Report Offered Bleak Outlook About Iraq Oil

[RamboLiberal]

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/05/international/middleeast/05OIL.html?ex=1065931200&en=b54a445c3f34fa9b&ei=5062&partner=GOOGLE

The Bush administration's optimistic statements earlier this year that Iraq's oil wealth, not American taxpayers, would cover most of the cost of rebuilding Iraq were at odds with a bleaker assessment of a government task force secretly established last fall to study Iraq's oil industry, according to public records and government officials.

The task force, which was based at the Pentagon as part of the planning for the war, produced a book-length report that described the Iraqi oil industry as so badly damaged by a decade of trade embargoes that its production capacity had fallen by more than 25 percent, panel members have said.

Despite those findings, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz told Congress during the war that "we are dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction, and relatively soon."

Moreover, Vice President Dick Cheney said in April, on the day Baghdad fell, that Iraq's oil production could hit 3 million barrels a day by the end of the year, even though the task force had determined that Iraq was generating less than 2.4 million barrels a day before the war.

[LiberalVoice]

1. oh i bet we'll do our best to pump every last drop into bushit and co.

[JohnyCanuck]

2. Oil & a Growing Sense of Panic in the US by Robert Fisk

Oil is slippery stuff but not as slippery as the figures now being peddled by Iraq's American occupiers. Up around Kirkuk, the authorities are keeping the sabotage figures secret - because they can't stop their pipelines to Turkey blowing up. And down in Baghdad, where the men who produce Iraq's oil production figures are beginning to look like the occupants of Plato's cave - drawing conclusions from shadows on their wall - the statistics are being cooked. Paul Bremer, the US proconsul who wears combat boots, is "sexing up" the figures to a point where even the oilmen are shaking their heads.

Take Kirkuk. Only when the television cameras capture a blown pipe, flames billowing, do the occupation powers report sabotage. This they did, for example, on 18 August. But the same Turkish pipeline has been hit before and since. It was blown on 17 September and four times the following day. US patrols and helicopters move along the pipeline but, in the huge ravines and tribal areas through which it passes, long sections are indefensible.

<snip>

But the real irony lies in the nature of America's new power in Iraq. US oil deposits are increasingly depleted and by 2025, its oil imports will account for perhaps 70 per cent of total domestic demand. It needs to control the world's reserves - and don't tell me the US would have invaded Iraq if its chief export was beetroot - and it now has control of perhaps 25 per cent of world reserves.

But it can't make the oil flow. The cost of making it flow could produce an economic crisis in the US. And it is this - rather than the daily killing of young American soldiers - that lies behind the Bush administration's growing panic. Washington has got its hands on the biggest treasure chest in the world - but it can't open the lid. No wonder they are cooking the books in Baghdad.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article4855.htm

[realFedUp]

3. Anyone checking to see if a pipeline's being built to Israel?

Thought we read rumors of that after the invasion.

[lindashaw]

9. I may be wrong, but I think they were going to be supplied through...

Turkey.

[DemNoir]

4. Good grief!

Is there anything this clown posse can get right? One would think that oil is the one thing they may know something about, but noooooooooo.

[RamboLiberal]

5. Bush pens another poem

Roses are red
Violets are blue
We said Iraq had oil
Wave your tax dollars goodbye fools

[LittleApple81]

10. LOL!!!! Your poem is much better than his and truer too. n/t

[The Magistrate]

6. There Will Not Be A Drop Of Oil Exported From Iraq For Years

It is hard to imagine these people can even believe themselves.

"LET'S GO GET THOSE BUSH BASTARDS!"

[RedSock]

7. they are importing oil INTO Iraq

Halliburton is having so much trouble getting the Iraqi oilfields restored, the US is currently IMPORTING oil into Iraq -- at a cost to US taxpayers of about $6 million per day.

http://www.forbes.com/markets/commodities/newswire/2003/09/12/rtr1080160.html

[lindashaw]

8. Just when I think nothing about this war can shock me...

mercy! And the Baker Institute told them in December before the war that oil production would be scanty. I simply can't believe how we have been hornswoggled!

[LittleApple81]

11. what is the meaning of hornswoggled? n/t

[The Magistrate]

12. Tricked, Sir

Usually by a fast-talking salesman or such.

[JohnyCanuck]

13. Or by a fast-talking president. n/t

n/t

[Dover]

14. Some candidate should create a list of Bush lies and the costs

of each one, so we can keep a running tally.

I'm running out of room on my list of lies.