Endless War
Even the very small draw-down of troops from Baghdad has led to a rise in American and Iraqi deaths. Now General Petraeus has concluded he can’t draw down anymore troops. What we now realize is that the civil war between Sunni and Shia will not end–it just goes underground when we surge. This is Rumsfeld’s “Long War”, just like in 1984
The Realpolitik part of my nature says we should get out of the way and let the majority Shia Parties take control. I have suggested before that the militias are rearming. As Shia Militias fire Iranian rockets at American targets in the Green Zone–we cannot remain in this McCain-Bush fantasy movie called “The Surge Is Working”.
To everything – turn, turn, turn
There is a season – turn, turn, turn
And a time to every purpose under heaven
A time to be born, a time to die
A time to plant, a time to reap
A time to kill, a time to heal
A time to laugh, a time to weep
A time to build up, a time to break down
A time to dance, a time to mourn
A time to cast away stones
A time to gather stones together
A time of love, a time of hate
A time of war, a time of peace
A time you may embrace
A time to refrain from embracing
A time to gain, a time to lose
A time to rend, a time to sew
A time to love, a time to hate
A time of peace, I swear it’s not too late!
once again this man, god i can’t even bring myself to spell out his name, will escape into the pod of security that this nation and it’s long parade of defenders has provided for him and his family leaving others to wash out his stinking diapers.
can’t we send him/them?
For once, the internet has let me down. There was a very good piece on Iraq on Channel 4 here in the UK recently. It was a discussion panel conducted in Amman, Jordan, featuring various members of various interested parties, including Iraqi government officials, a US ambassador and others, both Shia and Sunni, and the whole thing was moderated by Jon Snow, a well known journalist and reporter from the channel – and despite my best efforts, I can’t find the entire thing online dammit!
Some of the most intriguing talking points, all raised by Iraqis in the discussion, were:
- the “civil war” between Shia and Sunni was nowhere near as divisive or aggressive prior to the invasion and subsequent power vacuum (one woman went so far as to accuse the US of provoking, encouraging it, if not manufacturing it for their own benefit).
- In the five years since the invasion began, anywhere from 250,000 to 1 million Iraqis crossed the border into Syria and settled, many in shantytowns on the borders – and yet when asked whether they would consider returning to Iraq, only 4% said they would consider it right now.
- the draft oil law in Iraq has been held up by, among other things, the inclusion of a proposed ‘gift’ of oil to foreign bodies (hey, who says you can’t benefit from invasion, right? – see this for the report on oil ownership dispute – http://www.channel4.com/player/v2/player.jsp?showId=11498) – one panel member was clearly furious with the US ambassador, asking ‘What gives you the right to tell us how we should use our oil?’
- a recent poll that reflected a positive outlook among certain portions of the Iraqi population also made it very clear that Iraqis across the board was the US and its allies out of the country (“on the crucial question of whether US led forces should stay or go only 18% said yes, 70% calling them to leave Iraq – almost all saying immediately.”)
That’s only a tiny portion of the piece and I really wish I could find the whole thing, but no luck. Having said that, there is a podcast that is worth checking out and a few reports by Snow, though once again, it doesn’t include the panel discussion. I’m going to keep looking for it because, frankly, this kind of in depth discussion/debate with Iraqi people is few and far between in Western media these days, where Western “experts” on Iraq (military or civilian) are brought in to speak instead of asking the people on the ground for their views.
Podcast: http://www.channel4.com/news/articles/politics/international_politics/iraq+the+fallout+podcast/1832947
Jon Snow’s reports:
http://link.brightcove.com/services/player/bcpid1459151496
We’ll see.
Morgan, what will we see? Will it be with foresight or hindsight? Will we know what to do with what we see? We haven’t yet, if include the Bushwhackers in “we”…
I think a number of us have “seen” for quite a while that this war waged by stupid and egotistical men based upon lies is the path to hell. And now we have a war monger running for president on the Republican side, and a woman who still won’t simply apologize for voting for the war fighting with a guy who may just wind up with the shitty end of the stick to deal with next year.
