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January 26, 2003
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| KARIM SAHIB / AFP, 2002 |
| An Iraqi worker's hand tends to pipe at the Iraqi-Turkish pipeline in Kirkuk, Iraq. Oil production capacity has sharply declined in recent years, from 3.5 (million barrels of oil a day before the Iran-Iraq war to a low of 1.2 million barrels a day. Recently, production has been on the increase. |
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MUDDY MIX: OIL, POLITICS
Critics say Bush's interest in Iraq has more to do with its vast petroleum reserves than with its arsenal.
Iraq has the world's second-largest proven oil reserves.
The United States has the world's greatest thirst for oil.
And that, say some critics, is the true driving force behind President Bush's Iraq policy.
Iraq has reserves of 113 billion barrels — about 11 percent of the world's supply. Experts believe that there may be that much again still undiscovered in the country, enough to rival Saudi Arabia, the world's largest oil repository.
Oil politics has played a major role in the area since before Iraq's creation following World War I. Before the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, British-controlled Turkish Petroleum Company held oil concessions in Mosul, the Kurdish area in what is now northern Iraq.
In a series of agreements and trade-offs after the war, Turkish Petroleum became Iraq Petroleum Company (IPC), still controlled by the British and holding the concession for Mosul oil. Turkey and France, another player in the region, got pieces of Iraq Petroleum and Iraq got the Mosul region — and its Kurdish populace — as a province.
In 1961 Iraq took over 99.5 percent of the IPC's area, leaving it to operate only in the area it was currently drilling. By 1972, Iraq had completely nationalized the IPC and formed the Iraq National Oil Company to control the resource.
Today, critics say that it is no coincidence that the U.S. and Britain, home to the world's four largest oil companies, are the staunchest foes of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. And it is no coincidence that Russia, France and China were less eager for action against Saddam.
Russia's largest oil company, Lukoil, signed a 23-year, $3.5 billion deal with Iraq five years ago to rehabilitate the country's giant West Qurnah oil fields.
France had an even larger deal as its state-owned TotalFinaElf company was negotiating to explore the Majnoon field, which has estimated reserves of 20 billion to 30 billion barrels.
And China National Petroleum has a contract to develop part of the Rumaylah area, a production area substantially damaged during the 1991 Persian Gulf War.
Skeptics also question the administration's reported strategy of immediately moving to protect oil fields, so that Saddam cannot destroy them, in the event of a war. The administration says that oil revenue will be desperately needed to rebuild the country. Skeptics say the fields are being protected for outside oil interests.
Decaying industry
Still, the oil issues are not cut and dried. Iraq's oil industry has deteriorated drastically after two decades of strife. Where its capacity before the Iran-Iraq war was 3.5 million barrels of oil a day, it reached a low of perhaps 1.2 million. It might take $5 billion and three years to restore production to pre-war levels. To reach 6 billion barrels a day within 10 years could cost $50 billion. Foreign oil companies might not gamble that much on an unstable, post-war Iraq.
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TO LEARN MORE |
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Library of Congress, Portals to the World: Links to electronic resources. www.loc.gov/rr/international/amed/iraq/iraq.html
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United Nations disarmament news: Leads searcher into information on global terrorism and weapons bans and stockpiling. disarmament.un.org
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MidEastWeb: A site created by Arabs, Jews and others interested in issues of coexistence all over the Middle East. Provides history, maps and articles in Arabic, English and Hebrew. www.mideastweb.org
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Iraqi expatriates' views: A site created by Washington, D.C.-based group of expatriates promoting human rights in Iraq. www.iraqfoundation.org
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Iraq's United Nations missions site: History, facts, maps, Iraqi poetry and a link to the Iraqi News Agency. www.iraqi-mission.org
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State Department site: Contains issues leading to conflict between the U.S. and Iraq from the U.S. point of view. www.state.gov/p/nea/ci/c3212.htm
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Peace site: Sponsored by Voices in the Wilderness, a Chicago-based group that has sent small groups into Iraq to promote peace and report on human-rights conditions. www.iraqpeaceteam.org
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AL-QAIDA LINK?
U.S. tries to connect Saddam, bin Laden but administration offers scant evidence.
In marshaling support for war against Iraq, President Bush has increasingly linked Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden as twin menaces to the United States and democracy.
Rumors surfaced soon after the Sept. 11 attacks that Saddam and the elusive al-Qaida leader had joined forces against their common enemy, America.
But such an alliance is seen by many — including some military officers, intelligence professionals and diplomats in Bush's administration — as unlikely. The radical Islamists in al-Qaida hate Saddam's secular regime, they point out, and Saddam despises Islamist mullahs, whom he has had killed in large numbers or deported to Iran.
The two would hardly have the same vision for the future of Iraq or Islam, they say.
CONNECTIONS CLAIMED
In trying to convince Americans that Saddam poses an imminent threat to the U.S., Bush said last fall that officials "know that Iraq and al-Qaida have had high-level contacts that go back a decade."
Some al-Qaida leaders fled Afghanistan and went to Iraq, he said, including one "very senior al-Qaida leader" who received medical treatment in Baghdad. Iraq has trained al-Qaida members "in bomb making, poisons and deadly gases," Bush said.
Should Iraq decide to provide a biological or chemical weapon to terrorists, Bush added, it would allow Iraq "to attack America without leaving any fingerprints."
A few days later Bush said, "This is a man who we know has had connections with al-Qaida. This is a man who...would like to use al-Qaida as a forward army."
At about the same time, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said the U.S. government has "bulletproof" evidence of links between Iraq and al-Qaida, and "solid evidence" that members of the terrorist network maintain a presence in Iraq.
NO PROOF OFFERED
But Bush's statements remain unsub-stantiated. And sources said Rumsfeld's was based, in part, on intercepted telephone calls made by an al-Qaida member, passing through Baghdad, to family or friends. The calls apparently showed no evidence the man was working with the Iraqi government or planning any terrorist activity there.
As for fingerprints, biological or chemical weapons do leave identifying marks. If evidence showed a biological or chemical attack originated in Baghdad, critics of the president's war talk say, Saddam knows retribution against him would be swift and complete.
Rumsfeld also has suggested that al-Qaida members fleeing Afghanistan took refuge in Iraq. That's partly true — about 150 members of Ansar al-Islam, a militant Islamic group, took refuge in Kurdish-controlled areas of northern Iraq. But the area is not under Saddam's control.
One of the earliest reports linking al-Qaida and Iraq concerned a purported meeting between Mohamed Atta, the leader of the Sept. 11 attacks, and an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague in 2000. That story has been disputed, even within the administration.
Even without direct links to al-Qaida, Iraq can legitimately be accused of harboring some Islamic extremists. The most notorious, Abu Nidal, a Palestinian renegade once branded the world's most dangerous terrorist by the State Department, was found shot to death in August in Baghdad. Nidal's followers are blamed for killing 300 people and wounding 650 in 20 countries.
Another, Ramzi Yousef, convicted of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing that killed six people, entered the U.S. on an Iraqi passport and is believed by some American officials to be an Iraqi intelligence agent.
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