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Al Jazeera (English)
    Baghdad Burning Blog (by Riverbend, an Iraqi civilian girl)
            Dahr Jamail's Blog from Baghdad
                Imad Khadduri's blog "Free Iraq" (scroll down for English version)

Iraqi Civilian Deaths ... caused by Bush's unprovoked war

 

U.S. Intends to Plunder Iraqi Oil Reserves
(Larry Elliott, The Guardian, January 27, 2003)
Despite what Colin Powell might say, it takes a trusting, nay naive, soul to imagine that the White House would be making all this fuss were it not that Iraq has something the US needs. There are plenty of small, repressive states in the world - Zimbabwe for one - where the regimes are being allowed to quietly kill and torture their people. There are plenty of small, repressive states with weapons of mass destruction - North Korea, for example - which appear to pose a larger and more immediate threat to international security. But only with Iraq do you get a small, repressive country with weapons of mass destruction that also happens to be floating on oil. . . . Moreover, the realities of oil dependency are catching up with the world's biggest economy. The US has long ceased to be self-sufficient in oil and, as the recent shutdown of Venezuela's refineries has proved, is therefore vulnerable to its imported supplies being cut off. The growing imbalance between the global demand for oil and discoveries of fresh supplies means that the outlook for the US is even more troubling than it appears. As the director of ExxonMobil, Harry Longwell, admitted in an article for World Energy last year, the discovery of oil peaked in the mid-1960s but demand is expected to continue growing by 2% a year - or the world is sucking oil out of the ground faster than corporations are finding it. . . . The seizure intact of Iraqi oil fields is a prime war aim of the US in any conflict, and it is likely that once Saddam has been toppled and an army of occupation has control of the country, the big oil companies will be called in to modernise the country's decrepit oil infrastructure. There have been reports in the Wall Street Journal, denied by the administration, that Dick Cheney held discussions last October with ExxonMobil and other firms about the rehabilitation of Iraq's oil industry. It stretches credulity somewhat to imagine that the subject has never been broached. . . . But while the Bush strategy has its rationale, it is fraught with risks. One is that the war will not lead to the collapse in oil prices that is predicted by the hawks in Washington. Should the conflict follow the example of 1991, crude could fall quickly to around $20 a barrel. Or prices could hit $50 a barrel if Saddam torches the Iraqi fields and manages to land a couple of Scuds on refineries in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. . . . Worryingly for Bush, there have already been signs that investors in the Gulf states have been withdrawing their assets from the US, helping to keep shares on Wall Street depressed and contributing in no small measure to the dollar's recent fall. This would turn into a rout should the oil-producing states decide that crude should be denominated in euros rather than greenbacks, a development that has already been canvassed publicly by Opec. . . . The real lesson of the struggle against Iraq is that the depletion of non-renewable energy resources is a problem that will be persist long after the butcher of Baghdad is dead and buried.

posted by LoZo 1:22 PM