Roads to Iraq

LB,

Since I am clearly not as smart as you, will you please iterate more clearly whichever implied conspiracy theory you are here insinuating?

Is it something about Cheney, oil, and the jooos?

When conspiracy theories combine logical fallacies with lack of evidence, the result is a world view known as conspiracism. Conspiracism is a world view that sees major historic events and trends as the result of secret conspiracies. Academic interest in conspiracy theories and conspiracism has identified a set of familiar structural features by which membership of the genre may be established, and has presented a range of hypotheses on the basis of studying the genre. Among the leading scholars of conspiracism are: Hofstadter, Popper, Barkun, Goldberg, Pipes, Fenster, Mintz, Sagan, Johnson, and Posner, from whom the following list is synthesized.

Hi TAI

I emailed you, ask about you, did you get it???

Hi LB,

Yeah, didn’t I reply?

Gosh, am sorry, I thought I did. Chinit hwaya makhbus.

= (

Charles - “When conspiracy theories combine logical fallacies with lack of evidence, the result is a world view known as conspiracism.”

From Wiki - “Throughout human history, political and economic leaders genuinely have been the cause of enormous amounts of death and misery, and they sometimes have engaged in conspiracies while at the same time promoting conspiracy theories about their targets. Hitler and Stalin would be merely the most prominent examples; there have been numerous others. In some cases there have been claims dismissed as conspiracy theories that later proved to have some basis in facts.”

You would suggest that conspiracies never occur, unless of course it is in your interests for there to be one. This mode of thinking would be illogical. History has borne out the fact that conspiracies do occur and the odds are especially high when great profit or power is concerned.

There is no doubt that crimes have been committed by this administration. They have waged an illegal war of aggression which has resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent people.

link is hereıes_violated_by_pr.htm

Jon,

There is no doubt that crimes have been committed by this administration. They have waged an illegal war of aggression which has resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent people.

That’s your opinion. Fine. It has no bearing on the truth or validity of the conspiracy theories posted on this site:

Zarqawi didn’t exist;

9/11 US inside job;

Etc.

I think the latest one is LB insinuating that the US kidnapped and beheaded the Russian diplomats.

This is classic conspiracism.

You can argue that Saddam could be contained. That the intelligence community was wrong. You can argue that various laws have been broken, or that mistakes have been made, etc. Those are all issues that revolve around potentially verifiable facts.

The ‘conspiracies’ selectively and vaguely connect disparate snippets of facts out of their context in the attempt to support a conclusion that was made before the ‘facts’ were even identified.

Do you see the difference?

LB,

Dumb american Charles is still awaiting clarification.

Does this posting (thread topic) mean to insinuate that the US was behind the kidnapping and murder of the Russian diplomats???

Charles - “This is classic conspiracism.”

First off, who cares? What difference does it make what theories might rattle around in people’s brains. That’s like a side issue and I don’t pay it much attention. I have some theories myself, but not like I can do anything about it.

You are forgetting who started the whirlwind of bullshit. The Bush administration fabricated this entire situation we all find ourselves in. Bush betrayed the world. The result is that you have people, not necessarily believing every crackpot theory, but developing a general sense of paranoia where it becomes much easier to believe the worst.

“facts out of their context in the attempt to support a conclusion that was made before the ‘facts’ were even identified”

Yeah, I know. Those are called a “foregone conclusions”. You are doing the same thing. You operate under the mistaken belief that Iraq is a threat to the US and that we had the right to wage an illegal war of aggression which has killed hundreds of thousands of people.

“Do you see the difference?”

Yes. Your conclusions are killing lots of people.

“So those people who concoct nutty conspiracies really do suffer from ‘Bush derangement syndrome’?”

To a certain extent, yeah. BDS would be clinically described as “having been lied to so much, you don’t trust anyone anymore”.

Charles - “Ah, but the whole conspiracy about ‘having been lied to’ is yet another manifestation of BDS.”

