Maliki: Civil war in Iraq has been averted & Iranian intervention has ceased to exist

[BrainGlutton]

Story here. And he does not think Iraq will be needing any long-term American military presence like we’ve had in South Korea for decades. Finally, something from Iraq that just might be good news!

Iraqi security forces, Maliki said, are increasingly capable of operating without U.S. support. But he agreed with the Bush administration that an early U.S. withdrawal would be unwise.

Iraq’s political leadership, he said through an interpreter, “wants the process of withdrawing troops to happen [simultaneously with] the process of rebuilding Iraqi Security Forces so that they can take responsibility.” No one, he said, “wants to risk losing all the achievements” they have made.

But although Bush administration officials have spoken of a smaller, long-term U.S. military presence in Iraq, similar to the tens of thousands of troops stationed in South Korea over the past half-century, Maliki said he does not foresee it.

The two governments, he said, are in the initial phases of discussion about “a long-term multilateral treaty and not necessarily a long-term presence for troops.” Any agreement, he said, would have to be approved by the Iraqi parliament.

Maliki’s view of Iran’s role in fomenting violence in Iraq also diverges from that of the administration. He said his government has begun a dialogue with Iran and Syria and has explained to them that their activities are unhelpful. As a result, he said, “our relationships with these countries has improved to the point that they are not interfering in our internal affairs.”

Asked about Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Forces, which the U.S. military charges is arming, training and directing Shiite militias in Iraq, Maliki said: “There used to be support through borders for these militias. But it has ceased to exist.”

He said he has no fear of Sunni tribal forces recruited by the United States in their Anbar province stronghold because all Sunnis are “sons of Iraq.”

Is Maliki being too optimistic here, or can we actually see the light at the end of the tunnel?

[tomndebb]

@BrainGlutton

Is Maliki being too optimistic here, or can we actually see the light at the end of the tunnel?

Or is al-Maliki relying on (and denying the presence of) Shi’a Iranian support for his government in the face of a possible power grab by Muqtada al-Sadr? Now that the Sunnis have been pretty effectively removed from any “sensitive” Shi’ite areas and are bottled up in their own enclaves, al-Maliki’s biggest problem is with the various power hungry Shi’ite factions (of which al-Sadr’s is only the largest), and having a very large nation supporting his faction while denying that they are there might be (in his mind) his best hope to come out on top.

[Linty_McGinty_McGee]

He knows more about it than I do, but the US won’t be leaving as long as there is oil.
All aspects of the oil industry are moving into US hands.

[Drunky_Smurf]

@Linty McGinty McGee

He knows more about it than I do, but the US won’t be leaving as long as there is oil.
All aspects of the oil industry are moving into US hands.

Good, because I am damn tired of paying $3.00+ for gas. It should also bring down the prices of other petrolium based products.

[BrainGlutton]

@Tahssa

Good, because I am damn tired of paying $3.00+ for gas. It should also bring down the prices of other petrolium based products.

I hope you are not really expecting American oil companies’ control of foreign oilfields to translate automatically into lower prices at the pump. Perhaps you are assuming that oil companies, like most manufacturers and most wholesalers, want to buy the raw material as cheaply as they can, and then either pass the savings along to the end consumer, or pocket the difference. Actually, in their industry it is often more profitable for them to buy dear than to buy cheap. As explained by Greg Palast in his book Armed Madhouse:

. . . When OPEC raises the price of crude, Big Oil makes out big time. The oil majors are not simply passive resellers of OPEC production. In OPEC nations, they have “profit sharing agreements” (PSAs) that give the companies a direct slice of the higher price charged. More important, the industry has its own reserves whose value is attached, like a suckerfish, to OPEC’s price targets. Here’s a statistic you won’t see on Army recruitment posters: The rise in the price of oil after the first three years of the war boosted the value of the reserves of ExxonMobil alone by just over $666 billion. The devil is in the details.

Maintaining the status quo for the oil companies requires holding down oil production, and Iraq has been assigned that sorry role since it was founded (it has 74 known oil fields and only 15 in production). In 1927, the major oil company execs met at a hotel room in Belgium and signed an agreement: The Anglo-Persian company (now British Petroleum) would pump almost all its oil from Iran; Standard Oil, under the name of the Arabian-American Oil Company (Aramco), would limit almost all its drilling to Saudi Arabia; Anglo-Persian would drill in Iraq’s Kirkuk and Basra fields but it would drill very little.

When the British Foreign Office fretted that locking up oil would stoke local nationalist anger, BP-IPC agreed privately to pretend to drill lots of wells, but make them absurdly shallow and place them where, wrote a company manager, “there was no danger of striking oil.”

In the early '60s, the frustrated Iraqi government canceled the BP-Shell-Exxon concession and nationalized the oil fields, but that didn’t solve the problem.

