sentence in Mosul, Richard Tomkins reports for UPI.In a city known as al-Qaida’s last urban stronghold, fear of sudden death dictates how people live their daily lives. For 21 men condemned to death by terrorists here, survival has come down to a dingy, bullet-scarred building on Mosul’s eastern outskirts.

Newly declassified statistics on the frequency of insurgent attacks in Iraq suggest that after major security gains last fall in the wake of an American troop increase, the conflict has drifted into a stalemate, with levels of violence remaining stubbornly constant from November 2007 through early 2008, James Glanz and Eric Schmitt report for The New York Times.

The Senate Appropriations Committee heard testimony Tuesday on waste and corruption in Iraq, an issue committee Democrats suggested will be a talking point in upcoming debate over the Bush administration’s request for $102.5 billion in fiscal 2008 supplemental funds for the war. Calling the committee “the only regulator on the spigot this administration opened in 2003 to flood Iraq with billions” of dollars, Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., pledged to put “a strong hand on that spigot” when considering the emergency war funding request, Dan Friedman reports for Congress Daily. Testimony on U.S. contracting problems and corruption at Iraq ministries from Comptroller General David Walker, Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction Stuart Bowen, Defense Department Inspector General Claude Kicklighter and Radhi Hamza al-Radhi, Iraq’s former commissioner on public integrity, mostly followed statements they gave at earlier hearings.

The Iraq Press Roundup — a recap of Iraq’s editorial pages by UPI’s Hiba Dawood.
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