tony mitra
09-20-2007, 08:58 AM
This is a copy of the article by NY Times Op-Ed Columnist and Economist, Mr. Paul Krugman
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2006/04/02/opinion/ts-krugman-190.jpg
http://select.nytimes.com/2007/09/14/opinion/14krugman.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: September 14, 2007
To understand what’s really happening in Iraq, follow the oil money, which already knows that the surge has failed.
Back in January, announcing his plan to send more troops to Iraq, President Bush declared that “America will hold the Iraqi government to the benchmarks it has announced.”
Near the top of his list was the promise that “to give every Iraqi citizen a stake in the country’s economy, Iraq will pass legislation to share oil revenues among all Iraqis.”
There was a reason he placed such importance on oil: oil is pretty much the only thing Iraq has going for it. Two-thirds of Iraq’s G.D.P. and almost all its government revenue come from the oil sector. Without an agreed system for sharing oil revenues, there is no Iraq, just a collection of armed gangs fighting for control of resources.
Well, the legislation Mr. Bush promised never materialized, and on Wednesday attempts to arrive at a compromise oil law collapsed.
What’s particularly revealing is the cause of the breakdown. Last month the provincial government in Kurdistan, defying the central government, passed its own oil law; last week a Kurdish Web site announced that the provincial government had signed a production-sharing deal with the Hunt Oil Company of Dallas, and that seems to have been the last straw.
Now here’s the thing: Ray L. Hunt, the chief executive and president of Hunt Oil, is a close political ally of Mr. Bush. More than that, Mr. Hunt is a member of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, a key oversight body.
Some commentators have expressed surprise at the fact that a businessman with very close ties to the White House is undermining U.S. policy. But that isn’t all that surprising, given this administration’s history. Remember, Halliburton was still signing business deals with Iran years after Mr. Bush declared Iran a member of the “axis of evil.”
No, what’s interesting about this deal is the fact that Mr. Hunt, thanks to his policy position, is presumably as well-informed about the actual state of affairs in Iraq as anyone in the business world can be. By putting his money into a deal with the Kurds, despite Baghdad’s disapproval, he’s essentially betting that the Iraqi government — which hasn’t met a single one of the major benchmarks Mr. Bush laid out in January — won’t get its act together. Indeed, he’s effectively betting against the survival of Iraq as a nation in any meaningful sense of the term.
The smart money, then, knows that the surge has failed, that the war is lost, and that Iraq is going the way of Yugoslavia. And I suspect that most people in the Bush administration — maybe even Mr. Bush himself — know this, too.
After all, if the administration had any real hope of retrieving the situation in Iraq, officials would be making an all-out effort to get the government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki to start delivering on some of those benchmarks, perhaps using the threat that Congress would cut off funds otherwise. Instead, the Bushies are making excuses, minimizing Iraqi failures, moving goal posts and, in general, giving the Maliki government no incentive to do anything differently.
And for that matter, if the administration had any real intention of turning public opinion around, as opposed to merely shoring up the base enough to keep Republican members of Congress on board, it would have sent Gen. David Petraeus, the top military commander in Iraq, to as many news media outlets as possible — not granted an exclusive appearance to Fox News on Monday night.
All in all, Mr. Bush’s actions have not been those of a leader seriously trying to win a war. They have, however, been what you’d expect from a man whose plan is to keep up appearances for the next 16 months, never mind the cost in lives and money, then shift the blame for failure onto his successor.
In fact, that’s my interpretation of something that startled many people: Mr. Bush’s decision last month, after spending years denying that the Iraq war had anything in common with Vietnam, to suddenly embrace the parallel.
Here’s how I see it: At this point, Mr. Bush is looking forward to replaying the political aftermath of Vietnam, in which the right wing eventually achieved a rewriting of history that would have made George Orwell proud, convincing millions of Americans that our soldiers had victory in their grasp but were stabbed in the back by the peaceniks back home.
What all this means is that the next president, even as he or she tries to extricate us from Iraq — and prevent the country’s breakup from turning into a regional war — will have to deal with constant sniping from the people who lied us into an unnecessary war, then lost the war they started, but will never, ever, take responsibility for their failures.
---------------------------
Mr. Krugman, I understand, has started a blog, though I do not know the address. It might be an idea to keep a tab on what he writes. I read his book "The Great Unraveling", and found it very intriguing.[hr]Well, I found the blog. It is at (link) (http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/), and could not resist copying a few of the posts here.
Did I say Paul Krugman is an astute observer, apart from being an economist?
Gregory Kasza, Bloomington, Ind.: Does one have to be an insider to see that the U.S. has decided to abandon the Maliki government? Instead of striving to put the government’s security forces in charge of matters in Anbar Province, we are arming and legitimizing outlaw Sunni militias, which are born of the old regime and stalwart enemies of the government in Baghdad. Where does this leave the prospect for a political solution by which we would hand over power in Iraq to a central government worthy of the name? By its actions in Anbar, our government has committed itself to the partition of Iraq.
