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Ill say it again.
Boutons has been right all along. Damn. I salute you, sir.
Iraq's Kurdish region defends criticised energy deal
Tue Sep 11, 2007 5:08pm BST
DUBAI, Sept 11 (Reuters) - The government of Iraq's Kurdish region on Tuesday defended an oil and gas production contract it has concluded with a U.S. company, rejecting remarks by the country's oil minister who questioned its legality.
The semi-autonomous Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) said on Saturday it had signed the production sharing contract with a unit of U.S.-based Hunt Oil Co. and with Impulse Energy Corp.
( NOT lease contract, which all the other govts in the region switched to long ago because it brings them much more money, to great detriment of (US) oilco profits. )
"Ray L. Hunt, the chief executive and president of Hunt Oil, is a close political ally of Mr. Bush. More than that, Mr. Hunt is a member of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, a key oversight body." - Krugman
(So obviously, Hunt signed this deal with full approval by the US govt. The pre-2000/PNAC primary objective for the Iraq invasion, oil grab, is nearing. )
Media reports have quoted Iraqi Oil Minister Hussain al-Shahristani as saying that the deal "has no standing" because it was not approved by the central government in Baghdad.
"Shahristani's recent remarks about the legality of the KRG's contracts are totally unacceptable..." said Khaled Salih, spokesman of the Kurdistan regional government, in a statement made available to Reuters.
"His (Shahristani) views are totally irrelevant to what we are doing legally and cons utionally in Kurdistan."
( the partioning of Iraq is becoming more clear, and now de facto and operational, but we hear notlhing from dubya about par ioning )
The deal is the first such contract since the region passed its own oil law in August, while Iraq's parliament failed to pass a national law after months of negotiations.
The national law is crucial to regulating how wealth from Iraq's oil reserves, the world's third largest, will be shared out among its sectarian and ethnic groups. The reserves are mainly in the north and the south of the country.
"What right does Shahristani have to question the legitimacy of contracts awarded by KRG acting under the powers of the newly enacted law passed by the unanimous decision of the Regional Parliament and according to the new Iraq cons ution?" the statement said.
The deal covers exploration activity in the Dihok area. Hunt Oil Co. of the Kurdistan Region will begin geological survey and seismic work by the end of 2007 and has plans to drill an exploration well in 2008.
The regional government has signed five production sharing agreements earlier with foreign companies.
© Reuters 2006. All rights reserved.
http://uk.reuters.com/article/oilRpt...87953420070911
===========================
September 14, 2007
Op-Ed Columnist
A Surge, and Then a Stab
By PAUL KRUGMAN
To understand what’s really happening in Iraq, follow the oil money, which already knows that the surge has failed.
Back in January, announcing his plan to send more troops to Iraq, President Bush declared that “America will hold the Iraqi government to the benchmarks it has announced.”
Near the top of his list was the promise that “to give every Iraqi citizen a stake in the country’s economy, Iraq will pass legislation to share oil revenues among all Iraqis.”
There was a reason he placed such importance on oil: oil is pretty much the only thing Iraq has going for it. Two-thirds of Iraq’s G.D.P. and almost all its government revenue come from the oil sector. Without an agreed system for sharing oil revenues, there is no Iraq, just a collection of armed gangs fighting for control of resources.
Well, the legislation Mr. Bush promised never materialized, and on Wednesday attempts to arrive at a compromise oil law collapsed.
What’s particularly revealing is the cause of the breakdown. Last month the provincial government in Kurdistan, defying the central government, passed its own oil law; last week a Kurdish Web site announced that the provincial government had signed a production-sharing deal with the Hunt Oil Company of Dallas, and that seems to have been the last straw.
Now here’s the thing: Ray L. Hunt, the chief executive and president of Hunt Oil, is a close political ally of Mr. Bush. More than that, Mr. Hunt is a member of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, a key oversight body.
Some commentators have expressed surprise at the fact that a businessman with very close ties to the White House is undermining U.S. policy. But that isn’t all that surprising, given this administration’s history. Remember, Halliburton was still signing business deals with Iran years after Mr. Bush declared Iran a member of the “axis of evil.”
