Thread: Archive Latest News - Think Tank - 15/04/08 - 26/08/08

Political summit to solve 6 important issues

Political blocs and Parliament's committees look out for holding wide summit of the political council of national security to solve six important issues

Legislative sources attributed carrying out these issues to its political and security dimensions, as they stressed on exploit what they described as "political spring" to solve it. MP Abbsa Bayati expected that this meeting will discuss oil law, security agreement with US, Kirkuk issue, constitutional amendments, create clear strategy to set relations with neighbor and regional countries and exploit ministries' capacities towards reconstruction.

http://www.alsabaah.com/paper.php?so...page&sid=63487

Cabinet Emphasizes Perfect Sovereignty With US Agreement

Official spokesman announced that the cabinet emphasized refusal any phrase to lacks the national sovereignty during the negotiations of contracting long term dualism agreement between Iraq & US, while Islamic Da'awa party limited 7 national standards and called public political blocks to observes it.

A statement issued declared that the 7 national standards including: emphasizing on the perfect sovereignty for Iraq as a people, government, land, waters, achieving Iraqis interest in building the state far away from any international or regionalism controlling, non using Iraq's land for achieving military processes against the neighbors, serious works for end foreign existence on Iraqi land as fast as possible, non offering lasting or long term military basics besides respecting Iraqi dignity.

http://www.alsabaah.com/paper.php?so...page&sid=63479

Higher demand for the dollar at daily auction

Demand for the dollar was up in the Iraqi Central Bank's auction on Wednesday, reaching $ 101.520 million compared to $66.335 million on Tuesday.

"The demand hit $6.680 million in cash and $94.840 million in foreign transfers outside the country, all covered by the bank at an exchange rate of 1,197 Iraqi dinars per dollar, unchanged for the second session in a row" according to the central bank's daily bulletin which was received by Aswat al-Iraq - Voices of Iraq - (VOI).

The 14 banks that participated in the auction offered to sell $3 million, which the bank bought all at anexchange rate of 1,195 dinars per dollar.

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

Aswat Aliraq

Kirkuk cause delays Approving Provincial Councils Law, says MP

An MP from the Islamic Fadhila party attributed the delay in approving the provincial councils law to the Kirkuk cause and using religious symbols to promote the elections.

”Kirkuk cause and using the religious symbols and mosques platforms to promote the elections are one of the main reasons of the delay in approving the provincial councils laws by the Iraqi parliament,” Basem Sherief told Aswat al-Iraq – Voices of Iraq (VOI).

“Using the religious symbols issue witnesses disagreements among the political blocs to prevent it during the elections,” he added.

Article 140 of the Iraqi constitution is related to the normalization of the situation in Kirkuk, an important and mixed city of Kurds, Turkmen, Christians and Arabs. Kurds seek to include the city in the autonomous Iraq's Kurdistan region, while Sunni Arabs, Turkmen and Shiite Arabs oppose the incorporation. The article currently stipulates that all Arabs in Kirkuk be returned to their original locations in southern and central Iraqi areas, and formerly displaced residents returned to Kirkuk, 250 km northeast of Baghdad.

A referendum, provided for in the Iraqi constitution, was scheduled to be held by the end of 2007 on including the city into the Kurdistan region, but was postponed for six months.

Iraq's Kurdistan region includes the provinces of Arbil, Sulaimaniya and Duhuk. It has a Kurdish majority population in addition to Turkmen, Arabs, Christians and Chaldean-Assyrians, constituting one fifth of Iraq 's 27 million population, according to figures released by the Independent Electoral Commission of Iraq.

Fadhila party has 15 seats out of the 275-seat parliament.

Aswat Aliraq

New contracts could give Iraq quick oil fix

Iraq is exporting more oil than it has for years and is on the verge of signing deals with oil majors that could quickly take output higher, oil officials say.

Baghdad expects this month to conclude negotiations for six oilfield service contracts with international companies that could boost output this year.

The deals could provide the extra 200,000 barrels per day (bpd) in exports Iraq wants from the southern Basra terminal by the end of 2008. Basra accounts for most of Iraq's exports, shipping more than 1.5 million bpd.

"Provided they are signed promptly, these deals could give quick progress," said an ****utive at a western oil company negotiating for one of the contracts.

"They are the first step towards real improvement in a sector that has been under stress for 30 years."

Iraq expects June exports to reach 2.2 million barrels per day, the highest for monthly shipments since the U.S.-led invasion of March 2003. Baghdad sees exports rising further to 2.3 million bpd by the end of 2008.

