Iraq analysis

[Al-khiyal]

"Conspiracy theory"

However, both before and after the invasion, much of the U.S. political press treated the notion that oil was a motive for invading Iraq in March 2003 as a laughable conspiracy theory. Generally, business news outlets were much more frank about the realpolitik importance of Iraq's oil fields. For instance, Ray Rodon, a former executive at Halliburton, the oil-service giant that Cheney once headed, said he was dispatched to Iraq in October 2002 to assess the country's oil infrastructure and map out plans for operating Iraq's oil industry, according to an April 14, 2003 story in Fortune magazine. "From behind the obsidian mirrors of his wraparound sunglasses, Ray Rodon surveys the vast desert landscape of southern Iraq's Rumailah oilfield," Fortune's story said. "A project manager with Halliburton's engineering and construction division, Kellogg Brown & Root, Rodon has spent months preparing for the daunting task of repairing Iraq's oil industry. Working first at headquarters in Houston and then out of a hotel room in Kuwait City, he has studied the intricacies of the Iraqi national oil company, even reviewing the firm's organizational charts so that Halliburton and the Army can ascertain which Iraqis are reliable technocrats and which are Saddam loyalists."

At about the same time as Rodon's trip to Iraq - October 2002 - Oil and Gas International, an industry publication, reported that the State Department and the Pentagon had put together pre-war planning groups that focused heavily on protecting Iraq's oil infrastructure. The next month, November 2002, the Department of Defense recommended that the Army Corps of Engineers award a contract to Kellogg, Brown & Root to extinguish Iraqi oil well fires. The contract also called for "assessing the condition of oil-related infrastructure; cleaning up oil spills or other environmental damage at oil facilities; engineering design and repair or reconstruction of damaged infrastructure; assisting in making facilities operational; distribution of petroleum products; and assisting the Iraqis in resuming Iraqi oil company operations."

In January 2003, as President Bush was presenting the looming war with Iraq as necessary to protect Americans, the Wall Street Journal reported that oil industry executives met with Cheney's staff to plan the post-war revival of Iraq's oil industry. "Facing a possible war with Iraq, U.S. oil companies are starting to prepare for the day when they may get a chance to work in one of the world's most oil-rich countries," the Journal reported on January 16, 2003.

"Executives of US oil companies are conferring with officials from the White House, the Department of Defense and the State Department to figure out how best to jump-start Iraq's oil industry following a war, industry officials say. The Bush administration is eager to secure Iraq's oil fields and rehabilitate them, industry officials say. They say Mr. Cheney's staff hosted an informational meeting with industry executives in October [2002], with ExxonMobil Corp., ChevronTexaco Corp., ConocoPhillips and Halliburton among the companies represented. Both the Bush administration and the companies say such a meeting never took place. Since then, industry officials say, the Bush administration has sought input, formally and informally, from executives and industry experts on how best to overhaul Iraq's oil sector."

Guarding the Oil Ministry

Despite the Bush administration's denials about oil as a motivation for war, the Bush administration's focus on Iraqi oil was firmly set. On April 5, 2003, Reuters reported that the State Department's "Future of Iraq" project headed by Thomas Warrick, special adviser to the Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs, held its fourth meeting of the oil and energy-working group. Documents obtained by Reuters showed that "a clear consensus among expert opinion favoring production-sharing agreements to attract the major oil companies."

"That is likely to thrill oil companies harboring hopes of lucrative contracts to develop Iraqi oil reserves," the news agency reported. "Short-term rehabilitation of southern Iraqi oil fields already is under way, with oil well fires being extinguished by US contractor Kellogg Brown and Root ... Long-term contracts are expected to see US companies ExxonMobil, ChevronTexaco and ConocoPhillips compete with Anglo-Dutch Shell, Britain's BP, TotalFinaElf of France, Russia's LUKOIL and Chinese state companies."

After U.S. troops captured Baghdad in April 2003, they were ordered to protect the Oil Ministry even as looters ransacked priceless antiquities from Iraq's national museums and stole explosives from unguarded military arsenals.

Unacceptable options

In April 2001, the report laid out a series of unacceptable options, including helping Iraq under Saddam Hussein extract more oil by easing embargoes that were meant to hem Hussein in. "The U.S. could consider reducing restrictions on oil investment inside Iraq," the report said. But if Hussein's "access to oil revenues was to be increased by adjustments in oil sanctions, Saddam Hussein could be a greater security threat to U.S. allies in the region if weapons of mass destruction, sanctions, weapons regimes and the coalition against him are not strengthened."

