[GJM] Fw: [globalnetnews-summary] All the oil news that's fit to print

[mary rose]

This excerpt from the article below appears to confirm that more oil is used 
to "fight the wars for oil" than is used for any other purpose. And, leaves 
U.S. American citizens paying billions of dollars for something they again 
must pay more for at the pump. And, then when we protest, we are called 
"unAmerican" and faced with potential punishment for our actions. And this 
is what young U.S. Americans are sent to give their lives for --  its "the 
American way of life."  Does anyone else see something wrong with this 
picture.  Why are we doing this?

Recall that this was the subject of our dialogue here on the Co-learner's 
list a couple weeks back entitled:  "Misallocation of Resources,"  .But 
then, this is how the linear left brain works when not balanced by the right 
brain's influence -- it is completely "sociopathic" and unable to see the 
consequences of its actions since it is unable to get the whole big picture. 
.  .

The Pentagon-petroleum partnership
Another connection, long ignored in the mainstream, that reporters like 
Kramer might consider pursuing when it comes to the complex ties among Iraqi 
officials, the Bush administration, the Department of Defense (DoD), and Big 
Oil is the overt Pentagon connection. The DoD is, as national security 
expert Noah Shachtman notes, "the world's largest energy consumer". And, 
when it comes to Pentagon gas-guzzling, its post-9/11 wars and occupations, 
especially in Iraq, have been a boon. While the Bush administration has been 
working overtime to clear the path for Big Oil's return to Iraq, the 
Pentagon has been paying out staggering amounts of US taxpayer dollars to 
the very oil majors now negotiating with Iraq's Ministry of Oil.

mary rose

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Jul 9, 2008


DISPATCHES FROM AMERICA
All the oil news that's fit to print
By Nick Turse
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/JG09Ak02.html

On June 19, the New York Times broke the story in an article under the 
headlines "Deals with Iraq Are Set to Bring Oil Giants Back: Rare No-Bid 
Contracts, A Foothold for Western Companies Seeking Future Rewards". 
Finally, after a long five years-plus, there was proof that the occupation 
of Iraq really did have something or other to do with oil. Quoting unnamed 
Iraqi Oil Ministry bureaucrats, oil company officials and an anonymous 
American diplomat, Andrew Kramer of the Times wrote: "Exxon Mobil, Shell, 
Total and BP ... along with Chevron and a number of smaller oil companies, 
are in talks with Iraq's Oil Ministry for no-bid contracts to service Iraq's 
largest fields."

The news caused a minor stir, as other newspapers picked up and advanced the 
story and the mainstream media, only a few years late, began to seriously 
consider the significance of oil to the occupation of Iraq.

As always happens when, for whatever reason, you come late to a major story 
and find yourself playing catch-up on the run, there are a few corrections 
and blind spots in the current coverage that might be worth addressing 
before another five years pass. In the spirit of collegiality, I offer the 
following leads for the mainstream media to consider as they change gears 
from no comment to hot pursuit when it comes to the story of Iraq's most 
sought after commodity. I'm talking, of course, about that "sea of oil" on 
which, as deputy secretary of defense Paul Wolfowitz pointed out in May 
2003, the month after Baghdad fell, Iraq "floats".

All the news that's fit to print department
In a June 30 follow-up piece, the Times' Kramer cited US officials (again 
unnamed) as acknowledging the following, "A group of American advisers led 
by a small State Department team played an integral part in drawing up 
contracts between the Iraqi government and five major Western oil companies 
..."

In addition, he asserted, this "disclosure ... is the first confirmation of 
direct involvement by the [George W] Bush administration in deals to open 
Iraq's oil to commercial development and is likely to stoke criticism". This 
scoop, however, reflected none of the evidence - long available - of the 
direct involvement of Bush administration and US occupation officials in 
Iraq's oil industry. In fact, since the taking of Baghdad in April 2003, the 
name of the game has been facilitating relationships between Iraq and 
US-based and allied Western energy firms when it came to what Bush used to 
delicately call Iraq's "patrimony" of "natural resources".