I think the only solution is dividing up Iraq into three countries or territories, and letting everyone go to their corner to sort it all out. Yes, it’s ethnic cleansing; no, it won’t stop turmoil; yes, a lot of folks will die during the process; but I think that only by separating the combatants will they ever stop killing one another in this gigantic street brawl played out with horrific weapons. These are a bunch of children who simply have to go to their own rooms for a couple of hundred years…
Rick, I meant, we’ll see. The gains will either hold or they won’t. Elections there will either go on as planned or they won’t. They will increase oil output, and split up the revenue or they won’t.
It is up to the Iraqis.
But either way, we’re talking about 13 or 14 military bases in Iraq for ten years (under Obama).
And I certainly am not opposed to Iraq being divided up into 3 countries – if thats what it takes to secure our interests. Likewise, most of the military there, the folks you say you care about, they say they are doing more good than harm, and I’m apt to believe them. We have strategic interests in the region, and “just leaving” isn’t on the table – all three presidential candidates expect to have us there through their next 8 years. What everyone wants is our guys not getting killed.
But if the gains do hold, and the elections do come, and the Iraqis decide they don’t want to be split up into 3 countries, and they continue to ask for our presence there, than the current policy will continue.
So we’ll see.
What about securing the interests of the Iraqis? Or is that pile of sand really just there as a lid on “our” oil? And how much oil from there is getting out and into our gas tanks at this point anyway?
And we’re doing more good than harm? That’s like infecting someone with a deadly disease, then giving them the antibiotic that saves them, and then demanding thanks from them for saving their life…
Your logic has a peculiar time cutoff whereby we accept no responsibility for screwing this up in the first place.
I say, “Mission accomplished.” So let’s butt out.
See above.
“And I certainly am not opposed to Iraq being divided up into 3 countries – if thats what it takes to secure our interests.”
… I just don’t see what gives us the right to say how many countries the Iraqis can or cannot choose to divide themselves up into.
Again, see above.
March 10, 2008 Issue
Copyright © 2008 The American Conservative
Oil for War
After invading one of the most petroleum-rich countries on earth, the U.S. military is running on empty.
by Robert Bryce
Napoleon famously said that an army marches on its stomach. That may have been true for his 19th-century force. But the modern American military runs on jet fuel—and lots of it.
Today the average American G.I. in Iraq uses about 20.5 gallons of fuel every day, more than double the daily volume consumed by U.S. soldiers in Iraq in 2004. Thus, in order to secure the third-richest country on the planet, the U.S. military is burning enormous quantities of petroleum. And nearly every drop of that fuel is imported into Iraq. These massive fuel requirements—just over 3 million gallons per day for Operation Iraqi Freedom, according to the Pentagon’s Defense Energy Support Center—are a key reason for the soaring cost of the war effort.
Controlling Iraq’s oil has historically been a vital factor in America’s involvement in Iraq and was always a crucial element of the Bush administration’s plans for the post-Saddam era. Of course, that’s not how the war was sold to the American people. A few months before the invasion, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld declared that the looming war had “nothing to do with oil, literally nothing to do with oil.” The war was necessary, its planners claimed, because Saddam Hussein supported terrorism and, left unchecked, he would unleash weapons of mass destruction on the West.
Nevertheless, oil was the foremost strategic focus for the U.S. military in Iraq. The first objectives of the invading forces included the capture of key Iraqi oil terminals and oilfields. On March 20, 2003, Navy SEALs engaged in the first combat of the war when they launched a surprise invasion of the Mina al-Bakr and Khor al-Amaya oil loading terminals in the Persian Gulf. A few hours later, Marine Lt. Therral Childers became the first U.S. soldier to die in combat in the invasion when he was killed fighting for control of the Rumaylah oil field in southern Iraq.
Oil was also the first objective when U.S. forces reached Baghdad on April 8. Although the National Library of Iraq, the National Archives, and the National Museum of Antiquities were all looted and in some cases burned, the oil ministry building was barely damaged. That’s because a detachment of American soldiers and a half-dozen assault vehicles were assigned to guard the ministry and its records.