Iraq is a "key swing producer turning its taps on and off when it has felt such action was in its strategic interest," the report said, adding that there was even a "possibility that Saddam Hussein may remove Iraqi oil from the market for an extended period of time" in order to drive up prices. "Under this scenario, the United States remains a prisoner of its energy dilemma, suffering on a recurring basis from the negative consequences of sporadic energy shortages," the report said. "These consequences can include recession, social dislocation of the poorest Americans, and at the extremes, a need for military intervention."

The report recommended Cheney move swiftly to integrate energy and national security policy as a means to stop "manipulations of markets by any state" and suggested that his task force include "representation from the Department of Defense." "Unless the United States assumes a leadership role in the formation of new rules of the game," the report said, "U.S. firms, U.S. consumers and the U.S. government [will be left] in a weaker position." Two years after the Baker report, the United States - along with Great Britain and other allies - invaded Iraq. Now, more than six years later, the U.S. oil industry finally appears to be in a strong position relative to Iraq's oil riches. However, the price that has been paid by American troops, Iraqi civilians and the U.S. taxpayers has been enormous.

[Al-khiyal]

Fifteen wounded in Baghdad blast

BAGHDAD, July 4, 2009 (KUNA) -- Up to 15 people were wounded on Saturday when a booby-trapped car exploded in southern Baghdad, police reported. An Iraqi police source told KUNA that the booby-trapped car was detonated in Al Doura district, southern Baghdad. The source said that 15 people suffered wounds of varying severity, adding that all had been taken to hospital for treatment. The condition of some was said to be critical.

[Al-khiyal]

Si la violence ethnique reprend en Irak,
Washington menace de se désengager

Dimanche 5 Juillet 2009 -- Le vice-président américain Joe Biden, en visite à Bagdad, a menacé vendredi ses interlocuteurs irakiens d'un désengagement politique du pays si la violence confessionnelle ou ethnique reprenait en Irak, a indiqué à la presse un haut responsable américain. M. Biden, qui a rencontré dans la soirée le Premier ministre Nouri al-Maliki, a affirmé que si “la violence reprenait, cela changerait la nature de notre engagement. Il a été très direct sur ce point”, a affirmé le haut responsable à la presse. “Si, en raison des actions de différentes parties en Irak, le pays devait replonger dans la violence confessionnelle ou tomber dans la violence ethnique, alors ce n'est pas une chose qui nous permettrait de rester engagé car ce ne serait pas dans l'intérêt du peuple américain”, a-t-il ajouté. Interrogé pour savoir s'il s'agissait d'une menace, le responsable a affirmé : “Cela est une description de la réalité.” “Des quantités énormes de sang ont coulé, des ressources ont été dépensées pour aider l'Irak à se relever. Nous voulions que cela arrive, mais il n'y a aucune volonté de recoller les pots cassés encore une fois si, par l'action de certains, l'Irak devait s'effondrer”, a insisté le haut responsable. Le responsable a reconnu que Washington exerçait une “pression” sur Bagdad. Mais, a-t-il estimé, cette menace “crée une importante motivation” pour les Irakiens. Selon lui, les responsables irakiens sont d'accord sur les problèmes à régler en priorité pour stabiliser le pays, comme l'intégration de toutes les composantes ethniques et confessionnelles dans le processus politique et le statut de la ville de Kirkouk (Nord). La question de Kirkouk est liée à la répartition des richesses pétrolières : la “Constitution” kurde, qui devrait être ratifiée fin juillet, stipule que la province multiethnique de Kirkouk doit être annexée au Kurdistan, ce que le gouvernement central rejette fermement. “Le président (Barack Obama) et moi-même sommes heureux du long chemin parcouru par l'Irak depuis un an, mais la voie menant à la paix et la stabilité est encore difficile. Ce n'est pas encore fini”, a affirmé plus tôt M. Biden à des journalistes après l'entretien avec M. Maliki. “Les Irakiens doivent prendre des mesures politiques et utiliser le processus politique pour résoudre leurs différends et faire avancer leur intérêt national”, a ajouté M. Biden. Il a assuré que les États-Unis “restent prêts, si l’on nous le demande, à aider dans ce processus”. Il a également qualifié le retrait des troupes américaines des villes irakiennes, le 30 juin, “d'étape très importante sur le chemin d'un Irak stable, sûr et autonome”. Le Premier ministre irakien a de son côté estimé que le retrait américain des villes “confirme la crédibilité des accords” signés avec les États-Unis. “Ces accords sont fidèlement respectés”, a-t-il insisté, en référence à l'accord de sécurité signé en novembre dernier qui a ouvert la voie au désengagement total des forces américaines en 2011.