For instance, almost a year ago, the Washington Post's Walter Pincus drew 
attention to a call by Bush's Commerce Department for "an international 
legal adviser who is fluent in Arabic 'to provide expert input, when 
requested' to 'US government agencies or to Iraqi authorities as they draft 
the laws and regulations that will govern Iraq's oil and gas sector'." The 
document went on to state, "As part of a US government inter-agency process, 
the US Department of Commerce" would be "providing technical assistance to 
Iraq to create a legal and tax environment conducive to domestic and foreign 
investment in Iraq's key economic sectors, starting with the mineral 
resources sector."

This was no aberration. In March 2006, for instance, the US Army issued a 
solicitation for a two-year contract "to allow any organization or entity to 
support IRMO [Iraq Reconstruction Management Office] (US Embassy Baghdad) to 
deliver an effective capacity development program utilizing predominantly US 
and European firms, universities, institutes and professional organizations 
for personnel within the Iraqi Ministry of Oil ..." This was to include 
participation in "development programs" offered by "private companies", 
long-term development through "commercial training entities in the United 
States and Europe for oil and gas specialists from the Ministry of Oil", and 
the implementation of "joint government-industry activities". Translated out 
of bureaucratic contract-ese, this meant that the US would pay for programs 
to, among other things, enhance relationships between the Iraq Oil Ministry 
and ... you guessed it ... foreign firms.

In October 2006, the Department of Commerce (DOC) put out a call for experts 
that was nearly identical to the later solicitation discovered by Pincus. 
They were to aid a program facilitating "the creation of a legal and tax 
environment conducive to domestic and foreign investment in Iraqs [sic] key 
economic sectors, starting with the mineral resources sector" and provide 
"expertise to DOC, to other [US government] agencies, or to Iraqi 
authorities on creating a legal and tax environment conducive to domestic 
and foreign investment in Iraqs [sic] oil and gas sector". Such an 
individual would, in fact, act "as a liaison between [the DOC's technical 
assistance arm] and key stakeholders in Iraq (such as Iraq's Ministry of 
Oil, or the oil authorities in Kurdistan)".

In fact, the US Trade and Development Agency notes that, in 2006 and 2007, 
it funded a "$2.5 million multifaceted training program for the Iraqi 
Ministry of Oil" to "provide critical knowledge transfer and establish 
long-term relationships between the US and Iraqi oil and gas industry public 
and private sector representatives".

It's worth recalling that Iraq's oil bureaucrats, about to receive such 
"critical knowledge" and "expertise", were not exactly neophytes in the 
world of oil management. They had effectively managed the Iraqi oil industry 
from the time the five oil majors now slated to receive those "service 
contracts" were tossed out of Iraq, when its industry was nationalized in 
1972, until the invasion of 2003. They had kept the country's oil 
infrastructure going even after the disaster of the First Gulf War of 
1990-1991, even through all the desperate final years of sanctions against 
Saddam Hussein's regime.

The Pentagon-petroleum partnership
Another connection, long ignored in the mainstream, that reporters like 
Kramer might consider pursuing when it comes to the complex ties among Iraqi 
officials, the Bush administration, the Department of Defense (DoD), and Big 
Oil is the overt Pentagon connection. The DoD is, as national security 
expert Noah Shachtman notes, "the world's largest energy consumer". And, 
when it comes to Pentagon gas-guzzling, its post-9/11 wars and occupations, 
especially in Iraq, have been a boon. While the Bush administration has been 
working overtime to clear the path for Big Oil's return to Iraq, the 
Pentagon has been paying out staggering amounts of US taxpayer dollars to 
the very oil majors now negotiating with Iraq's Ministry of Oil.