The oil sector has increased output as security has improved but oil companies remain nervous.

Iraq will contract international oil firms to help manage operations at its largest producing fields such as Rumaila in the south, supplying equipment to refurbish dilapidated infrastructure.

The two-year deals call for a total output boost of 600,000 barrels per day. Once the contracts are signed, Iraq plans to offer the same fields in a bidding round for longer-term development.

The industry needs billions of dollars for renewal and expansion. The service deals are part of stop-gap measures to attract part of that investment in the absence of a vital oil law.

Political disputes have stalled the passage of an oil law through parliament for over a year. The legislation aims to set the terms and extent of foreign investment in developing the world's third largest oil reserves.

"Considerable progress can be made without the law," said Muhammad-Ali Zainy, senior energy analyst at the London-based Centre for Global Energy Studies.

"These contracts are a big step forward and will help bring new methods and technology to these important fields."

BETTER SECURITY

Improved security has yielded gains of nearly 500,000 bpd in northern exports since last summer. Sabotage had kept that line mostly idle since the war.

Baghdad hopes to see Kirkuk oil exports up by another 100,000 bpd by the end of the year.

Oil Minister Hussein al-Shahristani said this week he was optimistic that Iraqi forces would keep security tight at oil facilities, helping to bolster the confidence of foreign investors discouraged by sectarian violence.

Rising output and exports are allowing Iraq to cash in on record oil prices and have raised the prospect of an accelerated recovery in its shattered economy.

Iraq has a 10-year plan to boost output from 2.5 million bpd this year to 6 million bpd, Shahristani said this week. It aims to hit 4.5 million bpd in five years.

But for those larger long-term gains, Iraq needs the oil law in place for international oil companies to play a bigger role in developing untapped fields.

"We remain very cautious in terms of further capacity expansion," said Alex Munton, analyst at global consultancy Wood Mackenzie.

"Iraq has almost reached the point, simply by repairing the damage of the last few years and adding security around main pipelines, of maximum capacity with the infrastructure in place. But there is little likelihood of being able to add to that without much larger-scale investment and the assistance of international oil companies."

Even with the law, international oil majors have said it would be years before security improves enough for them to be able to send ground staff to Iraq.

They intend to manage the new technical service contracts from outside the country, and will rely on Iraq's state oil companies to ****ute their plans.

The law is meant to help bridge divides between Iraq's Shi'ites, Sunni Arabs and Kurds. Control of oil reserves is one of the principal disputes.

The Iraqi Kurdish region's prime minister said on Tuesday that it would take fresh proposals to Baghdad on the oil law in the next two weeks. The Kurds' top energy official said he hoped the law would pass this year.

ANALYSIS-New contracts could give Iraq quick oil fix - Forbes.com

Side note--- I read the other day Iraq has about 2000 oil well and Texas has about one million. Txtrue

Originally Posted by txtrue

Side note--- I read the other day Iraq has about 2000 oil well and Texas has about one million. Txtrue

RRC:History of Texas Crude Oil, Annual Production, and Producing Wells

MP calls to adopt dividing Kirkuk into 4 constituencies

A lawmaker from the National Dialogue on Wednesday called to adopt the proposal of dividing administration and authority in Kirkuk.
Speaking at a press conference in Baghdad, Moahmed al-Juburi, MP from the National Dialogue, said 110 lawmaker called on Parliament to adopt the national proposal of dividing administration and authority in Kirkuk into 32 percent for each ethnicity, Kurds, Arab and Turkmen."

The lawmaker noted "Kirkuk is witnessing a demographic change and running any elections would yield to a success for one ethnicity befo*****d".

Earlier, MP Mohamed Mahdi al-Bayati said "over 110 lawmakers from different blocs tabled a proposal to divide Kirkuk into four constituencies in which the three major ethnicities each have 32 percent, while 4 percent would be given to the city's minorities."

Al-Juburi referred to statement voiced by Kurdistan regional Prime Minister Negervan Barazani that Kurds were willing to share power with Arabs in the city of Kirkuk as they are pushing for a solution over the status of Kirkuk, but that this did not necessarily have to come in the form of referendums proposed thus far.

The MP considered the Kurdish officials' statement as "support and a key step to safeguard the national unity."

Aswat Aliraq

Opinion piece.......

Why should Iraq repay its past debts?

Iraq is not a poor country, everyone knows that. Back during the "sanction days" as Iraqis called them, referring to the 1990-2003 UN-US economic sanctions imposed on the country, affecting and degrading us Iraqis, we used to wonder: Is it possible that we were actually on the abyss of poverty, while at the very same time, we were walking on ponds upon ponds of black gold?

