Thread: Archive Latest News - Think Tank - 16/08/07 - 03/11/07

Chevron, Total Submit Study On Iraq s Majnoon Devt - Oil Min

Oil giants Total SA (TOT) and Chevron Corp. (CVX) have jointly submitted to the Iraqi Oil Ministry a study on the development of one of Iraq's biggest oil fields, Majnoon, in the south of the country, a ministry statement said Tuesday.

"Total and Chevron jointly prepared studies about Majnoon oil field and were submitted to the ministry on the form of a memorandum of understanding," said the statement, a copy of which was obtained by Dow Jones Newswires.

"The ministry has set up a committee headed by Director General of the South Oil Company, Abdul Jabbar Lauby, to study the possibility of signing a memorandum of understanding with the two companies," the statement said.

However, if a memorandum of understanding is signed with these two companies that doesn't imply they have been promised the right to develop the field, the statement noted.

The ministry statement said the two companies, however, wouldn't be given preferential treatment when the Oil Ministry issues tenders to develop Majnoon and other oil fields. "The ministry will offer Iraqi oil fields for investment through tenders and contracts would be awarded to international companies on the basis of competition and it wouldn't give any preferential treatment to any company."

Total and Chevron have recently started preparatory work on the development of hydrocarbons from Majnoon, Iraq's fourth biggest oil field, which sits near the border with Iran, Dow Jones Newswires reported in August.

The two companies signed an agreement last year over Majnoon which has estimated total reserves in place of 12 billion barrels. Majnoon has currently a daily production capacity of around 50,000 barrels a day.

Foreign oil companies certainly won't begin working in Iraq until security improves in the country, but many will look to quickly finalize deals once the Iraqi government announces tenders to develop oil fields.

Iraq's Oil Minister Hussein al-Shahristani said earlier this month that his ministry could soon announce new tenders to develop oil fields in southern Iraq without waiting for the issuance of the long-delayed oil and gas law.

The Iraqi parliament hasn't started to debate the controversial law because of differences between the Kurds and the central government in Baghdad on some provisions of the draft document.

RIGZONE - Chevron, Total Submit Study on Iraq's Majnoon Development

Demand for dollar up, exchange rate down in daily auction

Demand for the dollar was higher in the Iraqi Central Bank’s auction on Tuesday, reaching $93.970 million compared with $87.270 million on Monday.

In its daily statement the bank said it had covered all bids, including $5.200 million in cash and $88.770 in foreign transfers, at an exchange rate of 1,234 dinars per dollar, one tick lower than yesterday.

The 14 banks that participated in Tuesday's session offered to sell one million dollars, which the bank bought all at an exchange rate of 1232 dinars per dollar.

In statements to the independent news agency Voices of Iraq (VOI), Ali al-Yasseri, a trader, said the decline in the exchange rate after stability has encouraged traders to send their remittances.

The Iraqi Central Bank runs a daily auction from Sunday to Thursday.

Demand for dollar up, exchange rate down in daily auction | Iraq Updates

Choppers shoot to protect Iraq oil, power

The Iraqi Defense Ministry has issued a shoot-to-kill order to helicopter gunners guarding Iraq's vulnerable oil and power infrastructure.

Azzaman reports the Ministry of Defense has brought in armed helicopters, possibly Russian, to protect the power and fuel supply to Baghdad.

Iraq as a whole suffers from drought of fuels and electricity, and Baghdad is especially targeted by insurgents looking to choke the country's capital.
The newspaper reports pilots are to shoot at anyone approaching the oil pipelines or power lines and towers.

Choppers shoot to protect Iraq oil, power | Iraq Updates

We need ‘Maliki’s awakening’ first

The decision by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to set up an ‘awakening council’ in the province of Nineveh similar to the one led by Abdul Sattar Abu Risha in Anbar is yet another evidence of a military and security fiasco.

Maliki is pressing ahead with his ‘awakening councils’ and recently moved to set up one in the Province of Nineveh.

These councils show, if anything, the government is powerless or almost nonexistent, hence its total reliance on tribal militias to contain violence and fight al-Qaeda which has claimed responsibility for the killing of Abu Risha last week.

The tribal chieftain to save Nineveh after the murder of Anbar’s ‘savoir’ cannot play the role of Abu Risha due to the distinct demographic differences that characterize Nineveh.

In Nineveh, there is a complex network of tribes whose disparate composition makes it almost impossible to bring them together. The Arab tribes are not united, so are the Kurdish ones. Turkmen in the Province trust neither the Kurds nor the Arabs.

And who are these tribesmen going to fight? The awakening councils of Anbar, Baghdad and Diyala have not quelled the violence. And the new one in Nineveh will not succeed too because, as the mighty U.S. military has found, the battle against an invisible enemy like al-Qaeda is rather difficult to win.

