Iraq: "Sexing up" Oil Figures

posted by ewing2001 on Saturday October 04, @02:35PM

U.S. can't hide concern for Iraq's oil

L. Paul Bremer, the U.S. administrator here, is "sexing up" the figures to a point where even the oilmen are shaking their heads. Take Kirkuk. Only when the television cameras capture a blown pipe, flames billowing from its wounds, do the occupation powers report sabotage.

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This they did, for example, on Aug.18 . But the same Turkish pipeline has been hit before and since. It was blown up again on Sept. 17 and four times again the following day. U.S. patrols and helicopters now move along the pipeline but, in the huge ravines and tribal areas through which it passes, long sections are indefensible.

European oilmen in Baghdad realize now that Iraqi officials in the oil ministry -- one of only two government institutions that the Americans defended from the looters -- knew very well that the sabotage was going to occur.

Earlier, Americans took the quiet and unwise decision to rehire many Baathist oil technocrats, which means that a large proportion of ministry officials are still ambivalent towards the Americans. Thus the only oil revenues the Americans can get are from the south.

In mid August, Bremer gave the impression that daily production stood at around 1 . 5million barrels. But the real figure then was 780 , 000 barrels and rarely does production reach a million. In the words of an oil analyst visiting Iraq, this is "an inexcusable catastrophe."

When Americans attacked Iraq in March, the country was producing2 .7 million barrels a day. It now also transpires that in the very first hours after they entered Baghdad April9 , U.S. troops allowed looters into the oil ministry. By the time senior officers arrived, they had destroyed billions of dollars of irreplaceable data.

While the major U.S. oil companies stand to cream off billions of dollars if oil production resumes in earnest, many of their executives were demanding to know from the Bush administration -- long before the war -- how it intended to prevent sabotage.

In fact, Saddam Hussein had no plans to destroy the oil fields themselves, but plenty of plans for blowing up the export pipes. The Pentagon got it the wrong way round, racing its troops to protect the fields but ignoring the vulnerable pipelines.

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