Monday, September 26, 2005
Saddam's slow Revenge
The secret history of U.S. mistakes, misjudgments and intelligence failures that let the Iraqi dictator and his allies launch an insurgency now ripping Iraq apart
By Joe Klein
Finished reading The Sunday Times 25 September 2005 version of this Time article.
Is there another phrase for I told you so? Right from the beginning of this website - which was never a war blog - I have written, again and again, the insurgency was possible because of the stashes of arms and money plus the outside help. Now we learn that even the tyrant would be surprised to know how effective it has been. But we shake our heads, eyes shut, when we learn that the man responsible for organising the insurgency, and for the deaths of Iraqis as well as occupation forces,is living in Damascus and has had a friendly visit from a CIA man to ask him if he would like to chat about how to stop the insurgency.
We are enured to the incompetence and lack of foresight of both the U.S. and British administrations, despite the slow roll of revelations which both comfort the anti-war lobby and put the pro-war faction (including me) in a similar position to Hitchens, chewing right though ones finger to the bone, thinking it was a pencil.
::
POURING OIL ON TROUBLED WATERS
Postman Pat
(sorry for silly Engleeesh joke) sent me his latest post mentioning statements made by Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld at different (Senate/Congressional?) Hearings on the same day 27, March 2003, on how to pay for the war, in response to my mentioning the AltNet article, The Failed War for Oil.
He also sent the eia country analysis brief for Iraq, updated June 2005, which is a must for all those following Iraq.
I picked up on this, under 'refining' :
According to former Oil Minister Issam Chalabi, Iraqi refineries currently are operating at only 50 percent-75 percent of capacity, forcing the country to import around 200,000 bbl/d of refined products, at a cost of $200-$250 million per month. This does not include the additional cost of steep government subsidies on the consumer price of gasoline, which runs at under 10 cents per gallon. It is estimated that, overall, direct and indirect oil subsidies cost Iraq $8 billion per year. Subsidies also encourage illegal smuggling of oil out of Iraq, and exacerbate shortages within the country. In order to reduce Iraq's need for oil product imports, significant investment will be needed to perform refinery upgrades (Iraq had identified dozens of such projects prior to the war) and possibly to build new refineries.
which leads me to a flight of fancy: we (UK) paying $7 a gallon, you (US) $2-3 dollars, who can't afford to drive around willy-nilly, just for the hell of it, tank up on subsidised 10c. a gallon and drive around Baghdad in our 4x4s...but the image got stuck on the SUVs flying high up into the air over those newly imported Iranian bobs, or of us being kidnapped and later ceremonially decapitated.
Anyone interested in following my on-going gripe about the disparity between US and UK domestic vehicle fule retail prices cn follow some of the posts at Norfolkskies.
¶ Monday, September 26, 2005
