Lobotero’s Info Ink

Bush administration officials knew that a Texas oil company with close ties to President Bush was planning to sign an oil deal with the regional Kurdistan government that ran counter to American policy and undercut Iraq’s central government, a Congressional committee has concluded.

As reported in the NY Times, it appears the the oil men running this country have assisted the awarding of a oil contract to a Texas firm.

The conclusions were based on e-mail messages and other documents that the committee released Wednesday.

United States policy is to warn companies that they incur risks in signing contracts until Iraq passes an oil law and to strengthen Iraq’s central government. The Kurdistan deal, by ceding responsibility for writing contracts directly to a regional government, infuriated Iraqi officials. But State Department officials did nothing to discourage the deal and in some cases appeared to welcome it, the documents show.

The company, Hunt Oil of Dallas, signed the deal with Kurdistan’s semiautonomous government last September. Its chief executive, Ray L. Hunt, a close political ally of President Bush, briefed an advisory board to Mr. Bush on his contacts with Kurdish officials before the deal was signed.

In an e-mail message released by the Congressional committee, a State Department official in Washington, briefed by a colleague about the impending deal with the Kurdistan Regional Government, wrote: “Many thanks for the heads up; getting an American company to sign a deal with the K.R.G. will make big news back here. Please keep us posted.”

Iraq’s oil minister, Hussain al-Shahristani, has condemned the Kurdistan deal as illegal because it was not approved by Iraq’s central government and was struck without an oil law, which has still not been passed.

The encouragement by State Department officials did not end with the signing of the contract on Sept. 8, the documents suggest. Five days later, a State Department official in the southern city of Basra wrote to Ms. Phillips, “I read and heard about with interest your deal with the regional Kurdish government.”

“I don’t know if you are aware of another opportunity,” the official wrote, mentioning an enormous port project and a natural gas project in the south. After a few more lines, the official concluded, “This seems like it would be a good opportunity for Hunt.”

McCain flexes his southern strategy, only this one is south of the border…thinking….how many electoral votes are there in Columbia?  This is just a photo-op to show that he has foreign policy experience.  I ask who paid for this trip?  The US taxpayer or the McCain campaign?

Ok now for the coincidence.  Not a single shot was fired in Wednesday’s rescue mission, which snatched from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, the four foreigners who were its greatest bargaining chips.  The Colombian government with the help of US intel agents have come up with a veryt successful plan to free hostages.  All this on the basic eve of a McCain visit.  How fortunate for the candidate.

My problem with it is that I do NOT believe in coincidences in politics–nothing just happens.  Why am I skeptical?  McCain has been linked to a lobbyist that works for the Colombian government and plus this was all too convenient with the dialog that has been had recently questioning McCain’s actual experience to be president.

This event gives McCain a free ride and a PR boom to his campaign.  Coincidence?  I think not!

HA! HA! HA!  Bush and the Boyz are scrambling around trying to find some form of legacy for this lame duck president.  Now they seem to think that they can find this elusive positive legacy, somewhere in the Middle east.

The US has proposed new talks in a push to reach a deal on the Palestinian statehood before President George W. Bush leaves office in January.

Chief Palestinian negotiator Ahmed Qurie said US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had invited the Israelis and Palestinians to a series of trilateral discussions in New York and Washington.

At a US-sponsored peace conference in Annapolis in November that was attended by the Palestinian Authority chief Mahmoud Abbas and the Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert, the two leaders agreed to calls to halt violence against Palestinians and freeze settlement construction.

However, Israeli officials said this month that they had approved a plan to build 40,000 new homes in al-Quds over the next 10 years, including the annexed Arab eastern sector of the city. Israel also stepped up military operations against the Palestinians in recent months, which has resulted in many deaths and injuries among civilians.

May I suggest that the admin just look elsewhere for some of positive news or better yet let the Egyptians handle the talks, they were instrumental in the Gaza Deal.  They seem to have a much better batting average than the present administration.

If you really want to know, then the answers are a bit complex but I will try to break it down for you.
How to explain the oil price? Why is it so high? Are we running out? Are supplies disrupted, or is the high price a reflection of oil company greed or OPEC greed. Are Chavez and the Saudis conspiring against us?

The dollar is weak because of large trade and budget deficits, the closing of which is beyond American political will. As abuse wears out the US dollar’s reserve currency role, sellers demand more dollars as a hedge against its declining exchange value and ultimate loss of reserve currency status.

In an effort to forestall a serious recession and further crises in derivative instruments, the Federal Reserve is pouring out liquidity that is financing speculation in oil futures contracts. Hedge funds and investment banks are restoring their impaired capital structures with profits made by speculating in highly leveraged oil future contracts, just as real estate speculators flipping contracts pushed up home prices. The oil futures bubble, too, will pop, hopefully before new derivatives are created on the basis of high oil prices.

There are other factors affecting the price of oil. The prospect of an Israeli/US attack on Iran has increased current demand in order to build stocks against disruption. No one knows the consequence of such an ill-conceived act of aggression, and the uncertainty pushes up the price of oil as the entire Middle East could be engulfed in conflagration. However, storage facilities are limited, and the impact on price of larger inventories has a limit.

Perhaps more difficult to understand than the high price of oil are the low US long-term interest rates. US interest rates are actually below the rate of inflation, to say nothing of the imperiled exchange value of the dollar. Economists who assume rational participants in rational markets cannot explain why lenders would indefinitely accept interest rates below the rate of inflation.

Of course, Americans don’t get real inflation numbers from their government and have not since the Consumer Price Index was rigged during the Clinton administration to hold down Social Security payments by denying retirees their full cost of living adjustments. According to statistician John Williams, using the pre-Clinton era measure of the CPI produces a current CPI of about 7.5%.

By pumping out money in an effort to forestall recession and paper over balance sheet problems, the Federal Reserve is driving up commodity and food prices in general. Yet American real incomes are not growing. Even without jobs offshoring, US economic policy has put the bulk of the population on a path to lower living standards.

The crisis that looms for the US is the loss of world currency role. Once the dollar loses that role, the US government will not be able to finance its operations by borrowing abroad, and foreigners will cease to finance the massive US trade deficit. This crisis will eliminate the US as a world power.

And that is the name of that tune!

According to a report issued last week by the human rights organization Amnesty International, the plight of nearly 5 million Iraqis displaced from their homes since the American invasion of 2003 is worsening in nearly every respect.

The report cites the atrocious living conditions in most of Iraq as an additional factor driving people to flee the country. According to Oxfam, in 2007 70 percent of Iraqis had no access to clean drinking water and 43 percent were living on less than a dollar a day. Child malnutrition has increased from 19 percent in 2003 to 28 percent last year.

About half of Iraqis who have fled their homes remain in other parts of Iraq because of the increasing restrictions on leaving the country. Denial of access to refuge abroad is at least in part due to the actions of the Iraqi government, which—along with its American masters—has a vested interest in reducing the number of people fleeing the country.

The report, for example, notes that one factor in the Syrian government’s decision to introduce stricter visa requirements for Iraqis crossing the boarder was “the request of the Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.”

Iraqi refugees in Syria have access to the public health system, but the system itself cannot meet their needs. Iraq families are often required to make a financial contribution for treatment that they cannot afford. In addition, Iraqis in Syria suffer from a much higher incidence of trauma because of their experiences in Iraq and have complex psychological needs that go untreated.

Five hundred thousand Iraqi refugees reside in Jordan (8 percent of the population). Here, if anything, the situation is even worse than in Syria. Access to Jordan is also highly restricted. The report observes that young men in particular are turned back at the border. In May the Jordanian government instituted new visa requirements, forcing Iraqis to apply for visas before they travel to Jordan.

Most Iraqis in Jordan have no legal status. Iraqis with no residence permit must pay US$761 for every year that they are without official status. Further, Iraqis are not permitted to work. As in Syria, Iraqis in Jordan are becoming poorer every week. Some work illegally, the report says, “where they are reported to be vulnerable to low pay, exploitation, and arbitrary dismissals.” Rents are also on the rise, and Iraqi families are now sharing apartments and, in many cases, rooms with others.

In a related report issued last week, the United Nations Committee on Human Rights documented an increase in the number of global refugees and internally displaced persons to 67 million in 2007, up 2.5 million from a year before. About half of these have fled their homes because of natural disasters (or the inability of states to deal with disasters), and the remainder because of armed conflict. Iraq and Somalia saw some of the largest changes between 2006 and 2007 in the numbers of internally displaced persons.

Asked if the surge is working, most American politicians will say yes, but ask that same question to an Iraqi and you will most likely get a different answer.

Back in the waning days of 2001, Pres. Bush labeled some of the enemies of the US as the “Axis Of Evil”, they were Iraq, North Korea and Iran.  We bombed one off the list at a cost of 4000+ and counting lives, the other we talked and negotiated with at a cost of no American lives.  The Axis has been broken leaving only one remaining, Iran.

No one in the Administration wants to talk with the country, but they have no problem thumping their chests about the possibility of an attack.  Let us look at the equation, one cost lives, the other did not.  Which one is more preferable?

Removal from the terror list would pave the way towards lifting many of the most stringent sanctions, and enables Pyongyang to start receiving low-interest loans from the World Bank and other international lending agencies.

While making these pledges, Mr Bush emphasised that moves to take the country from the terror list would not begin for 45 days, and would start only if the North’s claims were verified.

But stop!  Do not keep thumping your chest and calling an Obama proposal as appeasement, when you are doing the same thing.  BTW, diplomacy cost few if any lives.  I would say that is far more preferable than a war that cannot be afforded.

This is one way to make global warming a prime program for funding–looks like an extension of the well used fear card.

Global warming is likely to increase illegal immigration, create humanitarian disasters and destabilize precarious governments and could add to terrorism, all of which could threaten U.S. national security, according to an assessment by U.S. intelligence agencies.

“Logic suggests the conditions exacerbated (by climate change) would increase the pool of potential recruits for terrorism,” said Tom Fingar, deputy director of national intelligence for analysis, who testified before a joint House committee hearing Wednesday.

Climate change alone would not topple governments, but it could worsen problems like poverty, disease, migration, and hunger that could destabilize already vulnerable areas, Fingar told the committee.

But he warned that efforts to reduce global warming by changing energy policies “may affect U.S. national security interests even more than the physical impacts of climate change itself,” he stated.

“The operative word there is ‘may,’ we don’t know,” Fingar said.

“Climate change will provide the conditions that will extend the war on terror,” stated Adm. T. Joseph Lopez, who commanded U.S. and allied peacekeeping forces in Bosnia in 1996.

“Weakened and failing governments, with an already thin margin for survival, foster the conditions for internal conflicts, extremism and movement toward increased authoritarianism and radical ideologies,” the previous report said. “The U.S. will be drawn more frequently into these situations,” stated the report, which drew on 11 retired generals and admirals.

California Republican Rep. Darrell Issa said Congress’ call for the intelligence agencies’ report was “a dangerous diversion of intelligence assets.” He said the issue should be studied by climate scientists, not intelligence agencies.

Republicans on the committee used the hearing to argue for domestic oil drilling and nuclear power to reduce reliance on foreign energy.

Amazing how they trot out this after the calls for more offshore drilling.  I ask, if the proposal had not been made, would this report have been released?

For months, maybe years, there is been a ever increasing crescendo of chest thumping because of something Iran has proposed to do, that being the development of nuclear technology.  Of one side says it is for the approaching need of more energy and the other is determined to say that it is because they, Iran, want nuclear weapons.  Now you be the judge of what side is really telling the truth.  That argument has been played to death.

All I want to do is offer up what , if anything, the Iranians would if they were truly attacked in one way or another.

But increasingly military analysts are warning of severe consequences if the US begins a shooting war with Iran. While Iranian forces are no match for American technology on a conventional battlefield, Iran has shown that it can bite back in unconventional ways.