No, what’s interesting about this deal is the fact that Mr. Hunt, thanks to his policy position, is presumably as well-informed about the actual state of affairs in Iraq as anyone in the business world can be. By putting his money into a deal with the Kurds, despite Baghdad’s disapproval, he’s essentially betting that the Iraqi government — which hasn’t met a single one of the major benchmarks Mr. Bush laid out in January — won’t get its act together. Indeed, he’s effectively betting against the survival of Iraq as a nation in any meaningful sense of the term.
The smart money, then, knows that the surge has failed, that the war is lost, and that Iraq is going the way of Yugoslavia. And I suspect that most people in the Bush administration — maybe even Mr. Bush himself — know this, too.
After all, if the administration had any real hope of retrieving the situation in Iraq, officials would be making an all-out effort to get the government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki to start delivering on some of those benchmarks, perhaps using the threat that Congress would cut off funds otherwise. Instead, the Bushies are making excuses, minimizing Iraqi failures, moving goal posts and, in general, giving the Maliki government no incentive to do anything differently.
And for that matter, if the administration had any real intention of turning public opinion around, as opposed to merely shoring up the base enough to keep Republican members of Congress on board, it would have sent Gen. David Petraeus, the top military commander in Iraq, to as many news media outlets as possible — not granted an exclusive appearance to Fox News on Monday night.
All in all, Mr. Bush’s actions have not been those of a leader seriously trying to win a war. They have, however, been what you’d expect from a man whose plan is to keep up appearances for the next 16 months, never mind the cost in lives and money, then shift the blame for failure onto his successor.
In fact, that’s my interpretation of something that startled many people: Mr. Bush’s decision last month, after spending years denying that the Iraq war had anything in common with Vietnam, to suddenly embrace the parallel.
Here’s how I see it: At this point, Mr. Bush is looking forward to replaying the political aftermath of Vietnam, in which the right wing eventually achieved a rewriting of history that would have made George Orwell proud, convincing millions of Americans that our soldiers had victory in their grasp but were stabbed in the back by the peaceniks back home.
What all this means is that the next president, even as he or she tries to extricate us from Iraq — and prevent the country’s breakup from turning into a regional war — will have to deal with constant sniping from the people who lied us into an unnecessary war, then lost the war they started, but will never, ever, take responsibility for their failures.
====================
All the bull from dubya about "kicking ass" of dubya-created AQI , "democracy and freedom", is just more lying smokescreen to hide the real business of grabbing the oil while "playing" for time until dubya and hhead can walk away from Iraq, start re-writing history that they won in Iraq, and vicious sliming the next Pres for losing Iraq.
Last edited by boutons_; 09-14-2007 at 10:42 AM.
Ill say it again.
Boutons has been right all along. Damn. I salute you, sir.
Where are our resident Bush lovers explaining this one?
Wow that sounds gay.
Not that I've bothered reading your article, but :
http://www.ekurd.net/mismas/articles...rdistan284.htm
The Kurds have several deals in place with revenue sharing agreements with Turkish and Canadian companies, among others. The result is that over the next several years billions of dollars will be spent modernizing their infrastructure of the Kurds production setup by those companies.
That is the point of the revenue sharing agreements you deride so much and why most "experts" will tell you that Iraq will need many of these to update the older production facilities.
So the big question is why if this was an oil grab, did the US fall behind and allow 5 other countries, including companies in countries opposed to the Iraq war, to negotiate these deals first?
Patreus didn't talk exclusively to Fox.
I saw him interviewed on PBS.
Not a major point of the story, but certainly one Krugman used to bolster his case - that Patreus was ONLY here to shore up the base, and thus only spoke to those wing-nuts at Fox. Well, he didn't.
How many other facts and innuendos in this piece should we check?
Dumb is dumb and you fit the bill all the way. You make
jokes and people are dieing. No wonder people look
at us as uncaring and idiots.
the Kurds can borrow to build and own the facilities themselves, just like other countries.
The production contracts sought by the US oilcos are for 30 years, way too long to recoup infrastructure investment.
Last edited by boutons_; 09-14-2007 at 02:24 PM.
So you are dismissing the entire article or just trying to distract from the major point of it?
25-30 years is standard.