Does the government realize that by arming tribesmen it is aggravating one of Iraq’s most intractable problems, namely the presence of unruly militias. These ‘awakening councils’ are a prototype of the militia groups blamed for much of the violence in the country.

There is no good or bad militia. It may eventually be harder to contain tribal militia than the factional militia which the government and U.S. troops have failed to disarm.

The solution lies with Maliki himself. He is in need of spearheading an ‘awakening’ among his own ranks and his own political faction.

After months of fighting and the ‘surge’ in U.S. troop numbers, Baghdad is still suffering as a result of the sectarian militia groups which Maliki’s government supports. These militiamen are still attacking innocent people, bombing residential areas and looting places of worship.

Under Maliki the country is in need of scores of ‘awakening councils’ in order to purge his own government of corruption, sectarianism, favoritism and fraud. The country needs a special ‘awakening council’ to regain constitutional legitimacy U.S. tanks and security companies violate on a daily basis.

We need ‘Maliki’s awakening’ first | Iraq Updates

New round of U.S.-Iranian talks in Baghdad – official

Deputy Foreign Ministry for Political Planning and Bilateral Relations Labied Abawi said on Tuesday that the Iraqi government is preparing to host a new round of talks between U.S. and Iranian officials.

“The date of the meeting has not yet been fixed and the Iraqi government is holding continued talks with the two sides set to host the meeting,” Abawi told the independent news agency Voices of Iraq (VOI).

“Such talks and negotiations require plenty of time as there are several issues that need to be discussed,” he added.

“The Iraqi government is satisfied as both sides voiced readiness to meet again in Baghdad and hold talks on Iraq, which will inevitably affect the security and stability in Iraq,” the Iraqi official explained.

“This will be the fourth of its kind between the U.S. and Iranian officials. The last meeting was on August 6, 2007, at the Iraqi government’s headquarters in the fortified green zone in central Baghdad.
The first U.S.-Iranian meeting was held on May 28, 2007.

New round of U.S.-Iranian talks in Baghdad – official | Iraq Updates

US officials have little control over contractors

American officials scrambled to head off a potential crisis on Monday after irate Iraqi authorities cancelled the licence of controversial US security company Blackwater USA, whose guards were accused of shooting to death 10 people while guarding a US State Department motorcade.

The swift response to Sunday's deaths marked Iraq's boldest step to assert itself against foreign security contractors who have long been accused of racing through Baghdad's streets and firing without restraint at anyone they see as a threat. It also cast a focus on the continued lack of control by American officials over heavily armed private security contractors, at least 20,000 of whom supplement the US-led military forces that invaded Iraq in March 2003.

The ouster of all Blackwater guards here could severely cripple security arrangements for US diplomats and other workers who rely on private guards to protect them. But several contractors predicted on Monday it was doubtful that the Iraqi government would carry through on the threat to expel Blackwater.

"For all intents and purposes they belong to the [US] Department of State," one contractor said of Blackwater, whose employees themselves often have been the victims of violence, including a 2004 incident in Fallujah when four guards were killed and mutilated.

While many details of Sunday's incident remain in dispute, the gravity of the situation was apparent in the reaction of top-level officials in Washington, DC, and Baghdad. US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice phoned Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Al Maliki on Monday night to express regret over the shootings involving the North Carolina-based company that provides most of the security for US embassy personnel travelling in Iraq.

A US embassy spokeswoman stressed that officials wanted to get to the bottom of the incident. "We take this very seriously and we are launching a full investigation in cooperation with the Iraqi authorities," spokeswoman Mirembe Nantongo said.

Overhaul

Iraq's national security adviser, Mouwafak Al Rubaie, said the Iraqi government should use the incident to look into overhauling private security guards' immunity from Iraqi courts that was granted by Coalition Provisional Authority administrator L. Paul Bremer in 2003 and later extended ahead of Iraq's return to sovereignty.

"This is a golden opportunity for the government of Iraq to radically review the CPA Order 17 and make the review part of the investigation process," Rubaie said. Iraqi Brigadier Gen. Abdul-Karim Khalaf, a spokesman for the interior ministry, accused Blackwater of breaking the law Sunday.

US officials have little control over contractors | Iraq Updates

Kurdistan, the Iraq worth fighting for
Kurdistan is safe, orderly, and bustling with economic development. It's what we hoped Iraq would become. And it's time to make sure it stays that way.

From Baghdad, I flew north on a Japanese air force C-130 to meet a Department of Defense task force charged with economic development in Iraq. I landed at Irbil airport, deep into the Kurdish autonomous zone, and stepped into a sort of Iraqi Bizarro world. I had been in Kurdistan at the beginning of the war, on that very spot, when the airport was just a landing strip surrounded by wheat fields. What had simply been a safe city before was now booming.

