Give. It. Up. No matter how badly you want the insurgents to win, they won't. They are at the narrow end of the funnel right now. Game over.
The US has built a 3 billion dollar embassy in Iraq. This alone tells me the war is over and the US has won.
The war is over, lol. Ex-general: Iraq a 'nightmare' for US . Amazing how retired generals are so damn negative on Iraq. Wasn't the insurgency in its last throes like 3 years ago?
This war has become a total circus.... and now CNN recently reported that the Penatgon is in last phase stages of planning a surgical strike against Iran..can you say $100/barrel oil ?
Yes. it's amazing how wannabe traders sitting in front of the computer in their underwear say the war is over and the US has won, while the generals, the best American military minds (brilliant strategists and tough motherfuckers to a man), have been saying for the past 3 years that it is unwinnable and an ongoing, total disaster. Hmmm... I wonder which opinion is closer to the truth? And of course, anyone who points this out is immediately called a terrorist sympathiser. And so on....
It's our job as traders to look into the future and attempt to get a jump on coming events. The Iraq war will soon be in the rear view mirror, and we'll have to scramble to foresee the next series of events. We are recruiting our former enemies in Iraq to come over to our side and fight the insurgents. It's working. The tipping point has been passed. It's over.
Itâs the Oil Jim Holt London Review of Books Iraq is âunwinnableâ, a âquagmireâ, a âfiascoâ: so goes the received opinion. But there is good reason to think that, from the Bush-Cheney perspective, it is none of these things. Indeed, the US may be âstuckâ precisely where Bush et al want it to be, which is why there is no âexit strategyâ. Iraq has 115 billion barrels of known oil reserves. That is more than five times the total in the United States. And, because of its long isolation, it is the least explored of the worldâs oil-rich nations. A mere two thousand wells have been drilled across the entire country; in Texas alone there are a million. It has been estimated, by the Council on Foreign Relations, that Iraq may have a further 220 billion barrels of undiscovered oil; another study puts the figure at 300 billion. If these estimates are anywhere close to the mark, US forces are now sitting on one quarter of the worldâs oil resources. The value of Iraqi oil, largely light crude with low production costs, would be of the order of $30 trillion at todayâs prices. For purposes of comparison, the projected total cost of the US invasion/occupation is around $1 trillion. Who will get Iraqâs oil? One of the Bush administrationâs âbenchmarksâ for the Iraqi government is the passage of a law to distribute oil revenues. The draft law that the US has written for the Iraqi congress would cede nearly all the oil to Western companies. The Iraq National Oil Company would retain control of 17 of Iraqâs 80 existing oilfields, leaving the rest â including all yet to be discovered oil â under foreign corporate control for 30 years. âThe foreign companies would not have to invest their earnings in the Iraqi economy,â the analyst Antonia Juhasz wrote in the New York Times in March, after the draft law was leaked. âThey could even ride out Iraqâs current âinstabilityâ by signing contracts now, while the Iraqi government is at its weakest, and then wait at least two years before even setting foot in the country.â As negotiations over the oil law stalled in September, the provincial government in Kurdistan simply signed a separate deal with the Dallas-based Hunt Oil Company, headed by a close political ally of President Bush. How will the US maintain hegemony over Iraqi oil? By establishing permanent military bases in Iraq. Five self-sufficient âsuper-basesâ are in various stages of completion. All are well away from the urban areas where most casualties have occurred. There has been precious little reporting on these bases in the American press, whose dwindling corps of correspondents in Iraq cannot move around freely because of the dangerous conditions. (It takes a brave reporter to leave the Green Zone without a military escort.) In February last year, the Washington Post reporter Thomas Ricks described one such facility, the Balad Air Base, forty miles north of Baghdad. A piece of (well-fortified) American suburbia in the middle of the Iraqi desert, Balad has fast-food joints, a miniature golf course, a football field, a cinema and distinct neighbourhoods â among them, âKBR-landâ, named after the Halliburton subsidiary that has done most of the construction work at the base. Although few of the 20,000 American troops stationed there have ever had any contact with an Iraqi, the runway at the base is one of the worldâs busiest. âWe are behind only Heathrow right now,â an air force commander told Ricks. The Defense Department was initially coy about these bases. In 2003, Donald Rumsfeld said: âI have never, that I can recall, heard the subject of a permanent base in Iraq discussed in any meeting.â But this summer the Bush administration began to talk openly about stationing American troops in Iraq for years, even decades, to come. Several visitors to the White House have told the New York Times that the president himself has become fond of referring to the âKorea modelâ. When the House of Representatives voted to bar funding for âpermanent basesâ in Iraq, the new term of choice became âenduring basesâ, as if three or four decades wasnât effectively an eternity. But will the US be able to maintain an indefinite military presence in Iraq? It will plausibly claim a rationale to stay there for as long as civil conflict simmers, or until every groupuscule that conveniently brands itself as âal-Qaidaâ is exterminated. The civil war may gradually lose intensity as Shias, Sunnis and Kurds withdraw into separate enclaves, reducing the surface area for sectarian friction, and as warlords consolidate local authority. De facto partition will be the result. But this partition can never become de jure. (An independent Kurdistan in the north might upset Turkey, an independent Shia region in the east might become a satellite of Iran, and an independent Sunni region in the west might harbour al-Qaida.) Presiding over this Balkanised Iraq will be a weak federal government in Baghdad, propped up and overseen by the Pentagon-scale US embassy that has just been constructed â a green zone within the Green Zone. As for the number of US troops permanently stationed in Iraq, the defence secretary, Robert Gates, told Congress at the end of