After all, the war’s architects had promised that oil money was going to rebuild Iraq after the U.S. military took control. In March 2003, Paul Wolfowitz told a Congressional panel, “The oil revenues of that country could bring between $50 and $100 billion over the course of the next two or three years. Now, there are a lot of claims on that money, but … we are dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction and relatively soon.” As Michael Gordon and Bernard Trainor explained in their 2006 book, Cobra II, “The Pentagon had promised that the reconstruction of Iraq would be ‘self-financing,’ and the preservation of Iraq’s oil wealth was the best-prepared and -resourced component of Washington’s postwar plan.”
After the invasion, when inspectors failed to find any weapons of mass destruction, Bush and his supporters changed their story, claiming that the U.S. had invaded Iraq to spread democracy in the Middle East. When democracy failed to materialize, the justification for the invasion turned to oil. During an October 2006 press conference, Bush declared that the U.S. could not “tolerate a new terrorist state in the heart of the Middle East with large oil reserves that could be used to fund its radical ambitions or used to inflict economic damage on the West.”
The U.S. military and the new Baghdad government have failed, however, to secure Iraq’s tattered oil sector. As A.F. Alhajji, energy economist and professor at Ohio Northern University, has said, “whoever controls Iraq’s oil, controls Iraq.” For the last five years, it’s never been exactly clear who controls Iraq’s oil. That said, the country’s leading industry is slowly increasing output. In January, daily production hit 2.4 million barrels per day, the highest level since the U.S. invasion.
But America’s presence in Iraq isn’t making use of the local riches. Indeed, little, if any, Iraqi oil is being used by the American military. Instead, the bulk of the fuel needed by the U.S. military is being trucked in from the sprawling Mina Abdulla refinery complex, which lies a few dozen kilometers south of Kuwait City. In 2006 alone, the Defense Energy Support Center purchased $909.3 million in motor fuel from the state-owned Kuwait Petroleum Corporation. In addition to the Kuwaiti fuel, the U.S. military is trucking in fuel from Turkey. But some of that Turkish fuel actually originates in refineries as far away as Greece.
In 2007 alone, the U.S. military in Iraq burned more than 1.1 billion gallons of fuel. (American Armed Forces generally use a blend of jet fuel known as JP-8 to propel both aircraft and automobiles.) About 5,500 tanker trucks are involved in the Iraqi fuel-hauling effort. That fleet of trucks is enormously costly. In November 2006, a study produced by the U.S. Military Academy estimated that delivering one gallon of fuel to U.S. soldiers in Iraq cost American taxpayers $42—and that didn’t include the cost of the fuel itself. At that rate, each U.S. soldier in Iraq is costing $840 per day in fuel delivery costs, and the U.S. is spending $923 million per week on fuel-related logistics in order to keep 157,000 G.I.s in Iraq. Given that the Iraq War is now costing about $2.5 billion per week, petroleum costs alone currently account for about one-third of all U.S. military expenditure in Iraq.
Soaring fuel costs are largely a product of the fact that U.S. forces have been forced to defend themselves against improvised explosive devices. The majority of American casualties in Iraq have been due to IED attacks, primarily on motor vehicles. The U.S. military has spent billions of dollars on electronic countermeasures to combat the deadly devices, but those countermeasures have largely failed. Instead, the troops have had to rely on old-fashioned hardened steel. Since the beginning of the war, the Pentagon has introduced numerous programs to add armor skins to its fleet of Humvees.
But even the newest armored Humvees, which weigh about six tons, haven’t been enough to protect soldiers against the deadly explosives. Last year, Congress, the White House, and the Pentagon agreed on a four-year plan to spend about $20 billion on a fleet of 23,000 mine-resistant ambush protection vehicles or MRAPs. Last August, the Pentagon ordered 1,520 of the vehicles at a cost of $3.5 million each.
