Why Withdrawal Is Unmentionable

[Jcrowley]

The original plan included wresting control of Iraqi oil from Saddam's hostile Ba'athist government and delivering it into the hands of the large oil companies through the privatization of new oil fields and various other special agreements. It was hoped that privatized Iraqi oil might then break OPEC's hold on the global oil spigot. In the Iraq of the Bush administration's dreams, the U.S. would be the key player in determining both the amount of oil pumped and the favored destinations for it. (This ambition was implicitly seconded by the Baker commission when it recommended that the U.S. "should assist Iraqi leaders to reorganize the national oil industry as a commercial enterprise")

All of this, of course, was contingent upon establishing an Iraqi government that would be a junior partner in American Middle Eastern policy; that, under the rule of an Ahmed Chalabi or Iyad Allawi, would, for instance, be guaranteed to support administration campaigns against Iran and Syria. Bush administration officials have repeatedly underscored this urge, even in the present circumstances, by attempting, however ineffectively, to limit the ties of the present Shia-dominated Iraqi government to Iran.

Withdrawal from Iraq would signal the ruin of all these hopes. Without a powerful American presence, permanent bases would not be welcomed by any regime that might emerge from the current cauldron in Baghdad; every faction except the Kurds is adamantly against them. U.S. oil ambitions would prove similarly unviable. Though J. Paul Bremer, John Negroponte, and Zalmay Khalilzad, our three ambassador-viceroys in Baghdad, have all pushed through legislation mandating the privatization of oil (even embedding this policy in the new constitution), only a handful of top Iraqi politicians have actually embraced the idea. The religious leaders who control the Sunni militias oppose it, as do the Sadrists, who are now the dominant faction in the Shia areas. The current Iraqi government is already making economic treaties with Iran and even sought to sign a military alliance with that country that the Americans aborted.

http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=147614

[twilight_sailing]

1. That's the truth of the matter.

[indepat]

2. Delivering Iraqi oil into the hands of large oil companies who will profit by trillions

of dollars while assuring Amurikans can have $3.00 gallon gasoline to power their SUV/Hummer-types: by George, I think I got it!

[Jacobin]

3. Here's why that is an utter pipedream

http://www.iags.org/iraqpipelinewatch.htm

Last few months of summaries of attacks on infrastructure:

We 'own and control' their oil the same way we 'own and control their country'...NOT


