Marie Cocco: Bush's oilmen got it all wrong in Iraq

[tk2kewl]

http://www.newsday.com/news/opinion/ny-opcoc094376423aug09,0,312665.column?coll=ny-viewpoints-headlines

Bush's oilmen got it all wrong in Iraq

Marie Cocco 8/8/05

No oil for blood.

<snip>

"Iraq has oil," Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told Fortune magazine in 2002, discussing the potential cost of an Iraq invasion and how it would be met. "They have financial resources."

Paul Wolfowitz, formerly Rumsfeld's deputy, was bolder: "The oil revenues of that country could bring in between $50 and $100 billion over the course of the next two or three years," he told Congress as the war began. "We're dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction."

Iraq exported 1.6 million barrels per day in July, according to the oil ministry, at least half a million barrels a day less than in the waning months of Saddam Hussein's regime. Hours-long lines at gas stations are a constant of daily life, and the country must import gasoline.

<snip>

How did an administration overflowing with oilmen get it all so wrong?

The story line is tiresome. It parallels the warnings about weapons of mass destruction. It tracks with the delusional prediction about being greeted as liberators, and the fantasy about how only a few "dead-enders" continued to fight after our troops took Baghdad.

<snip>

http://www.newsday.com/news/opinion/ny-opcoc094376423aug09,0,312665.column?coll=ny-viewpoints-headlines

[autorank]

1. "The story line is tiresome." Magnificent line, great summary.

With everything else they are, ultimately * and the Neocons are "tiresome" small minded, and incompetent. I'd hate to think what the implications could have been of a quick victory, incredibly efficient transition, and skillful installation of a "rubber stamp" government. Hell, we'd be training Iraq to conquer other Arab states.

But, no, they just can't do it. They have well earned performance anxiety.

Great post!

[tk2kewl]

2. the piece is a pretty good parallel to this one from DU last week

The Enemy of my Enemy is my Enemy
August 3, 2005
By Bucky Rea

[punpirate]

3. I remember the comment...

... from a few months after Bush announced "mission accomplished" from one of the State Dept.'s experts on nation-building. He'd asked around about why he hadn't been consulted before the war began. Someone from the White House told him, "It's all done. The President spent an hour on it."

`Nuff said.

[wishlist]

4. Bush was a failed oilman so it's no wonder they got Iraqi oil wrong too

Bush couldn't stand for Saddam to have control of that much oil.

Good points about failure of Iraq oil to pay for the expenses of reconstruction:

"The president's men saw what they wished to see - the 115 billion barrels of oil reserves beneath the desert. They were blind to what was really there: an oil industry decimated by more than a decade of economic sanctions, with technological decay and even geological deterioration of the fields already gnawing at it.

The rash predictions about Iraqi oil paying for the American conquest of Iraq were always suspect, part of the marketing campaign that sold the war. "The statement in and of itself always struck me as part of the spin that this was going to be a clean, simple, fairly cost-free operation," a veteran adviser to Western governments in Baghdad told me in an interview.

Just as UN weapons inspectors, once allowed back into Iraq, correctly surmised that there were no weapons of mass destruction, so, too, did oil industry inspectors for the United Nations accurately assess the dire condition of Iraq's oil industry. In 1998 a UN report found it in a lamentable state. The conclusion was confirmed in 2000 and again in 2001. "Basically being held together with chewing gum," is how the Western expert described it. "At the time this was dismissed by the United States as just another example of how the UN had been taken in by the Iraqis."

The U.S. Energy Information Administration concedes the point. The report for the United Nations "now appears to have been largely accurate," the agency says in its latest analysis of Iraq's oil situation."

[tk2kewl]

5. I guess they had bad intelligence. Better find someone to blame.

:eyes: