Iraqi Oil

WASHINGTON -- In another burst of impatience with Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, the U.N. Security Council ordered the seizure of frozen Iraqi oil assets yesterday to help pay for that which Iraq owes the United Nations under the cease-fire resolutions that ended the Persian Gulf War.By a 14-0 vote, with China abstaining, the Security Council adopted a U.S.-sponsored resolution that details a complicated method for nations to deal with Iraqi oil and with...

BAGHDAD - -The Iraqi government condemned Friday a reported cross-border raid by Iranian soldiers who allegedly raised their flag at an Iraqi oil field near the border. "The Iraqi government considers this matter a transgression on Iraq's sovereignty," government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh said Friday night in a television interview. Dabbagh said Iraq would deliver a formal written protest to Iran's ambassador in Baghdad. Iraqi officials said Iranian soldiers lowered an Iraqi flag at the Fakka oil field in Maysan province and hoisted an Iranian flag.

BAGHDAD - -The Iraqi government condemned Friday a reported cross-border raid by Iranian soldiers who allegedly raised their flag at an Iraqi oil field near the border. "The Iraqi government considers this matter a transgression on Iraq's sovereignty," government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh said Friday night in a television interview. Dabbagh said Iraq would deliver a formal written protest to Iran's ambassador in Baghdad. Iraqi officials said Iranian soldiers lowered an Iraqi flag at the Fakka oil field in Maysan province and hoisted an Iranian flag.

Soaring oil prices will leave the Iraqi government with a cumulative budget surplus of as much as $79 billion by year's end, according to an American federal oversight agency. But Iraq has spent only a minute fraction of that on reconstruction costs that are now largely borne by the United States. The unspent windfall, which covers surpluses from oil sales of 2005 through 2008, appears likely to reinforce growing debate about the roughly $48 billion in American taxpayer money devoted to rebuilding Iraq since the U.S.-led invasion.

UNITED NATIONS -- Hardening its position toward Saddam Hussein's government, the Clinton administration wants to impose new requirements for lifting the United Nations ban on Iraqi oil exports.The United States is urging other members of the U.N. Security Council to insist that Baghdad recognize Kuwait as an independent country and stop persecuting dissident Kurds and Shiite Muslims.These conditions would be in addition to the Security Council's demands, made at the end of the Persian Gulf war, that Iraq disarm and let the United Nations monitor its military industries.

WASHINGTON - The Bush administration's optimistic statements this year that Iraq's oil wealth, not American taxpayers, would cover most of the cost of rebuilding Iraq were at odds with a bleaker assessment of a government task force that was secretly established last fall to study Iraq's oil industry, according to public records and government officials. The task force, which was based at the Pentagon, produced a report that described the Iraqi oil industry as so badly damaged by a decade of trade embargoes that its production capacity had fallen by more than 25 percent before the war, panel members have said.

WASHINGTON - After a stiff, two-month crackdown on illegal Iraqi oil shipments in the Persian Gulf, Iran is allowing renewed smuggling activity, puzzling U.S. officials who had hoped to extinguish a key financing source for Saddam Hussein's weapons programs. "The activity's picked up again in the last two weeks," said U.S. Navy Cmdr. Jeff Gradeck, a spokesman for the gulf-based allied naval force that is enforcing the United Nations trade sanctions against Iraq. "Why [Iran has] opened it up and to what extent I don't know."

WASHINGTON -- The United States wants to attach stringent conditions to a proposed Iraqi oil sale to make sure its proceeds go for humanitarian purposes, administration officials said yesterday, and will also demand fuller compliance with the gulf war cease-fire resolution.The United Nations sanctions committee was to meet today to consider Iraq's request to sell nearly $1 billion worth of oil to purchase food and other humanitarian supplies.President Bush, speaking to farm editors yesterday, said Iraq was "now trying to appeal to get some relief on the oil. There's . . . not going to be any relief as far as the United States goes until they move forward on a lot of fronts."

GENEVA -- The suspension of talks between Iraq and the United Nations last week was especially bitter news for Carlos Alzamora.For more than four years, this former Peruvian diplomat and his team of experts have been collecting and sifting the claims of more than 2 million people who say they were hurt in some way -- economically, physically or psychologically -- by Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in August 1990.Thirty percent of the money that would have been collected from the sale of Iraqi oil that might have come out of the talks would have flowed into the nearly empty coffers of Mr. Alzamora's compensation fund, at the rate of about $100 million a month.

As the Bush administration spends hundreds of millions of dollars to repair the pipes and pumps above ground that carry Iraq's oil, it has not addressed serious problems with Iraq's underground oil reservoirs, which American and Iraqi experts say could severely limit the amount of oil those fields produce. In northern Iraq, the large but aging Kirkuk field suffers from too much water seeping into its oil deposits, the experts say, and similar problems are evident in the oil fields in southern Iraq.