The MRAPs mean even greater demand for fuel from U.S. troops in Iraq. An armored Humvee covers perhaps 8 miles per gallon of fuel. One version of the MRAP, the Maxxpro, weighs about 40,000 pounds, and according to a source within the military, gets just 3 miles per gallon. The increased demand for fuel for the MRAPs will come alongside the need for an entirely new set of tires, fan belts, windshields, alternators, and other gear.
This swelling of the logistics train creates yet another problem for the military: an increase in supply trucks on the road, which demands yet more fuel and provides insurgents with a greater range of targets to attack.
While the U.S. military chases its own fuel tail in Iraq, a country that sits atop 115 billion barrels of oil—about 9.5 percent of the world’s total—the global energy industry is racing forward with new alliances and deals, many of which would have been unthinkable before the invasion. Those alliances have far-reaching significance for America’s foreign and energy policy. The world’s oil market is no longer shaped by U.S. military power. Markets are trumping militarism. As one analyst put it recently, dollars are replacing “bullets as shapers of the geopolitical picture.”
The importance of this point is obvious: as the effectiveness of militarism in controlling global energy trends is declining, the U.S. is spending billions of dollars a week in Mesopotamia on a war effort that—if John McCain is right—could drain the American treasury for decades to come. Meanwhile, America’s key rivals, China and Russia in particular, are using their influence to forge economic alliances that are realigning the global balance of power. They are creating a multi-polar world in which America’s influence will be substantially diminished.
This realignment is particularly advantageous for major energy exporting countries such as Russia, Abu Dhabi, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and of course, Iran. These states are taking advantage of higher energy prices caused by ever-increasing global energy demand and tightening supplies. And while the Bush administration has tried to diminish the influence of countries like Iran and Russia, there’s little, if anything, the U.S. can do to slow the trend. The myriad of energy exploration and production contracts that the Iranians have signed in recent months proves the point.
Meanwhile, Russia’s state-controlled behemoth, Gazprom, has consolidated its hold on the European natural gas market. Add the massive financial power of the sovereign wealth funds of just three countries—Abu Dhabi, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, who hold a combined $1.4 trillion in assets—and the shift in power becomes even more apparent. Higher energy prices are the main difference between the first Iraq War and the second, says Jeff Dietert, a managing director at Simmons & Company International, a Houston-based investment banking firm that focuses on the energy sector. “It’s a completely different result from the first Iraq War, which was really a demonstration of military prowess. It was quick and decisive versus the current situation in Iraq, which is slow, expensive and drawn out.”
The Kurds have been quick to exploit new opportunities in the fast-changing oil market. In direct defiance of the weak central government in Baghdad, the Kurdistan Regional Government has signed 15 oil exploration deals with 20 companies from 12 countries. Increasing oil production benefits the Kurds. It also helps Turkey, which stands to reap more revenue from the Kirkuk to Ceyhan pipeline, which will carry much of the new production. A Norwegian company, DNO ASA, has already built a pipeline from their Tawke oil field north of Mosul to an interconnection point immediately next to the Kirkuk-Ceyhan pipeline.
Geneva-based Addax Petroleum is another big player in Kurdistan. During a presentation at an oil and gas conference in Connecticut in September, the company’s chief financial officer, Michael Ebsary, said that Addax’s potential reserves in Kurdistan may be as large as 2.7 billion barrels of oil. (Addax’s partner in the project is a Genel Enerji, a subsidiary of the Cukorova Group, one of Turkey’s biggest conglomerates.) “Everyone sees the Kurdish region as an area that has to be developed. There’s tons of oil there,” Ebsary told me. “It has to get out.”
The same can be said for Iranian oil and gas. One of the unintended consequences of the Iraq War has been the strengthening of Iran’s influence in the region. In 2007 alone, the Iranians cut deals—worth perhaps $50 billion over the next few decades—with companies from Britain, Spain, Brazil, China, Austria, Turkey, and Malaysia. In addition to those projects, the Iranian government is still negotiating the pricing formulas for the long discussed, much-delayed Peace Pipeline, the $7 billion, 1600-mile conduit to carry Iranian gas to Pakistan and India. In 2005, Susil Chandra Tripathi, the secretary of India’s ministry of petroleum and natural gas, promised that the deal would eventually go through. He told me that the U.S. may “want to isolate Iran, but that doesn’t mean Iran will quit producing crude oil and gas, or that we will stop buying it.”