[Al-khiyal]

Sandstorms plague Iraq and are getting worse

BAGHDAD, July 5, 2009 — Shamal. Accented on the second syllable, that means the ill wind that blows in summer across Iraq, and other countries in the region, stirring sandstorms in its wake. Vice President Joe Biden found out late last week what 25 million Iraqis have known for a long time-everybody talks about them, but nobody can do anything about them. His chopper flight from a U.S. base to the International Zone was canceled when a shamal turned the skies over Baghdad and beyond the same color as Biden's khaki desert boots. He wound up donning body armor and a helmet for a caravan to his meetings with Iraqi leaders and others. Several NFL coaches visiting troops in Iraq also found their plane to Kuwait delayed a day.

That same storm still hovers over the capital. It coats parked cars in a tan frosting. It seeps under windowsills and doorways. It grits the teeth and stings the eyes. It clogs rifles and etches scrimshaw across sniper scopes. And it kills people. Three in Diyala Province this week, where 800 others were hospitalized with breathing and related ailments. Dr. Jeleel al Shammeri, head of the health department in Karkh in west Baghdad, said 13 major hospitals and 84 clinics had received several thousand patients over the last two days, many of them children. Dr. Ali Bustan, head of the health department in Rusafa in eastern Baghdad , said ERs had taken in 800 to 900 patients since Saturday night. "Thank God, we have not run out of medication," he said.

Sandstorms pose diplomatic as well as medical and weather problems. Baghdad negotiators are locked in a battle with Istanbul over how much water from the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers - which start in Turkey - its neighbor is willing to release to the southwest for Iraqi farms and factories. A lack of irrigation water has caused thousands of acres of agricultural land to dry up. Just this week, the government signed an agreement with an Iranian delegation to limit such "desertification."

Sandstorms and their duststorm cousins are nothing new in these parts, of course. Iraq averages only 4 to just over 6 { inches of rainfall a year. The Sahara Desert, which is the size of the United States, is just a short jet stream hop to the west. Iraq itself is half desert.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says the shamal causing the storms combines two separate weather systems. One is a sub-tropical jet stream pushing north from Arabia, the other a polar jet stream shoving south from Europe . When they meet, they form a northwest wind that fills the sky with sand and dust. Two of the ancients' elements, earth and air, become one. Gusts can reach 50 miles an hour. Sometimes, as happened last year and much more often in recent years, the sandstorms balloon into fronts tens of miles wide, maybe a half-mile high, that blot out the sun. For days. Or, in recent years, longer.

Evidence is mounting that today's sandstorms are worse than in the past. Ibrahim Shareef , head of the desertification department in the Ministry of the Environment , notes that dusty days like Saturday in Iraq used to total only about eight times a year. Now it's one or two days a week. Like other experts, he blames a five-year-long regional drought and urban expansion into areas that once grew crops. "Military operations also have had some role," he adds, "as their vehicles travel across our deserts and to some extent remove the upper crust of sand."

U.S. Air Force meteorologists at Multi-National Corps Iraq say trends from last year till now "show a significant increase in the occurrence and duration" of sand and dust storms compared to 2003-07. "The sandstorms here are not the high-powered, sand-blaster clouds of fast-moving gravel and grit like in the movies," says Air Force Capt. Noah Rich , a meteorologist. "They are more like a fog of extremely fine dust powder that hangs in the air and gets into everything."

The director general of counter-desertification in the Ministry of Agriculture, Fadhil al Faraji , says it's trying to establish grazing stations in western deserts, set up large nurseries to transplant greenery in the deserts and build oases. However, "it will take decades to complete all these projects," he says. "There is no hope to stop these storms but for the drought to end."

The 1991 Persian Gulf War's saturation bombing destroyed much of Iraq's electric power generation. Families in Fallujah , for example, were forced to cut down trees in and around their city for fires to bake bread. Since the 2003 U.S. invasion, electric power in Iraq has been intermittent at best, non-existent at its worst.

Today's sandstorms visit hardship on ordinary Iraqis almost like a biblical plague. Vendors now peddle cloth medical masks at traffic circles. Jassim Chiad, 46, bought one. "They're worse than in the '80s or '90s," he says of the brown haze that restricts visibility to a few blocks. "We don't have electricity, so we can't stay home. We haven't had running water for a week."

