… Instead of making Iraq an open economy fueled by a thriving oil sector, the war has failed to boost the flow of oil from Iraq’s giant well-mapped reservoirs, which oil experts say could rival Saudi Arabia’s and produce 6 million barrels a day, if not more. Thanks to insurgents’ sabotage of pipelines and pumping stations, and foreign companies’ fears about safety and contract risks in Iraq, the country is still struggling in vain to raise oil output to its prewar levels of about 2.5 million barrels a day. As it turns out, that has kept oil off the international market at just the moment when the world desperately needs a cushion of supplies to keep prices down. Demand from China is booming, and political strife has limited oil production in Nigeria and Venezuela.
In the absence of Iraqi supplies, prices have soared three-and-a-half-fold since the U.S. invasion on March 20, 2003. (Last week, they shattered all previous records, even after adjusting for inflation.) The profits of the five biggest Western oil companies have jumped from $40 billion to $121 billion over the same period.
While the United States has rid itself of Saddam Hussein and whatever threat he might have posed, oil revenues have filled the treasuries of petro-autocrats in Iran, Venezuela and Russia, emboldening those regimes and complicating U.S. diplomacy in new ways. American consumers are paying for this turmoil at the pump. If the overthrow of Hussein was supposed to be a silver bullet for the American consumer, it turned out to be one that ricocheted and tore a hole through his wallet.
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If we went to war for oil, we did it as clumsily as anyone could do. And we spent more on the war than we could ever conceivably have gotten out of Iraq’s oil fields even if we had particular control over them," says Anthony Cordesman, an expert on U.S. strategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies who rejects the idea that the war was designed on behalf of oil companies. But that doesn’t mean that oil had nothing to do with the invasion. Says Cordesman: "To say that we would have taken the same steps against a dictator in Africa or Burma as we took in Iraq is to ignore the strategic realities that drove American behavior" …
Imagine that. Someone that’s not a blogger finally wrote something that said, "we invaded Iraq for oil" and "it was a total failure and is responsible for the huge oil profits and the tripling of our gas prices" in the same article, in a major newspaper [The Washington Post]. The only thing wrong with the article is that it is labelled "
opinion" instead of something like "
we hold these truths to be self evident." [see
this also].
It’s almost anticlimactic to finally read it in print, it’s been so obvious for so long. I expect the scientists in Galileo’s day felt the same way about his announcement that the screwy theories that antedated him were ridiculous. Or for that matter, the modern scientists looking at the data must marvel when our leaders deny global warming and climate change. As I mentioned earlier this year, the Masai tibesmen living in dung huts in Africa don’t question global warming. Or yesterday, our President said that the economy was going through a hard time. Duh!
Mr. Bush went on to paint a false picture of the economy. He dismissed virtually every proposal Congress is working on to alleviate the mortgage crisis, sticking to his administration’s inadequate ideas. And despite the rush of serious problems — frozen credit markets, millions of impending mortgage defaults, solvency issues at banks, a plunging dollar — he said that a major source of uncertainty today is whether his tax cuts, scheduled to expire in 2010, would be extended.
Unbelievable!
My mother said, "If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything" …
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