Today, five years after the downfall of the Baathist regime, a full fledged war, an invasion, swinging back and fourth on the brinks of a civil war, insurgency, Al Qaida, illegal armed militias, and heaven knows what else, the Iraqi government is trying its very best to enforce the status of law.

But, Iraq is still burdened with debts. To be precise, Iraq has to pay back the Paris Club Group of developed countries around $13 billion, and another $50-70 billion to different Arab countries. Most, if not all these debts occurred during the eight year Iran-Iraq war.

Related issues

A number of related issues were addressed recently at the International Compact with Iraq (ICI) conference which was held in Stockholm last week.

"This isn't a donor conference. The Iraqis don't need large sums of money," US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said. "They do need large infusions of technical assistance, project support, etc..." she added.

Swedish officials also played down the possibility of new initiatives at the meeting, and Foreign Minister Carl Bildt said debt was not its subject.

But how is it that Iraq does not need large sums of money, when it has to re-construct its basic infrastructure from scratch?

And is Iraq truly able to pay back these debts, and re-build a devastated country which will need tremendous efforts? Lastly and most importantly, are these debts fair?

Going back to 1991, the official amount of all Iraq's debts was $42 billion. This figure was stated in an official document submitted to the UN Security Council at that time, and as a result, Resolution 687 was issued and a ceasefire was carried out.

Most of the loans offered by major industrial countries around the world at the time were tied to Iraq's purchase of weapons to be used in the war against Iran. Those loans were given to the Iraqi leadership for political considerations.

So, it is not enough that Iraq today has to pay the debts of the regime which the international community decided to first weaken by imposing sanctions against it, then started a war to topple it and finishing off with all that was left of the country's infrastructure, not mentioning the deaths, diseases and misery. Iraq has to also pay the accumulated interest on the major loans.

All this seems very unfair. The loans interest took place during the 13 years of UN sanctions against Iraq, when Iraq had no inflow of foreign currency. Even the revenue of $21 billion generated during the UN oil-for-food programme went unaccounted for at the time of Paul Bremer, the US head of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq.

It was stashed away in French and American banks like lame ducks! No interest was added to Iraq's frozen assets in foreign banks for 13 years, so why should Iraq pay interest now?

Only country

Russia was the only country that dropped all of Iraq's debts. Needless to say, the loans given to Iraq were unethical in the first place, as they were given to step up a destructive war.

James S. Henry is a successful American entrepreneur, attorney, economist, and investigative journalist with outstanding record of professional accomplishment.

On his blog which he has called "Submerging Markets" he wrote: "Indeed, as I've argued before, if Iraq's foreign debt had been restructured in the late 1980s, when (James) Baker was secretary of state, many of our difficulties with Iraq - including Saddam's 1990 invasion of Kuwait, the prolonged embargo, and our most recent invasion of Iraq - might well have been avoided entirely."

So isn't it time to take Iraq seriously for a change, and treat its people like human beings?

The region's stability and wellbeing is interwoven with Iraq's security, and stability. Relieving debts that were given to Saddam Hussain for political interests of countries that gave them must be considered before it is too late.

Gulfnews: Why should Iraq repay its past debts?

Iraq SHOULD take responsibility and be made to repay its debts eventually... even if it takes another 25 years to play it out... it cannot be brushed aside this easily behind the excuse of the current state it is in... before Saddam and after the current re-structuring of this war-torn country's desperate need to enter and trade decent deals with the International Community at large.

How would you like to see someday... when you are brushed aside in your own city, far away from Sadr City, and Iraq if you will.... by an arrogant, perhaps spitting Iraqi in your country, with his bad manners or indifference to your society but he's living off your country's generosity by fleeing his own with wealth created from the debt write-offs???

While they drive around in SUVs and limos and women still draped in ominous black and only their eyes are visible, shopping around your supermarkets like weird beings, unable to chat or strike a conversation with Westerners, remember again... they're in YOUR country but you need to bow to their presence and you are all going through hard times with unsettled loans driven as high up to your necks for repayment arrangements... but they traveled far and wide disregarding your hardships... your loss of siblings or close kins fighting on their land to help them out... etc... the list goes on... and probably, my recap will strike some chords pretty painfully here too....

Think carefully... is that a bargain worth supporting for??? I beg to differ even though I am not in your shoes nor ever will be but I can relate ... looking at 10 years from today in anticipating what will eventually happen... they'll be rich, STINKING RICH and U R as poor as a church mouse for sure....