Rahgad Qassim, 32, a partner in Anaqty (My Elegance), a shop that sells colorful cloth for robes and veils, thinks the sandstorms have hurt business. But she sees the glass as half full - even of sand. "Thank God for the storms," she says. "No car bombs."

[Al-khiyal]

Baghdad rejects Biden's offer on national reconciliation

Baghdad, July 5, 2009: The Iraqi government spokesman publicly rejected the American vice-president's offer to help with national reconciliation, saying it is an internal affair. Government's spokesman Ali Al Dabbagh's comments on Saturday were in response to an appeal Joseph Biden made a day earlier for Iraqis to do more to bring the country's deeply divided factions together and his offer of U.S. help. Biden also warned on Friday that U.S. assistance may not be forthcoming if the country reverts to ethnic and sectarian violence.

Al Dabbagh said on Iraqi state TV that "the political situation won't accept that the United States intervenes in an internal issue, whether that issue is reconciliation, relations between various Iraqi groups or between the [self-ruled Kurdish] region and Baghdad."

Meanwhile, Biden spent the Fourth of July with his son and other American troops in Iraq on Saturday. Biden took a break from politics and presided over a naturalisation ceremony for 237 U.S. troops from 59 countries in a marble rotunda at one of Saddam Hussain's former palaces at what is now Camp Victory, the U.S. military headquarters on the western outskirts of Baghdad. He then had lunch with the 261st Theatre Tactical Signal Brigade from Delaware, to which his son, Beau, belongs. Biden's unusually long three-day trip to Baghdad, which began late on Thursday, was aimed at fostering political reconciliation after U.S. combat troops withdrew from Iraqi cities as part of a security pact that calls for a full withdrawal by the end of 2011.

"The U.S. administration is concerned about the absence of progress on some political issues in Iraq and this is clear," Al Dabbagh added. "But the Prime Minister [Nouri Al Maliki ] said that these are internal issues and it is the Iraqis who will handle the matter and the interference of non-Iraqis in these issues will create unnecessary complications and problems."

Nouri Al Maliki is trying to use the U.S. withdrawal to build support before January 30 general elections and his spokesman's remarks were likely aimed at an Iraqi public impatient with the American presence. But they also signalled a growing assertiveness by Iraqis as the US dominance in the country wanes with its pullback of troops. Al Maliki's office also said the Iraqi government is committed to the national reconciliation process but excluded Saddam's ousted Baath Party, saying "it is responsible for the destruction inflicted on Iraq".

It was Biden's first visit to Iraq as vice-president and as Obama's new unofficial point man on Iraq, although he has been to the country several times as a senator. Biden planned to fly to the semi-autonomous Kurdish region in northern Iraq later on Saturday, but the trip was cancelled due to heavy sandstorms. Biden's visit and his new position overseeing the U.S. administration's Iraq policy reflect growing concern about a recent rise in violence after a series of bombings that killed scores of people.

[Al-khiyal]

Obama warns of difficult days in Iraq

Washington, July 5, 2009: President Barack Obama warned on Saturday "there will be difficult days ahead" in Iraq and said the U.S. will remain a strong partner to Iraq for its security. Obama, speaking to military families at the White House for Independence Day festivities, praised Iraq's independence and thanked troops for their service. Because of the courage, capability and commitment of soldiers who have served in Iraq, the country is now "taking control of its own destiny", he said. "Iraq's future now rests in the hands of its own people. As extraordinary an accomplishment as that is, we know that this transition won't be without problems," he said. "We know there will be difficult days ahead. And that's why we will remain a strong partner to the Iraqi people on behalf of their security and prosperity." The White House invited about 1,200 military families to attend the Fourth of July gathering on the White House South Lawn. Obama told the service members they were "the latest, strongest link in that unbroken chain that stretches back to the Continental Army".

[Al-khiyal]

Insurgent attacks kill 2 in Iraqi cities of Mosul and Baqouba

Baghdad, July 5, 2009: Attackers targeted police patrols in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul on Sunday, killing a police officer with a grenade and injuring 14 people in a car bomb blast, authorities said. Separately, bombs in Baqouba, northeast of Baghdad, killed one civilian and injured 14 others, police said. The attacks highlight how the two cities remain hubs of insurgent activity despite big security gains in Iraq. American troops completed a withdrawal from Iraqi cities on June 30 ahead of a full U.S. withdrawal by the end of 2011. In Mosul, police and medical officials said one officer died and six other people, including two police, were injured in grenade attacks. The 14 people injured in the car bomb included two police. All the officials spoke on condition of anonymity.