Look who’s back in charge of Iraqi oil
Crisis mounts while large refinery remains shut; cuts in fuel subsidies in the wake of policy-making demanded by IMF
US and US-puppet control of Iraq’s oil industry has resulted in a failure to regain pre-invasion production levels. Meanwhile, Iraq’s domestic fuel prices triple overnight.
According to a BBC report:
Iraqi Oil Minister Ibrahim Bahr al-Uloum has been temporarily released from his post amid a dispute over the government’s petrol pricing policy. He is to be replaced for 30 days by Deputy Prime Minister Ahmed Chalabi.
Chalabi is the quintessential fraudster (see this Guardian story from April 2003 for full details, though Jordan has apparently forgiven Chalabi). Furthermore, no single human being is more responsible for generating the phony intelligence that led to war than Chalabi. There are plenty of stories on this, start here and here.
Corruption has been off the charts since the US took over international guardianship of Iraq’s oil accounts in May 2003 with the passage of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1483. Billions of dollars literally have disappeared unaccounted since. This largely unreported scandal dwarfs in size and level of official corruption the much-ballyhooed irregularities of the Saddam-era Oil-for-Food program.
Deep Blade Journal has in the past covered aspects of this corruption here, here and here.
Now the whole Iraqi oil industry threatens to come apart over policies being insisted upon by the international financial class. Crime upon crime continue to be committed under the auspices of the US-Iraq regime.
December 31st, 2005 at 06:40
Juan Cole has an interesting item posted on this topic. The item features some anonymous insider commentary:
http://www.juancole.com/2005/12/iraq-petroleum-production-suffocating.html
“An official of the Oil Ministry in Baghdad told ISN Security Watch, on condition of anonymity: `We do not know the exact quantity of oil we are exporting, we do not exactly know the prices we are selling it for, and we do not know where the oil revenue is going to.”’
“`Production in the north, centre and south is about to suffocate,’ he said.”
January 1st, 2006 at 09:40
I think most people who are aware of the absence of accountability in post-Saddam Iraqi oil production would like to know more about the details of the theft itself.
The fact that we know the problem exists implies that someone is monitoring the situation and measuring the degree of theft, but if theft was detectable, why were (are?) there no effective controls in place to stop it? And why did it take so long to detect the problem?
If there is one Iraqi asset that the US took pains to secure after the invasion, it is oil. And that implies that, before the war, the Bush administration was concerned about the loss of production capability, and that it had a plan to secure Iraq’s oil production infrastructure.
But despite the administration’s efforts, the siphoning of immense amounts of oil revenue has occurred.
There are only two possible explanations for this. Either corruption exists at the highest levels of the US government (where plans to secure Iraqi oil assets originated), or the administration is unimaginably incompetant.
Or more likely, a mix of both - after all, if one wanted to create an environment conducive to large-scale theft, then the Bush administration’s post-war policy of installing unqualified cronies and young Republicans would be just the ticket.
January 1st, 2006 at 23:23
Thanks for the comment, myxsptlk.
The simple answer for why “no effective controls” exist is that there is a Republican Congress in the US, therefore there is no true official investigative authority. Impunity is the result.
Well, we do have an Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction. The IG has issued some interesting reports and at one point wind of indictments were in the air (eg. Custer-Battles), but not much has come of it. After these IG reports, the Democrats held some hearings (led by Henry Waxman, find transcripts referenced in some of the links to this post), but not having any power they couldn’t make the hearings official or even find rooms in the Capitol Building.
Meanwhile, the UN had demanded an internationsl oversight board for the DFI (the Iraqi oil slush fund the Americans raped), as embodied in UNSCR 1483 and continued recently in UNSCR 1637. Now we begin to see possible motivations for keeping the UN on the ropes over the Saddam-era Oil-for-Food program and media well misdirected.