Paul Krugman: Yes indeed. The sheik who was just assassinated was, by all accounts, basically setting himself up as a local warlord, with U.S. support. According to Marc Lynch of G.W.U., a regional expert whose blog — along with Juan Cole’s — is one of the places I go to for some sense of what the Middle East is thinking, the Anbar Salvation Council didn’t blame al Qaeda for the murder — they accused the Maliki government of being responsible.
Mark O’Malley, Boston, Mass.: I read your column devotedly and usually think that you are spot on. However, I disagree that the Bush administration’s goal is simply to muddle through and pass the blame for failure in Iraq. Instead, I think its goal is to maintain a military presence in Iraq to enforce deals with the U.S. oil companies, such as Hunt’s firm that have bankrolled many politicians’ careers. If Iraq is to Balkanize, then the U.S. needs a presence in each of the offshoot states: Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish. The Sunni Arabs have the least oil. But they do have the potential to sabotage pipelines or the other states, so they must be co-opted. This is the real Bush agenda. The surge and the Maliki government are just buying time for the U.S. to try to cement ties with tribal and factional leaders in each of the likely entities. And don’t think that this agenda will end when Bush moves out of the White House. The oil industry has already purchased the loyalty of Giuliani, and is working on Romney and Clinton. The next government will continue to offer a shifting set of reasons for the U.S. presence in Iraq, but oil money will insure that the U.S. presence continues indefinitely.
Paul Krugman: I think you’re giving these guys too much credit. If they had been serious about seizing the oil fields, they wouldn’t have made so much of a mess.
John Muka, Trenton, N.J.: I always enjoy reading your column and applaud the great work you do getting us all closer to the truth. It seems apparent to even someone with no expertise in the area that the major oil companies would much prefer an Iraq broken into three pieces, instead of one unified country. Isn’t their biggest fear that there the oil assets would remain nationalized and completely under the control of the Iraqi government? Their biggest shock was in 1972, when this happened in the first place. Much better to be able to deal with the Kurds, the Sunnis and the Shiites separately. And this is, in fact, where everything the United States has done and not done is leading. We are trying to force their parliament to sign long term production-sharing agreements that are clearly not in the interests of the Iraqis. I would appreciate it much if you could shed more light on this from your greater expertise in this area.
Paul Krugman: As per earlier comment, I think you’re giving too much credit. I’ve even been told that the major oil companies were (a) skeptical about the war (b) opposed to administration plans to privatize Iraq’s oil fields, basically because the oil companies — though not the administration — were smart enough to know how much trouble they would face from insurgents.
---------
Well, thats all for now. You might like to bookmark that blog, and visit it time to time, or ask Mr. Krugman a question or two.
Cheers.
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2006/04/02/opinion/ts-krugman-190.jpg
http://select.nytimes.com/2007/09/14/opinion/14krugman.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: September 14, 2007
To understand what’s really happening in Iraq, follow the oil money, which already knows that the surge has failed.
Back in January, announcing his plan to send more troops to Iraq, President Bush declared that “America will hold the Iraqi government to the benchmarks it has announced.”
Near the top of his list was the promise that “to give every Iraqi citizen a stake in the country’s economy, Iraq will pass legislation to share oil revenues among all Iraqis.”
There was a reason he placed such importance on oil: oil is pretty much the only thing Iraq has going for it. Two-thirds of Iraq’s G.D.P. and almost all its government revenue come from the oil sector. Without an agreed system for sharing oil revenues, there is no Iraq, just a collection of armed gangs fighting for control of resources.
Well, the legislation Mr. Bush promised never materialized, and on Wednesday attempts to arrive at a compromise oil law collapsed.
What’s particularly revealing is the cause of the breakdown. Last month the provincial government in Kurdistan, defying the central government, passed its own oil law; last week a Kurdish Web site announced that the provincial government had signed a production-sharing deal with the Hunt Oil Company of Dallas, and that seems to have been the last straw.
Now here’s the thing: Ray L. Hunt, the chief executive and president of Hunt Oil, is a close political ally of Mr. Bush. More than that, Mr. Hunt is a member of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, a key oversight body.
Some commentators have expressed surprise at the fact that a businessman with very close ties to the White House is undermining U.S. policy. But that isn’t all that surprising, given this administration’s history. Remember, Halliburton was still signing business deals with Iran years after Mr. Bush declared Iran a member of the “axis of evil.”
No, what’s interesting about this deal is the fact that Mr. Hunt, thanks to his policy position, is presumably as well-informed about the actual state of affairs in Iraq as anyone in the business world can be. By putting his money into a deal with the Kurds, despite Baghdad’s disapproval, he’s essentially betting that the Iraqi government — which hasn’t met a single one of the major benchmarks Mr. Bush laid out in January — won’t get its act together. Indeed, he’s effectively betting against the survival of Iraq as a nation in any meaningful sense of the term.
The smart money, then, knows that the surge has failed, that the war is lost, and that Iraq is going the way of Yugoslavia. And I suspect that most people in the Bush administration — maybe even Mr. Bush himself — know this, too.