Iranian networks in Iraq and Afghanistan could imperil US interests there; American forces throughout the Gulf region could be targeted by asymmetric methods and lethal rocket barrages; and Iranian partners across the region – such as Hezbollah in Lebanon – could be mobilized to engage in an anti-US fight.

Iran’s response could also be global, analysts say, but the scale would depend on the scale of the US attack. “One very important issue from a US intelligence perspective, [the Iranian reaction] is probably more unpredictable than the Al Qaeda threat,” says Magnus Ranstorp at the Center for Asymmetric Threat Studies at the Swedish National Defense College in Stockholm.

Analysts say Iran has a number of tools to make good on those threats and take pride in taking on a more powerful enemy. “This is not something they are shying away from,” says Alex Vatanka, a Middle East security analyst at Jane’s Information Group in Washington.

“They say: ‘Conventional warfare is not something we can win against the US, but we have other assets in the toolbox,’ ” says Mr. Vatanka, noting that the IRGC commander appointed last fall has been “marketed as this genius behind asymmetric warfare doctrine.”

we can only hope that none of this is academic and that sanity will be returned to the international scene, but in case it does not, then be prepared for whatver will happen.  Peace!  Out!

Mia Farrow, the actress and activist, has asked Blackwater, the US private security company active in Iraq, for help in Darfur after becoming frustrated by the stalled deployment of a United Nations peacekeeping force.

Ms Farrow said she had approached Erik Prince, founder and owner of Blackwater, to discuss whether a military role was either feasible or desirable.

She acknowledged that many people might have reservations about Blackwater being involved in Darfur - the company’s men were involved in the fatal shooting of 17 Iraqi civilians last September - but said the threat of violence to refugees meant all options had to be explored.

Mr Prince hasraised the possibility of a role in Darfur for security companies.

Ms Farrow, who represents Dream for Darfur, a human rights group, and other lobbyists this week lambasted the UN Security Council for its “shameful” failure to halt killings in the Sudanese province.

The activists, who claim China has used the threat of its Security Council veto to prevent tough sanctions on its ally, urged the UN to stand up to Khartoum in the deployment of a 26,000- strong force. They said the Sudanese government had abused its right to approve contingents in an effort to ensure only relatively poorly trained and equipped African troops were assigned.

Nearly four decades after the four biggest Western oil companies were expelled from Iraq by Saddam Hussein, they are negotiating their return. By the end of the month, Royal Dutch Shell, BP, Exxon Mobil and Total will sign agreements with the Baghdad government, Iraq’s first with big Western oil firms since the US-led invasion in 2003.

The deals are for repair and technical support in some of the country’s largest oilfields, the Oil Ministry in Baghdad said yesterday. The return of “Big Oil” will add to the suspicions of those in the Middle East who claimed that the overthrow of Saddam was secretly driven by the West’s desire to gain control of Iraq’s oil. It will also be greeted with dismay by many Iraqis who fear losing control of their vast oil reserves.

But they mean that the four oil companies, which originally formed the Iraq Petroleum Company to exploit Iraqi oil from the 1920s until the industry’s nationalisation in 1972, will be well-placed to bid for contracts for the long-term development of these fields. The oilfields affected are some of the largest in Iraq, from Kirkuk in the north to Rumaila, on the border with Kuwait. Although there is oil in northern Iraq, most of the reserves are close to Basra, in the far south.

The high price of oil means that Iraq is not under immediate pressure to maximise its oil revenues. The Iraqi parliament has suspected anything which looks like giving foreign companies ownership of Iraq’s oil through a production sharing agreement.

The nationalisation of Iraq’s oil is one the few acts of Saddam Hussein’s long years in power which is still highly popular, and Iraqi members of parliament are fearful of anything that looks like back-door privatisation in the interests of foreigners.

This is something that should been a no brainer–they should have nationalized the industry immediately and that would avoid the possibility of the companies gaining complete control of their fields.  Slowly, but slowly these companies are reasserting their control–good for the companies—but bad for Iraq.