. . . The OPEC cartel, controlled by Saudi Arabia, capped Iraq’s production at a sum equal to Iran’s, though the Iranian reserves are far smaller than Iraq’s. The excuse for this quote equality between Iraq and Iran was to prevent war between them. It didn’t.

To keep Iraq’s Ba’athists from complaining about the limits, Saudi Arabia simply bought off the leaders by funding Saddam’s war against Iran and giving the dictator $7 billion for his “Islamic bomb” program.

So why did Hussein – a secular Ba’athist, no sponsor of Islamist terrorism, possessing no WMDs, contained as a military threat, yet arguably still useful as a counterbalance to Iran – why did Hussein, finally, have to go?

The answer was that Saddam was jerking the oil market up and down. One week, without notice, the man in the moustache suddenly announces he’s going to “support the Palestinian intifada” and cuts off all oil shipments. The result: Worldwide oil prices jump up. The next week, Saddam forgets about the Palestinians and pumps to the maximum allowed under the Oil-for-Food Program. The result: Oil prices suddenly dive-bomb. Up, down, up, down. Saddam was out of control.

“Control is what it’s all about,” Lapham told me. "It’s not about getting the oil, it’s about controlling oil’s price."

Whatever “oil law” the Iraqi Parliament finally approves, whatever military or political settlement finally emerges, whoever ends up owning or running Iraq’s oilfields, I have no doubt the OPEC production cap will continue to be enforced and the global price of petroleum kept stable – and higher than it would be in a free competitive market without cartelization. Because that is in the common interest of both the OPEC nations (most of them, anyway) and the international oil companies. It’s not in your interest or mine, but there you are.

[ralph124c]

@BrainGlutton

I hope you are not really expecting American oil companies’ control of foreign oilfields to translate automatically into lower prices at the pump. Perhaps you are assuming that oil companies, like most manufacturers and most wholesalers, want to buy the raw material as cheaply as they can, and then either pass the savings along to the end consumer, or pocket the difference. Actually, in their industry it is often more profitable for them to buy dear than to buy cheap. As explained by Greg Palast in his book Armed Madhouse:

Maintaining the status quo for the oil companies requires holding down oil production, and Iraq has been assigned that sorry role since it was founded (it has 74 known oil fields and only 15 in production). In 1927, the major oil company execs met at a hotel room in Belgium and signed an agreement: The Anglo-Persian company (now British Petroleum) would pump almost all its oil from Iran; Standard Oil, under the name of the Arabian-American Oil Company (Aramco), would limit almost all its drilling to Saudi Arabia; Anglo-Persian would drill in Iraq’s Kirkuk and Basra fields but it would drill very little.

In the early '60s, the frustrated Iraqi government canceled the BP-Shell-Exxon concession and nationalized the oil fields, but that didn’t solve the problem.

So why did Hussein – a secular Ba’athist, no sponsor of Islamist terrorism, possessing no WMDs, contained as a military threat, yet arguably still useful as a counterbalance to Iran – why did Hussein, finally, have to go?

Whatever “oil law” the Iraqi Parliament finally approves, whatever military or political settlement finally emerges, whoever ends up owning or running Iraq’s oilfields, I have no doubt the OPEC production cap will continue to be enforced and the global price of petroleum kept stable – and higher than it would be in a free competitive market without cartelization. Because that is in the common interest of both the OPEC nations (most of them, anyway) and the international oil companies. It’s not in your interest or mine, but there you are.

Excellent analysis: except to add: IRAQ has vast reserves-and hasn’t been producing in any significant way for 5+years. It would not surprise me to learn that Iraq has more reserves than Saudi Arabia. The obly problem: getting it out: you either pump it to Basra on the Persian Gulf (and load onto tankers), or pump into the pipeline that crosses Syria. Either link is vulnerable to sabotage. The emergence of an Iraq in full production is something OPEC won’t like.

[tomndebb]

@ralph124c

It would not surprise me to learn that Iraq has more reserves than Saudi Arabia.

Wikipedia: Oil reserves:

Saudi Arabia reports it has 262 gigabarrels of proven oil reserves, around a quarter of proven, conventional world oil reserves. . . .
Iran has the world’s second largest reserves of conventional crude oil at 133 gigabarrels. . . .
Iraq has the third largest reserves of conventional oil in the world at 112 gigabarrels. . . .

[BrainGlutton]

So, can we trust Maliki’s assessment that Iran has ceased its meddling?

[elucidator]

Short answer, no. Shorter answer, n. Probably, he is being somewhat diplomatic, he doesn’t want to piss off the Bushiviks, but he doesn’t want to give them any comfort in their campaign to blame everything on Iran. He would probably prefer to blame everything on Al Queda, and, by extension, Sunni resistance, and would prefer America train its attention and firepower thataway, as these represent his real enemies. Iraq. Iraq’s real enemies.