The news that no-bid contracts for oil production in Iraq were to be awarded to a number of U.S. oil companies sent keyboards tapping in the blogosphere (the contracts have been put on hold). A sampling of the commentary: "The U.S. government dictated terms that are set to bring back ExxonMobil, Shell, BP, Total and Chevron, the very same multinational energy giants that dominated Iraqi oil production before Baghdad nationalized the sector 36 years ago. They, along with a consortium of smaller firms, have been offered no-bid contracts by the Iraqi government.

The "commander-in-chef" whipped up quite a meal back in 2003. As late as March 2006, he was still trying to serve a version of it at a "strategy for victory" event - though he was no longer accompanying it with a dessert of cakewalk ice cream cake. Now the nation sits at a table with an oil-stained tablecloth, uncleared places, dirty dishes, used silverware and bones strewn everywhere. And if the meal doesn't give us heartburn, the multitrillion-dollar check will. For those with short memories, here is a handy recipe for Baghdad victory stew.

Throughout a career that took him from hardscrabble wildcatter to wealthy oil tycoon, Oscar S. Wyatt Jr. hasn't been the type to back down from a fight. So Monday's guilty plea to a federal conspiracy charge by the 83-year-old founder and former chairman of Coastal Corp. surprised those familiar with his tenacity. "I am shocked by his decision to plead guilty," said David H. Berg, who represented Wyatt's brother-in-law, Houston clothier Robert T. Sakowitz, when the oilman sued him in the 1980s over some business deals.

Alan Greenspan became famous when he was chairman of the Federal Reserve for being largely indecipherable, but his comment about Iraq in a new memoir could hardly have been clearer. "I'm saddened," he wrote, "that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: The Iraq war is largely about oil." Maybe that was too clear. Mr. Greenspan quickly began backpedaling in interviews after the book came out, reverting to his familiar sift-through-this-for-meaning style. Antiwar critics nevertheless treated it as a gotcha moment, while administration defenders, including Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, poured cold water all over it. But honestly, hasn't anyone been paying attention all these years?

DAVOS, Switzerland -- The pristine, snowy mountains of this ski town present a picture totally different from scenes of bloody Baghdad. But Iraq is far from absent at the Davos World Economic Forum, where it is the subject of several high-level panels. I had the chance to talk at length with two of Iraq's smartest and most competent political leaders, Vice President Adel Abdul Mahdi (a Shiite) and Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari (a Kurd). What they said - about the U.S. troop "surge," the prospects for Iraq's government, and the need for intense Mideast diplomacy to keep the war from spreading - should be factored into America's Iraq debate.

Regardless of past mistakes, the new Iraq still can be saved. In my opinion as an adviser to the Iraq Study Group, any rescue plan should focus on basic measures, including U.S. troop redeployment, prevention of oil theft and corruption, training of Iraqi troops, recognition of the influence of Iran and Syria, and promotion of democracy. Redeploy troops. Coalition forces should redeploy around critical infrastructure. They should have a defined space to defend instead of being sitting ducks for insurgents on the streets.

WASHINGTON -- Two and a half years after the West and its Arab allies went to war to keep Saddam Hussein from controlling the world's oil markets, the Iraqi president is again sending jitters through oil producers and their governments.The markets are jumpy over the consequences of a one-time, $1.6 million Iraqi oil sale the United Nations is considering to allow Baghdad to finance humanitarian needs and war reparations.There also is concern among oil analysts and within the U.S. government that the spigot will be hard to turn off, particularly as the U.N. humanitarian-aid coffers are desperately short of cash.

BAGHDAD, Iraq - Two explosions at oil pipelines near the Persian Gulf forced the shutdown of Iraq's main oil export terminal yesterday for what is expected to be about 10 days, costing the country perhaps as much as $1 billion in revenue. The shutdown, which the authorities said was caused by a bombing Monday and a bombing or malfunction on a second line yesterday, came on a day when snipers lining a highway and an overpass near Baghdad International Airport staged a well-organized ambush on a convoy, killing at least four foreign contract workers, an American military official and a security contractor said.

BAGHDAD, Iraq --A fuel crisis in Iraq deepened yesterday when the oil minister was suspended for objecting to steep government-imposed price increases for gasoline and cooking oil. Angry drivers waited in quarter-mile lines at gas stations in Baghdad, brought by fears of more price increases and electricity failures, which have forced them to siphon fuel for use in power generators. There was also concern over problems with refineries, including a shutdown at a major refinery in Baiji, 130 miles north of Baghdad.