September that âin his headâ he saw the long-term force as consisting of five combat brigades, a quarter of the current number, which, with support personnel, would mean 35,000 troops at the very minimum, probably accompanied by an equal number of mercenary contractors. (He may have been erring on the side of modesty, since the five super-bases can accommodate between ten and twenty thousand troops each.) These forces will occasionally leave their bases to tamp down civil skirmishes, at a declining cost in casualties. As a senior Bush administration official told the New York Times in June, the long-term bases âare all places we could fly in and out of without putting Americans on every street cornerâ. But their main day-to-day function will be to protect the oil infrastructure. This is the âmessâ that Bush-Cheney is going to hand on to the next administration. What if that administration is a Democratic one? Will it dismantle the bases and withdraw US forces entirely? That seems unlikely, considering the many beneficiaries of the continued occupation of Iraq and the exploitation of its oil resources. The three principal Democratic candidates â Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards â have already hedged their bets, refusing to promise that, if elected, they would remove American forces from Iraq before 2013, the end of their first term. Among the winners: oil-services companies like Halliburton; the oil companies themselves (the profits will be unimaginable, and even Democrats can be bought); US voters, who will be guaranteed price stability at the gas pump (which sometimes seems to be all they care about); Europe and Japan, which will both benefit from Western control of such a large part of the worldâs oil reserves, and whose leaders will therefore wink at the permanent occupation; and, oddly enough, Osama bin Laden, who will never again have to worry about US troops profaning the holy places of Mecca and Medina, since the stability of the House of Saud will no longer be paramount among American concerns. Among the losers is Russia, which will no longer be able to lord its own energy resources over Europe. Another big loser is Opec, and especially Saudi Arabia, whose power to keep oil prices high by enforcing production quotas will be seriously compromised. Then there is the case of Iran, which is more complicated. In the short term, Iran has done quite well out of the Iraq war. Iraqâs ruling Shia coalition is now dominated by a faction friendly to Tehran, and the US has willy-nilly armed and trained the most pro-Iranian elements in the Iraqi military. As for Iranâs nuclear programme, neither air strikes nor negotiations seem likely to derail it at the moment. But the Iranian regime is precarious. Unpopular mullahs hold onto power by financing internal security services and buying off elites with oil money, which accounts for 70 per cent of government revenues. If the price of oil were suddenly to drop to, say, $40 a barrel (from a current price just north of $80), the repressive regime in Tehran would lose its steady income. And that is an outcome the US could easily achieve by opening the Iraqi oil spigot for as long as necessary (perhaps taking down Venezuelaâs oil-cocky Hugo Chávez into the bargain). And think of the United States vis-à -vis China. As a consequence of our trade deficit, around a trillion dollarsâ worth of US denominated debt (including $400 billion in US Treasury bonds) is held by China. This gives Beijing enormous leverage over Washington: by offloading big chunks of US debt, China could bring the American economy to its knees. Chinaâs own economy is, according to official figures, expanding at something like 10 per cent a year. Even if the actual figure is closer to 4 or 5 per cent, as some believe, Chinaâs increasing heft poses a threat to US interests. (One fact: China is acquiring new submarines five times faster than the US.) And the main constraint on Chinaâs growth is its access to energy â which, with the US in control of the biggest share of world oil, would largely be at Washingtonâs sufferance. Thus is the Chinese threat neutralised. Many people are still perplexed by exactly what moved Bush-Cheney to invade and occupy Iraq. In the 27 September issue of the New York Review of Books, Thomas Powers, one of the most astute watchers of the intelligence world, admitted to a degree of bafflement. âWhatâs particularly odd,â he wrote, âis that there seems to be no sophisticated, professional, insidersâ version of the thinking that drove events.â Alan Greenspan, in his just published memoir, is clearer on the matter. âI am saddened,â he writes, âthat it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.â
Was the strategy of invading Iraq to take control of its oil resources actually hammered out by Cheneyâs 2001 energy task force? One canât know for sure, since the deliberations of that task force, made up largely of oil and energy company executives, have been kept secret by the administration on the grounds of âexecutive privilegeâ. One canât say for certain that oil supplied the prime motive. But the hypothesis is quite powerful when it comes to explaining what has actually happened in Iraq. The occupation may seem horribly botched on the face of it, but the Bush administrationâs cavalier attitude towards ânation-buildingâ has all but ensured that Iraq will end up as an American protectorate for the next few decades â a necessary condition for the extraction of its oil wealth. If the US had managed to create a strong, democratic government in an Iraq effectively secured by its own army and police force, and had then departed, what would have stopped that government from taking control of its own oil, like every other regime in the Middle East? On the assumption that the Bush-Cheney strategy is oil-centred, the tactics â dissolving the army, de-Baathification, a final âsurgeâ that has hastened internal migration â could scarcely have been more effective. The costs â a few billion dollars a month plus a few dozen American fatalities (a figure which will probably diminish, and which is in any case comparable to the number of US motorcyclists killed because of repealed helmet laws) â are negligible compared to $30 trillion in oil wealth, assured American geopolitical supremacy and cheap gas for voters. In terms of realpolitik, the invasion of Iraq is not a fiasco; it is a resounding success. Still, there is reason to be sceptical of the picture I have drawn: it implies that a secret and highly ambitious plan turned out just the way its devisers foresaw, and that almost never happens. ¤ ¤ ¤ ¤ ¤