340. June 6 - four Northern Oil Company employees were kidnapped on their way to the Ajeel oil site.
341. June 8 - Gunmen in Baghdad kidnapped the director general of the State Company for Oil Projects, Muthana al-Badri in Aazamiya, northern Baghdad.
342. June 9 - in Kirkuk gunmen attacked soldiers guarding a pipeline, wounding three of them and killing one civilian. also on the road between the oil-refinery town of Baiji and Tikrit, gunmen killed three oil engineers.
343. June 12 - six people have been killed in a roadside bomb attack in the southern Daura district in Baghdad. The blast targeted a bus carrying workers to Baghdad's main oil refinery and comes a day after al-Qaeda in Iraq vowed to carry out large-scale after the killing of its leader, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
344. June 16 - an employee of the Northern Gas Company was similarly shot dead near the oil city of Kirkuk.
345. June 27 - a suicide car bomb exploded at a gas station in Kirkuk, killing at least three civilians and wounding 14 people who were lined up to get fuel.
346. June 27 - three Iraqi policemen from a unit assigned to protect oil facilities in northern Iraq were injured by a roadside IED. A security source said the three men were injured when a bomb exploded as their patrol passed by in an area north of Kirkuk.
347. July 3 - early morning attack section of Yumurtalik pipeline in the city of Hassan about 40 miles southeast of Kirkuk.
348. July 9 - a sabotage attack along Iraq's vital northern oil export route to Turkey fractured both pipelines and repairs will take at least two weeks.
349. July 11 - insurgents killed an engineer working for the North Oil Company, along with his driver, while he was heading to work in Kirkuk.
350. July 11 - insurgents attacked a convoy carrying security personnel tasked with protecting oil facilities south of Mosul, killing at least 10 troops and injuring scores of others. The troops had been ambushed while on a routine inspection of oil pipes in the region. 351. July 13 - attack on a security patrol of the Northern Oil Company in Kirkuk killed three policemen and wounded six civilians.
352. July 16 - the head of Iraq's North Oil Company, Adel Qazaz, was kidnapped in northern Baghdad.
353. July 28 - attack near Samarra on a pipeline connecting Bayji and the Daura refinery.
354. July 31 - Iraq’s northern pipeline carrying crude from the northern oilfields to Turkey's Ceyhan port was sabotaged and ruptured, delaying the restart of export from a previous attack on 9 July 2006.
355. August 13 - insurgents shot and killed a colonel in the Oil Protection Facilities, a security body charged with guarding Iraq's oil infrastructure. He was shot while waiting at gas station north of Tikrit, 110 miles north of Baghdad.
356. August 13 - approximately 63 Iraqis were killed and another 140 wounded when bombs exploded in the vicinity of a building, rupturing a gas pipeline and causing a gas explosion near the Hawra market in southeast Baghdad.
357. September 1 - an IED attack targeting an oil pipeline on the outskirts of Musayyib south of Baghdad cut supply to a major electricity station. The pipeline feeds Musayyib's electricity station, which provides power to the cities of Karbala, Najaf, Hillah and Diwaniyah.
358. September 3 - attack on an oil pipeline near Kirkuk.
359. Septmebr 10 - a shooting attack near Bayji. Gunmen in two cars ambushed a bus carrying oil employees, killing four people and wounding one.
360. September 13 - an oil installation guard was wounded in a clash with gunmen who tried to blow up an oil pipeline in al-Fatha using an IED,in an area 20 miles south of Kirkuk.
361. September 17 - an oil pipeline was damaged by an IED in the town of Balad, 55 miles north of Baghdad. 362. September 18 - two militants who attempted an attack a gas tanker were arrested in the area of Shuwan, eastern Kirkuk. The attackers were attempting to hijack the tanker.
363. September 20 - a suicide truck bomb detonated at a police checkpoint at the entrance of a Baghdad oil refinery in southern Baghdad, killing three people and wounding 13 others.
364. September 22 - a pipeline carrying crude oil from the fields around Kirkuk to the refinery in Baiji was ruptured during a mortar attack.
365. September 26 - an IED ruptured gas pipeline at Bayji. No one was hurt when insurgents blew up the pipeline, which connects the Bayji refinery and a gas field.
366. September 29 - two fuel tankers were hit with roadside IEDs southwest of Samarra.
367. October 5 - an IED planted under an oil pipeline was detonated near the village of Ishaqi north of Baghdad. The explosion set fire to the pipeline linking the refinery in Bayji and the refinery in al-Daura.
368. October 7 - a roadside IED hit a fuel tanker being escorted by American troops near Samarra, sending plumes of black smoke into the air.
369. October 28 - a roadside IED targeting security forces guarding an oil industry facility wounded two police officers in eastern Baghdad.
370. October 30 - gunmen attacked a police centre assigned to oil, facilities protection in the city of Bayji, killing two policemen and destroying a police car.
371. November 1 - a roadside IED detonated near the convoy of the security advisor of the Governor of Salah ad Din Province in Bayji. He was unharmed but two of his guards were wounded.
372. November 2 - Gunmen killed a guard of the Northern Oil Company in Kirkuk.
373. November 2 - Sarkot Hikmat Shawkat, an officer with the city's Oil Protection Police, was killed in a drive-by shooting.
374. November 2 - insurgents set up a fake security checkpoint and killed the drivers of two fuel trucks and kidnapped three other people near Baquba.
375. November 13 - Five employees of the state-owned North Oil Company, one of them a women, were ambushed and killed in a small arms attack in the northern outskirts of Baghdad as they drove into the capital.
376. November 21 - In east Baghdad, a roadside IED detonated near an Oil Ministry convoy, killing four people.
377. November 25 - In Kirkuk, police found the bullet-riddled body of a pipeline security guard.
378. November 27 - Two mortar bombs hit the North Oil Co. pipeline-filtering facility northwest of Kirkuk. The resultant fire was burning out of control, and the flow of oil from all of Kirkuk's fields had been shut down to the Baiji refinery to the southwest.
379. November 27 - An IED detonated under an oil pipeline and set it on fire today 20 miles south of Baghdad, and Iraqi andUS forces were sent to secure the area. The pipeline carries crude oil from storage tanks in nearby Latifiyah to the Daura refinery in Baghdad.
380. November 27 - The corpses of two Oil Ministry employees were discovered in the town of Khalis.
381. November 29 - Police colonel ahmed izdeen from the ministry of oil was assassinated by unknown gunmen in Baghdad.

[Parisle]

4. Three reasons, actually,....

---- You are quite right about the oil considerations. Iraqi oil was especially prized because it is shallow-lying, and costs only about a third as much to extract as Saudi oil, for example. More profit there, eh?

---- But the PNAC military plan is part of it, too. The military bases,... proximity to the Straits of Hormuz, and to all of the Mideast... made Iraq a key to geo-political influence and control.

---- And finally,... absurdly,.. Bush is still trying to keep himself from looking like the stupid, inept Nazi loser that he, in fact, is. Those who call the invasion of Iraq a "mistake" or a foreign policy "blunder" are being disingenuously charitable. It was illegitimate all the way, and the administration knew it. Lies were told to congress and to the American people. It was deliberate and premeditated. Bush still believes that a semblance of victory would offset the criminality his administration had engaged in.

[Big Sky Boy]

5. It was only ever about oil

Bush isn't going to change course, because he has what he wants. We control the only dock in the Persian Gulf that pumps Iraqi crude.

Yes we have been hampered by some sporadic attacks, but we still control every drop that leaves the country--even if the flow slows down every once in a while.

He doesn't care how many Americans are dying to keep that spigot. He doesn't care how many will continue to die every day for it. He cares even less about Iraqi civilians.

Nor does he care how many people criticize him or that his approval rating is in the toilet. He has what he wants--and until we can move the discussion to "How many lives are we willing to waste every day to control that oil", we will be stuck there--losing two to five American lives and countless civilians every single day we are there.

Everything else is a distraction. Stabilizing the government. Democracy is on the march. Stand them up so we can stand down. Freedom for the Iraqi people. War on Terror. The world is a better place... WMDs.

Bush cares less about that rhetoric than he does about Iraqi civilians. But as long as we keep babbling about it, we won't be asking him the real tough questions about his oil policy.