Critical battle for Iraq's energy

[Crackingham]

Frustrated Iraqi and U.S. officials say insurgents in recent months have displayed an impressive capacity to cripple Iraq's most vital infrastructure.

"What they're doing is focusing efforts on intelligent attacks on infrastructure, especially oil and electricity," said a senior U.S. diplomat, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "The number of attacks is down, but the effectiveness of the attacks is up significantly."

<snip>

The biggest hit was on the national treasury. Almost the entire federal budget is generated by exports of crude oil, and, according to the Brookings Institution in Washington, revenue from oil exports in November dropped by nearly $700 million, almost 36 percent, from the previous month. The number of attacks on pipelines and other oil and gas infrastructure in November reached 30, almost tripling from October.

According to the State Department, exports rebounded slightly in December, but after attacks on pipelines in the northern and southern oil fields, early January exports skidded below even the November level, to fewer than 1 million barrels a day — less than half the current capacity.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6828349/

[Carolab]

1. So? According to Richard Perle, we're not there for the oil. n/t

[UL_Approved]

2. News agency dupe

This is a new posting of the article, but the article itself is on Washington Post's website. Still, a great way to post WITHOUT a registration.

BTW, Welcome to DU! :hi:

[daleo]

3. A strategic bombing campaign

A pretty subtle strategy for "dead-enders and terrorists". It sounds like a classic nationalist guerrilla campaign against a colonial army.

[teryang]

4. Critical fault in neo-con military strategy

One thing I noticed right away about the assumptions underlying the radical new American pre-emptive strategy was that the military principle of safeguarding the lines of communcication in the Persian Gulf has been changed to a principle of seizing the natural resources at their source rather than merely protecting their movement in international commerce.

Of course this development in geo-political military strategy necessitates a certain neglect of the principle of national sovereignty. And such neglect is the cost of a mechantilist or neo-colonial strategy.

Herein lies the fault. We are a sea power. We thrive on commerce. This is why we defend the lines of communication world wide as necessary pre-requisite of international commerce. When one unjustifiably extends this principle to seize the land based lines of communication in foreign nations (referred to as infrastructure) against their will, one must be able to project sufficient land based power to secure it. We are not such a land based power. In fact, the neo-con myth of unchallengeable American military strength, simply and completely collapses at this point.

Not only are we incapable of securing Iraqi internal lines of communication, we can't even secure the road from the international airport to Baghdad. Thus, we have chosen a principle of military and political strategy that guarantees that we will fight on a battlefield where we are at a profound disadvantage. Someone needs to brush up on Sun Tzu and some pre-neo-con issues of Naval Proceedings.

The principle of national sovereignty is based upon the notion that internal security is provided by the nation state, not an empire, not a colonial occupier. The principle of international law has emerged after hundreds of years of conflict and is true, tried and tested. Radical extremist world domination theorists now occupying the executive office defied the time tested principle of national sovereignty and now we and our Armed Forces suffer the inevitable results.

How long can this truth be hidden?