Mailbag

Oil Interest Blues
Here are some articles from Chela Elaine. All are from the Independnent in the UK.

1. About the crappy oil deals we gave the Iraqis.

But it doesn't demand the fevered imaginings of a conspiracy theorist to think that this law, struck while the beleaguered Iraqi government is facing opposition from all quarters, protects the interests of oil wealth (which is so well represented in the White House) more than it does the Iraqi people. Production sharing agreements don't apply in most other major Middle Eastern oil producers because they are widely thought to grant greater control to companies than governments. With economies so heavily dependent on oil, it's hard to see how countries can truly be self-governing if they sign away influence over their almost exclusive source of wealth.

Legitimate questions must be asked. How did this decision come to be made? How much pressure was President Nouri al-Maliki placed under to bend to the American corporate interests? Conservative US thinktanks such as the Heritage Foundation have been plotting the wholesale privatisation of the Iraqi oil industry for years. Since 2003, the supposed reconstruction of Iraq by US companies has left a bitter taste with most Iraqis who see a symbiotic relationship between the US military and big business that would make a British district commissioner in imperial Africa blush.

Well, clearly the Bush admin folks just don't give a toss.

2. About 'Peak Oil' Dick Cheney and his war.

"In all," says Chris Skrebowski, editor of the Energy Institute's 'Petroleum Review', "40 per cent of the world's oil is coming from areas where production is in clear and substantial decline." When the figure reaches 50 per cent, he adds, the world as a whole will have reached the "peak oil" tipping point.

The world's first oil well was dug on the Greek Island of Zante around 400 BC, but it was not until 1859 that the Pennsylvania Rock Oil company struck the black gold 69 feet below ground, setting the scene for the oil age.

Little more than 7,000 barrels of it were produced in the whole of 1860, the first full year of pumping. Since then, it is generally agreed, the world has burned nearly 1.1 trillion barrels. But nobody knows how much is left and can be economically recovered.

So while everyone agrees that some day oil production will peak - since there is a finite amount of it on the planet - there is wide debate over when this will be. At one extreme, some experts believe that time has already arrived. Professor Kenneth Deffeyes of Princeton University - who worked with M King Hubbert - plumped for the astonishingly precise date of 16 December 2005. At the other extreme, analysts at Cambridge Energy Research Associates in Massachusetts think the peak will not come until the 2030s.

But a growing number of experts are coming to believe that it will be upon us disturbingly soon, at around 2010 or 2011. Mr Skrebowski, once sceptical of the more pessimistic estimates, is among them. "All the work I have done suggests that you just can't get it beyond then," he says..

So there we have it in the press. One wonders if the world will jump to fix the problem or just sit on their fat rear-ends like they did with Global Warming.

3. What the Oil is actually worth.

The US government has been involved in drawing up the law, a draft of which has been seen by The Independent on Sunday. It would give big oil companies such as BP, Shell and Exxon 30-year contracts to extract Iraqi crude and allow the first large-scale operation of foreign oil interests in the country since the industry was nationalised in 1972.

The huge potential prizes for Western firms will give ammunition to critics who say the Iraq war was fought for oil. They point to statements such as one from Vice-President Dick Cheney, who said in 1999, while he was still chief executive of the oil services company Halliburton, that the world would need an additional 50 million barrels of oil a day by 2010. "So where is the oil going to come from?... The Middle East, with two-thirds of the world's oil and the lowest cost, is still where the prize ultimately lies," he said.

Oil industry executives and analysts say the law, which would permit Western companies to pocket up to three-quarters of profits in the early years, is the only way to get Iraq's oil industry back on its feet after years of sanctions, war and loss of expertise. But it will operate through "production-sharing agreements" (or PSAs) which are highly unusual in the Middle East, where the oil industry in Saudi Arabia and Iran, the world's two largest producers, is state controlled.

The thing about the Iraq war is that basically you have a bunch of first world nation hooked on Oil, looking for a fix. It's more than a little bit like heroin-addicts with guns, breaking down the doors to the house that stores a mountain of heroin.

From The Pleaides Mailbag
1. Here's a video of Olbermann having a blast at GWB. Check it out.

2. Here's another article about 9/11.

The two airplanes that struck the twin towers of the World Trade Center on 9/11 flew directly into secure computer rooms in both buildings. Is that simply a coincidence or were the computer rooms equipped to play a role in the crime?

Were there homing devices, for example, in these rooms that guided the planes to their targets? Were there pre-placed explosives or Thermite on these floors to destroy the evidence and assist with the collapses?

Kind of scary.
3. While we're on scary, Pleiades has sent in this link.

This evening I computed something that troubled me. George Bush's plan to send a 'temporary surge' of extra troops to Iraq is a wheeze. Under the guise of sorting out Iraq before eventual withdrawal, it's equally likely that the troops are being sent there to hold Iraq down while Israel attacks Iran. The Shi'a majority in Iraq will not be pleased by seeing Iran attacked. They have a dual sentiment toward Iran: in one sense Iran is a Shi'a brother, and in another it is a Persian big brother to the Shi'a Arabs, who have deep-seated mixed feelings about this. The history of power oscillations between Mesopotamia and Persia goes back longer than the history of most nations' very existence. As we know, Iraq is a powderkeg.

I understand that Israel has around 200 nuclear devices, of which perhaps 50 might be available for use in Iran (the rest need retaining for defence, or are inappropriate for use in the Iran context). Now Israel's position is complex. Its powers-that-be, who have relied since the nation's founding on an 'iron wall' military defensive-aggression strategy, are desperate to keep the 'iron wall' show on the road - otherwise social and political change comes, and with it their downfall and the shift of an historic mindset.

I don't know how much of an expert analyst this guy is, but it's pretty crazy to start talking about this by counting the nukes.

4. About Hawks and Doves.
This bit, I found funny:

Excessive optimism is one of the most significant biases that psychologists have identified. Psychological research has shown that a large majority of people believe themselves to be smarter, more attractive, and more talented than average, and they commonly overestimate their future success. People are also prone to an “illusion of control”: They consistently exaggerate the amount of control they have over outcomes that are important to them—even when the outcomes are in fact random or determined by other forces. It is not difficult to see that this error may have led American policymakers astray as they laid the groundwork for the ongoing war in Iraq.

Indeed, the optimistic bias and the illusion of control are particularly rampant in the run-up to conflict. A hawk’s preference for military action over diplomatic measures is often built upon the assumption that victory will come easily and swiftly. Predictions that the Iraq war would be a “cakewalk,” offered up by some supporters of that conflict, are just the latest in a long string of bad hawkish predictions. After all, Washington elites treated the first major battle of the Civil War as a social outing, so sure were they that federal troops would rout rebel forces. General Noel de Castelnau, chief of staff for the French Army at the outset of World War I, declared, “Give me 700,000 men and I will conquer Europe.” In fact, almost every decision maker involved in what would become the most destructive war in history up to that point predicted not only victory for his side, but a relatively quick and easy victory. These delusions and exaggerations cannot be explained away as a product of incomplete or incorrect information. Optimistic generals will be found, usually on both sides, before the beginning of every military conflict.

Not ha-ha funny, but black-irony-filled funny.