A couple dozen construction cranes poke into the skyline around the city. The outskirts are crowded with housing developments with names like Dream City and American Village, the most ambitious being the cluster of twelve high-rise buildings of upscale apartments - two-bed, two-bath, two thousand square feet, $150,000. In every way, this isn't Baghdad. New malls, car dealerships, and restaurants line the streets. The roads are clear, free of checkpoints and gun-laden convoys. The stoplights work. Traffic police marshal cars, and the drivers obey. Flowers adorn median strips and public parks. For the first time since I'd been in Iraq, I didn't wear body armor. I rode in an unarmored truck. I felt naked and giddy.
This is the Iraq of our prewar fantasies, the Iraq worth fighting for. Kept secure by a strictly enforced no-fly zone since the first Gulf war, Iraqi Kurdistan has become a country within a country, seemingly a million miles away from all the trouble not far from here.

Bob Love, a former Marine colonel who works for the task force, spun around in his seat and flashed me a showman's smile as we drove through town. "This is the other Iraq," he said. "This is the future."
The Kurds certainly see it this way, playing it up on their Web site, theotheriraq.com: "Have you seen the Other Iraq? It's spectacular. It's peaceful. It's joyful....Arabs, Kurds, and Westerners all vacation together."

And lately, it's become an attractive locale for Al Qaeda as well, which has also decided that Kurdistan is worth fighting for. That morning, in an unsettling breech of normalcy, a truck bomb blew up outside the Ministry of the Interior in Irbil, killing fourteen. This week Love was hosting businessmen from America and the Middle East, encouraging them to invest in the region. The group had been eating breakfast at their hotel when the bomb detonated a half mile away. "The bomb meant nothing. I kept eating," Elie Ajaka said. He manages Quiznos shops across the Middle East. "It's something us Lebanese are accustomed to. But it's not a good thing for foreign investors. Why would an investor bring his money into something that might go up in flames at any moment?"

That's a good question, and one that America has largely ignored, giving good insight into how haphazardly economic development has been figured into the global war on terrorism.

I saw how such efforts might be handled in the future from one of the most unlikely counterinsurgents in Iraq. Paul Brinkley, deputy undersecretary of defense for business transformation, left a West Coast fiber-optic manufacturing company two years ago to
lead a massive effort overhauling the Pentagon's business processes. Dispatched to Iraq, he was approached by Lieutenant General Peter Chiarelli, then commander of American ground forces in Iraq. Chiarelli wanted him to visit a factory. Brinkley balked but went: "We saw an idle but viable factory, and we started asking questions. There's inventory here. Why isn't it going out?" The factory, in Iskandariya, south of Baghdad, employed three thousand people to build buses, tractors, and agricultural equipment until it was shuttered by the Americans in 2003. US forces in the area had since been catching IED triggermen who had once worked at the factory. They said they needed the money. Chiarelli wanted them put back to work.

Before the war, Iraq had 192 state-owned factories, which employed five hundred thousand people. Some were destroyed in the invasion, and the Coalition Provisional Authority closed the rest. Free markets emerge the fastest in countries that quit subsidized industry cold turkey, went the reasoning. It was an interesting theory, but Washington didn't follow with economic assistance, private investment never arrived, and high unemployment added to the chaos. "Imagine if you shut down all interstate commerce in the United States," Brinkley said. "How long would it take before people started to secede?" The one factory visit turned into a serious push by the DOD to restart the factories. Nine, including the tractor factory, are run-ning now. Brinkley hopes to have a couple dozen more running by year's end. "Every person who goes back to work is going to have more of a stake in social stability. That's just a universal truth about people," he said. "In the absence of economic and political development, you're not going to see stabilization."

Brinkley's work has drawn criticism from elsewhere in the Bush administration, with State Department officials in Baghdad calling him a Stalinist for championing state-owned factories. He said the philosophical agreements have since been settled. The effort has suffered recently from internal problems as well, with the Defense Department's inspector general starting an investigation into various task-force matters. As of late August, when Esquire went to press, the investigation was ongoing.

Brinkley has been traveling to Iraq every two weeks for the past year, but he didn't come to Kurdistan until December. During his first meeting with Kurdish officials, they told him they had been abandoned by the United States. Four years. Nothing. Brinkley responded by quoting Churchill. "You can always count on Americans to do the right thing," he said, "after they've tried everything else." The Kurds smiled. He and his team are now regulars in the area. They tour businesses, meet with governors, and play matchmaker for the executives.