Another indication of the shift in power can be seen by looking at the new the Dubai Mercantile Exchange, which last June began trading the Oman Crude Oil Futures Contract. By getting into the energy futures business, Dubai is assuring that the crude oil coming out of the Persian Gulf has its own benchmark price—one that is not reliant on Western crude oil standards such as West Texas Intermediate and North Sea Brent. It also puts Dubai in competition with the traditional trading hubs in New York and London. In July 2006, Gary King, the CEO of the Dubai exchange, told me that the emergence of the exchange and the new futures contract indicates that the Persian Gulf is “the center of the world’s biggest hydrocarbon province. Most of the growth in oil consumption is in Asia-Pacific. So it’s a natural shift in gravity. Our timing is very opportune to be in that center of gravity.”
This change cannot be stopped or ignored. In today’s multi-polar world, economic interests, not military force, predominate. “It used to be that the side with the most guns would win,” says G.I. Wilson, a recently retired Marine Corps colonel, who has written extensively on terrorism and asymmetric warfare and spent 15 months fighting in Iraq. Today, says Wilson, the side “with the most guns goes bankrupt.”
Since World War II, America has held fast to the idea that controlling the oil flow out of the Persian Gulf must be assured at the point of a M-16 rifle. But the cost of that approach has been crippling. As the U.S. military pursues its occupation of Iraq—with the fuel costs approaching $1 billion per week—it’s obvious that the U.S. needs to rethink the assumption that secure energy sources depend on militarism. The emerging theme of the 21st-century energy business is the increasing power of markets. The U.S. can either adapt or continue hurtling down the road to bankruptcy.
_________________________________
Robert Bryce is the managing editor of Energy Tribune magazine. His third book, Gusher of Lies: The Dangerous Delusions of Energy Independence, will be published on March 10.
Morgan- How does this article posted by JH square with your vision of our Imperial control of Iraqi oil?
What is this “Imperial” control stuff? I guess it is fun to imagine it huh? Let’s try:
We, you and I, Greenspan, everyone – I think knew then and understands now it is about the oil. Our issue is /was about energy not being weaponized against us. We had just been attacked. The propped up Saudis looked weak. Iran and Iraq each were antagonistic – we were concerned for our interests. Everyone else benefits as well of course, it is still a free market, China and India are thirsty for oil. It isn’t “our” oil. The cause of the oil war wasn’t “imperial.”
After that, it is a little more questionable, because our next strategic goal is “maximum production,” right? Regardless of what is best for Iraq, Iran, OPEC, or anyone, our interest is maximum production.
Regardless of what we do to reduce our oil dependence (I think everyone supports that 100%), the lowest price we’ll pay for oil is when it is produced consistently at maximum bpd.
At that point, the decision making in the argument falls to your side…
1. How big of a crisis do you think Peak Oil is? If it is a crisis, than militarily having a strong presence there helps us. Obama is keeping bases there for 10 years for a reason, no?
If it is a crisis, then maximum output is the best hope we have that we can convert to this alt.energy future everyone wants. If there is a crisis, we need the oil to save the day as it were.
2. If you don’t think Peak Oil is a crisis, then after you are sure that supply can’t easily be weaponized, you can be less concerned with maximum production, and be ok with OPEC setting the prices.
So, if there is “imperialism,” it isn’t the war.
To be non-imperialist, we’d have to allow production to fall, prices to rise, to the nations with the supply to benefit, rather than us.
Is that your goal?
Morgan- Oil price becomes a weapon when we are overleveraged. Merrill Lynch just released a report that I’m going to write about tonight saying Inflation is the real problem.
[...] we discussed two days ago, the battle with the Militias is ramping up. NBC reports that US Commanders in Iraq were surprised [...]