According to recent reports, the proposed Iraqi service contracts, which may 
be paid off in cash or crude oil, will be worth $500 million each. That is 
roughly what the Pentagon paid out on June 18 alone - the day before the 
Times broke its story about Big Oil's return to Iraq - for natural gas and 
aviation fuel. Over half the total amount, in excess of $268 million, was 
handed over to one of the oil giants set to benefit from the Iraq deal: BP 
(formerly British Petroleum). Only days earlier, two of the other majors 
from the coterie of potential no-bid contractors, Exxon Mobil and Chevron, 
nabbed contracts from the DoD - in Exxon Mobil's case, a $73 million deal 
for gasoline and fuel oil; in Chevron's, a $16 million contract for aviation 
fuel.

Keep in mind, however, that - although you won't learn this in your daily 
paper - this has long been standard operating procedure. Each of the oil 
giants named in the original New York Times piece - Exxon Mobil, Shell, 
Total, BP, and Chevron - regularly show up on the Pentagon's payroll. In 
fact, last year, Iraq's new fave five took home more than $4.1 billion from 
the DoD - with Shell leading the way with $2.1 billion.

It's no secret that the Pentagon relies on vast quantities of oil to power 
the ships, planes, helicopters, heavy armor, and other ground vehicles 
essential to its occupation of Iraq, nor that it regularly pays out vast 
sums of taxpayer dollars to the very companies that US advisors have aided 
in working out oil deals with the Iraq Oil Ministry. Despite ample evidence 
of the Pentagon connection, this circular and mutually-reinforcing 
relationship has been almost totally ignored in the mainstream media. But 
think of it this way: Your tax dollars have given the Pentagon the 
opportunity to use up oil - bought from the oil majors, in prodigious 
quantities - in order to create a situation in Iraq in which those same 
majors will soon receive no-bid contracts to make money off the Iraqi oil 
industry and, if all goes well, get far better, longer term deals in the 
near future.

One big, happy, oily family
It turns out that, despite that story the Times broke as if something 
totally new were on the horizon, the Bush administration has been 
facilitating ties between the Iraqi government and foreign oil companies for 
years, and the same companies now likely to nab a no-bid toehold in Iraq's 
oilfields are intimately tied in to the Pentagon to the tune of billions of 
dollars annually. It's worth noting that most of these firms have also been 
closely connected to Vice President Dick Cheney from the early days of the 
Bush administration. In fact, executives from Exxon Mobil, Shell, and BP met 
behind closed doors with Cheney's energy task force in 2001, when the 
administration was pounding out its energy policies, according to a White 
House document obtained by the Washington Post. The Government 
Accountability Office also found that Chevron was just one of several 
companies that "gave detailed energy policy recommendations" to the task 
force.

It's almost impossible to tease out all the interconnections between Big 
Oil, the White House, the Pentagon, and the Iraqi Ministry of Oil, since 
they are tied together in a web of contracts and mutually supporting 
relationships built up over many years. However, just in case the Times 
wants to set its staff loose on the recent past, there is no mistaking the 
many ties that exist. (A small tip for Times researchers: skip the Times 
archives, they will be of little help.)

Should further evidence be necessary, when it comes to those US advisors at 
work in Iraq, mainstream reporters need look no further than the 
solicitations sent out by the Iraqi Ministry of Oil itself. Consider, for 
instance, a recent "tender" for a contractor to drill "two deep exploration 
wells" in the South Rumaila and Luhais oil fields in the Basra District of 
southern Iraq. Not only does the solicitation (the deadline for which is 
July 27, 2008) contain special instructions for "companies outside Iraq", 
but it asks potential contractors to send their bids to the Ministry of Oil 
not in Arabic, but "in the English language".

Nick Turse is the associate editor and research director of Tomdispatch.com. 
His first book, The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives, an 
exploration of the new military-corporate complex in America, was recently 
published by Metropolitan Books. His website, Nick Turse.com has been newly 
revamped and expanded.