Late last year, the government made its first big push to attract outside investors, when Brinkley's task force started bringing business executives to Iraq to tour the factories, hopefully moving them to place orders. Brink-ley's team would have been happy with commitments to build a few fast-food franchises; four and a half years after the invasion, the bar for success remained embarrassingly low. For a war sold in part on the notion that a free market would spring up allowing Iraq to take care of itself, remarkably little had been done to help the country on its way. Even now, Brinkley acknowledged progress across the country has been slower than he hoped.

On our last night in Kurdistan, we ate dinner with the governor of Suleimaniah, his aides, and a dozen local businessmen. We sat in an outdoor garden at a long table, twenty to a side, the air still holding the warmth of day. The servers brought us Bitburger beer and Johnnie Walker Black. The Blue Label would come out later. The table slowly filled with huge trays of whole fish, rice, chicken, and lamb. Bottles emptied and voices rose. This was a working dinner of sorts, with Iraqis and foreigners pairing off in quiet conversation to pitch each other business ventures. But as the night wore on, serious talk subsided. The beer and whisky ran out, giving way to vodka and loud toasts. This doesn't happen much in Baghdad.

"War is easy. Anyone can shoot. Anyone can have a gun," Hewa Jaff, the province's foreign and public-relations director told me the next morning as we toured the site of a new luxury hotel. "But this is difficult. This takes a brain. This takes thinking. This takes planning."

Kurdistan, the Iraq worth fighting for | Iraq Updates

INL says it will dismiss some members

Former Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi's Iraqi National List (INL) decided to fire some members "not used to a democratic atmosphere," said a leading member of the bloc.

"The names of the members to be fired will be announced in due time," Izzat al-Shabindir told the independent news agency Voices of Iraq (VOI).

The development caps a series of splits and withdrawals from parliamentary blocs, the most recent of which occurred on Saturday when the Sadrists, or Iraqis loyal to Shiite leader Muqtada al-Sadr, called it quits from the Shiite Unified Iraqi Coalition (UIC), followed by a threat from the Dawa Party – Iraq Organization, also Shiite, to follow suit.

The INL, which is of secularist orientation, is the fifth largest bloc in the Iraqi parliament, holding 24 out of the total 275 seats. It comes after the UIC (83), the Kurdistan Coalition (KC), the Sunni Iraqi Accordance Front (44) and the Sadrists (23).

Shabindir denied that his bloc would collapse.

"The INL is strong and coherent. Varied opinions do not threaten the bloc nor mean that it will split or dismantle. There is no 100% agreement within any parliamentary bloc in the whole world," he stressed.

Allawi recently revealed that he met with representatives from the now dissolved former ruling Baath Party's Izzat al-Dori's wing to arrange their participation in Iraq's political process.

This statement angered some members of the INL, including deputy Safiya al-Suhail, who said that these meetings coordinated by Allawi's bloc "were personal and not discussed" among the members.

INL member Mahdi Abdul-Hafez quit the bloc in late May, 2007, in protest over the "way decisions are taken inside the bloc," deciding to work inside parliament as an independent.

INL says it will dismiss some members | Iraq Updates

Speaker meets blocs' leaders, discusses committees' performance

Speaker in the Iraqi parliament Mahmoud al-Mashhadani and his deputies Khaled Attiya and Aaref Tayfoor met on Tuesday with the leaders of parliamentary blocs and discussed the current political situation and ways of enhancing the performance of the parliament's members and committees, according to a statement released by the speaker's office.

"The meeting tackled recent developments in the political process and the parliament's role in rectifying failures and offering good solutions," read the statement that was received by the independent news agency Voices of Iraq (VOI).

The participants agreed to meet this Thursday to raise matters in relation to other items on the agenda.

Speaker meets blocs' leaders, discusses committees' performance | Iraq Updates

Sistani aide survives assassination attempt in Basra

An aide to the top Shiite cleric Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani survived on Tuesday evening an attempt on his life in the southern Iraqi city of Basra, an eyewitness said.

"Unknown gunmen opened fire at Imad Abdul-Karim, Imam of Mosa al-Kadhem mosque, this evening, in al-Hussein neighborhood, western Basra," Sheikh Saied al-Saadi told the independent news agency Voices of Iraq (VOI).

The eyewitness added "Abdul-Karim sustained minor wounds and was taken to a nearby ho****al."

Abdul Karim is a representative of Sayyed Sistani in Basra.

The attack also resulted in killing one of Abdul-Karim's bodyguards, the witness said.

Over the last two weeks, two aides to Sistani were killed in separate attacks in Basra.

Basra, a predominantly Shiite city, is 590 km south of Baghdad.

Sistani aide survives assassination attempt in Basra | Iraq Updates