After all, if the administration had any real hope of retrieving the situation in Iraq, officials would be making an all-out effort to get the government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki to start delivering on some of those benchmarks, perhaps using the threat that Congress would cut off funds otherwise. Instead, the Bushies are making excuses, minimizing Iraqi failures, moving goal posts and, in general, giving the Maliki government no incentive to do anything differently.
And for that matter, if the administration had any real intention of turning public opinion around, as opposed to merely shoring up the base enough to keep Republican members of Congress on board, it would have sent Gen. David Petraeus, the top military commander in Iraq, to as many news media outlets as possible — not granted an exclusive appearance to Fox News on Monday night.
All in all, Mr. Bush’s actions have not been those of a leader seriously trying to win a war. They have, however, been what you’d expect from a man whose plan is to keep up appearances for the next 16 months, never mind the cost in lives and money, then shift the blame for failure onto his successor.
In fact, that’s my interpretation of something that startled many people: Mr. Bush’s decision last month, after spending years denying that the Iraq war had anything in common with Vietnam, to suddenly embrace the parallel.
Here’s how I see it: At this point, Mr. Bush is looking forward to replaying the political aftermath of Vietnam, in which the right wing eventually achieved a rewriting of history that would have made George Orwell proud, convincing millions of Americans that our soldiers had victory in their grasp but were stabbed in the back by the peaceniks back home.
What all this means is that the next president, even as he or she tries to extricate us from Iraq — and prevent the country’s breakup from turning into a regional war — will have to deal with constant sniping from the people who lied us into an unnecessary war, then lost the war they started, but will never, ever, take responsibility for their failures.
---------------------------
Mr. Krugman, I understand, has started a blog, though I do not know the address. It might be an idea to keep a tab on what he writes. I read his book "The Great Unraveling", and found it very intriguing.[hr]Well, I found the blog. It is at (link) (http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/), and could not resist copying a few of the posts here.
Did I say Paul Krugman is an astute observer, apart from being an economist?
Gregory Kasza, Bloomington, Ind.: Does one have to be an insider to see that the U.S. has decided to abandon the Maliki government? Instead of striving to put the government’s security forces in charge of matters in Anbar Province, we are arming and legitimizing outlaw Sunni militias, which are born of the old regime and stalwart enemies of the government in Baghdad. Where does this leave the prospect for a political solution by which we would hand over power in Iraq to a central government worthy of the name? By its actions in Anbar, our government has committed itself to the partition of Iraq.
Paul Krugman: Yes indeed. The sheik who was just assassinated was, by all accounts, basically setting himself up as a local warlord, with U.S. support. According to Marc Lynch of G.W.U., a regional expert whose blog — along with Juan Cole’s — is one of the places I go to for some sense of what the Middle East is thinking, the Anbar Salvation Council didn’t blame al Qaeda for the murder — they accused the Maliki government of being responsible.
Mark O’Malley, Boston, Mass.: I read your column devotedly and usually think that you are spot on. However, I disagree that the Bush administration’s goal is simply to muddle through and pass the blame for failure in Iraq. Instead, I think its goal is to maintain a military presence in Iraq to enforce deals with the U.S. oil companies, such as Hunt’s firm that have bankrolled many politicians’ careers. If Iraq is to Balkanize, then the U.S. needs a presence in each of the offshoot states: Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish. The Sunni Arabs have the least oil. But they do have the potential to sabotage pipelines or the other states, so they must be co-opted. This is the real Bush agenda. The surge and the Maliki government are just buying time for the U.S. to try to cement ties with tribal and factional leaders in each of the likely entities. And don’t think that this agenda will end when Bush moves out of the White House. The oil industry has already purchased the loyalty of Giuliani, and is working on Romney and Clinton. The next government will continue to offer a shifting set of reasons for the U.S. presence in Iraq, but oil money will insure that the U.S. presence continues indefinitely.
Paul Krugman: I think you’re giving these guys too much credit. If they had been serious about seizing the oil fields, they wouldn’t have made so much of a mess.
John Muka, Trenton, N.J.: I always enjoy reading your column and applaud the great work you do getting us all closer to the truth. It seems apparent to even someone with no expertise in the area that the major oil companies would much prefer an Iraq broken into three pieces, instead of one unified country. Isn’t their biggest fear that there the oil assets would remain nationalized and completely under the control of the Iraqi government? Their biggest shock was in 1972, when this happened in the first place. Much better to be able to deal with the Kurds, the Sunnis and the Shiites separately. And this is, in fact, where everything the United States has done and not done is leading. We are trying to force their parliament to sign long term production-sharing agreements that are clearly not in the interests of the Iraqis. I would appreciate it much if you could shed more light on this from your greater expertise in this area.
Paul Krugman: As per earlier comment, I think you’re giving too much credit. I’ve even been told that the major oil companies were (a) skeptical about the war (b) opposed to administration plans to privatize Iraq’s oil fields, basically because the oil companies — though not the administration — were smart enough to know how much trouble they would face from insurgents.
---------
Well, thats all for now. You might like to bookmark that blog, and visit it time to time, or ask Mr. Krugman a question or two.
Cheers.