It's hard to borrow the BILLIONS needed. Especially if either you are Islamic or the people you are dealing with are Islamic (it's illegal to charge or give interest in Islamic law, making loans as we see them impossible).
This is an accepted deal type that does not violate Islamic law and is actually commonly used when old facilities need to be updated. That's why hydrocarbon industry experts say these deals are necessary.
Sure they can, except that they are part of a country,
Iraq. Just like Okahoma and Texas and Louisana are
part of the US and providing most of the oil for this country.
Isn't that what we are trying to do? Get these folks
to be part of a country and not a tribe. Yeah, I know,
I can already hear the response, but they are tribes.
Actually, individual states can and do borrow money here in the US. Not billions at a time, but they do.
I know, and yeah, even make oil deals. H e l l o University
of Texas and their zillions with their oil rights. But
we are still part of the U.S. and it isn't the same situation.
And we, as states, do borrow BILLIONS.
Sorry about this little bit of self promotion, but I wrote a little artical on the subject. Check it out.
http://realp.blogspot.com/2007/09/hu...agreement.html
So, it' seems to be ok with the Bush lovers that Bush's friends and advisors are traitors.
"25-30 years is standard."
I'm not talking about contract length, but type of contract.
But Production sharing contracts are NOT the norm for the main oil-producing countries, that now own their oil and
1) write lease contracts, because the countries make more money, to (foreign) oil companies, or
2) have outright nationalized oil companies.
The primary objective of the Iraq invasion was regime change for a regime friendly to US oilcos. The still-born Iraqi oil law, vehemently opposed by the Iraqi oil industry that sees it as giving away control over, even ownership of, was written to produce what US oilcos wanted, production sharing contracts.
croutons, professional text bolder and sometime corporate counsel for multinational E&P companies.
Oh, oh....looks like Greenspan should get ready to take the fall for the subprime melt-down...
Times OnlineAMERICA’s elder statesman of finance, Alan Greenspan, has shaken the White House by declaring that the prime motive for the war in Iraq was oil.
In his long-awaited memoir, to be published tomorrow, Greenspan, a Republican whose 18-year tenure as head of the US Federal Reserve was widely admired, will also deliver a stinging critique of President George W Bush’s economic policies.
However, it is his view on the motive for the 2003 Iraq invasion that is likely to provoke the most controversy. “I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil,” he says.
Greenspan, 81, is understood to believe that Saddam Hussein posed a threat to the security of oil supplies in the Middle East.
Britain and America have always insisted the war had nothing to do with oil. Bush said the aim was to disarm Iraq of weapons of mass destruction and end Saddam’s support for terrorism.
Oh, yeah. I mean, he is ultimately responsible, but the same people that praised him as the savior of our economy are about to stab him in the back. It looks like he wants to leave a legacy that suggests that he knew what was going on about everything important. Being the monetary dictator of the US economy has to go to one's head.
Greenspan should stick to economics rather than a war he really is no expert at.
"a war he really is no expert at."
applies to dubya, expert at nothing, esp not at English.
It's great that Greenspan, who is member of DC inner circle, a top power player, is saying publicly, IN PRINT, that the war was about oil, NOT about US security, and that "everyone knows" it's about oil. Great. dubya and head legacy will be easier to plonk in the toilet. I expect more insiders will be admitting Iraq is a war for oil.
The lying by the WH and Repugs must be exposed by the insiders.
Last edited by boutons_; 09-16-2007 at 09:02 AM.
Someone is about to pull the unpatriotic card
this hunt deal has shed the light on why we're there. troops are there to provide muscle for multi-national oil co.'s. our sons and daughters are dying so these guys can steal oil and we have to pay the invoice for the war. our kids are dying so that these guys can build their wealth with billions and billions of profit that we at home will have to pay. Iraq's only hope is to kick us out.
Bush should stick to drinking rather than a war he really is no expert at.
Obviously the Canadians and Turks are sending hundreds of thousands of troops into Iraq to get access to oil, because they are partners with this same Kurdish group.
Oh wait...
Side note: I am absolutely shocked that poor Iraqis are leveraging their one commodity to make money. What the do they think they are doing, what gives them the right to do this?
They should be beholden to Chavez, Osama, and Putin, then maybe croutons would be happy.
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