America can't make Iraq's black gold flow

Oil is slippery stuff, but not as slippery as the figures now being peddled by Iraq's American occupiers. Up around Kirkuk, the authorities are keeping the sabotage figures secret - because they can't stop their pipelines to Turkey blowing up.

And down in Baghdad, where the men who produce Iraq's oil production figures are beginning to look like the occupants of Plato's cave - drawing conclusions from shadows on their wall - the statistics are being cooked.

Paul Bremer, the United States' proconsul who wears combat boots, 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.

This they did, for example, on August 18. But the same Turkish pipeline has been hit before and since. It was blown again on September 17 - I've met an oil executive who witnessed the explosion - and four times again the following day. American patrols and helicopters now move along the pipeline but long sections are indefensible.

European oilmen in Baghdad realise 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. "They told me in June that there would be no oil exports from the north," one of them said to me this week.

"They knew it was going to be sabotaged - and it had obviously been planned long before the invasion in March."

Early in their occupation, the US took the quiet - and unwise - decision to rehire many Ba'athist oil technocrats, which means that a large proportion of ministry officials are still ambivalent towards the US.

(more)

http://www.itechnology.co.za/index.php?click_id=123&art_id=qw1065949746290O425&set_id=1

i hope they all get sent back to the minors before they get us all killed besides BROKE

peace

couldn't find oil in Texas either.

xx

n/t

what if they want to keep Iraq's oil in the ground? Won't that make oil from SA that much more valuable? Won't prices remain high as long as that oil can't come to market?

Just a thought........