Ah, I see. You’re still living under the illusion that Hussein really did have stockpiles of WMDs that he was about to attack the US with. You should stop watching Fox. You’re becoming detached from reality, which is just as bad as BDS.

“A+B=11 is not necessarily valid.”

Crap. Someone broke Charles’ brain and now he’s stuck on “babble”.

I can see Micheal has issues… really serious ones i think, but come on you once again go on about others actions and not the actions of the insurgents, terrorists or sick murderers who hack innocent peoples heads off with a blunt nife and say they are doing it for GOD, come on your telling me it is ok to do that!!

Well perhaps you would prefer the electric chair, but unfortunately there’s no electricity, or perhaps lethal injection but unfortunately there’s no drugs.

what if the multinational forces were to do they same to Iraqi’s is that ok or will you bitch to the tv stations saying look what they do to us like school girls telling the teacher, grow up and take responsibilty for your actions and stop playing the poor hard done by routine.

The USA has tortured people to death over a period of months, at least beheading is a lot quicker than that.

Not all muslims are terrorists but most the terrorists so far have been muslims, what does that tell you?.
It tells me you are a racist nutcase, are you saying the IRA were Muslims, are you saying that the terrorists attacking Palestine right now are Muslims. The USA has caused terrorism by illegally invading a sovereign country and killing 250,000 Iraqis.

Yes the reasons to invade Iraq were dubious but hey lets move on and fix the problem.

The only way it can be fixed is for the NewWorldNazis to leave and that ain’t going to happen until the oil runs out.

Saying that how can you fix a problem with a people who still blame the Jews for killing Christ, shit get over it!! the rest of the world has, move on.

Who cares about the Jews killing Christ, I’m more concerned with the Jews killing Palestinians. I am also concerned that the Bolshevik/Communists which were almost entirely Jews killed over 30 million Christians and yet the only holocaust we are supposed to remember is one that allegedly happened in Germany which no one is allowed to investigate seriously.

No I’m not joking “Vet”, have you accidentally injected yourself?
Iraq was illegally invaded, Iraqis have a right to resist that illegal invasion, now if that results in some deaths which are not aesthetically pleasing perhaps you should think about the people in Falluja when white phosphorus burnt their skin off.
If you are not a yanqui, where are you from? Obviously not English or you would know how to spell “knife” correctly.

It’s actually a far more humane method of state execution that the methods used in the USA, such as lethal injection or the electric chair.

Except that the people the terrorists execute are truck drivers, election workers, students, doctors, etc.

They are innocent.

perroquet conveniently avoids that minor point.

Why am I not surprised?

Except that the people the terrorists execute are truck drivers, election workers, students, doctors, etc.

Apart from the fact there’s no evidence to support your accusations, certainly the majority of journalists murdered in Iraq were at the hands of the NewWorldNazis.

Vet - “sick murderers who hack innocent peoples heads off with a blunt nife and say they are doing it for GOD, come on your telling me it is ok to do that!!”

I know you’re new here and don’t realize that the US waged an illegal war of aggression against a nation that posed no threat to it. It’s not the other way around as you are trying to suggest. George Bush has even claimed that “God” told him to do it. So, are you trying to claim that there is a difference somehow because we are Americans so we can kill whomever we like?

link is here

link is hereıes_violated_by_pr.htm

“what if the multinational forces were to do they same to Iraqi’s”

Are you implying that the more humane method of slaughter is JDAM from 35kft? You’re value system is twisted.

“most the terrorists so far have been muslims, what does that tell you?.”

It tells me that you’re probably a racist and you don’t know what a terrorist is. Most of those whom you like to refer to as terrorists are actually insurgents or just plain criminals. Stop watching so much Fox news. They are fucking up your perception of reality.

“Yes the reasons to invade Iraq were dubious but hey lets move on and fix the problem.”

The case Bush presented was entirely fabricated. You know how I know? Simple detective work. Nobody is one hundred percent certain that someone possesses something without having any clue of where it is. You’re a sucker. Charles knows it, but he won’t admit it because he is here trying to protect the Republican party.

You don’t “move on” from mass murder. You incarcerate those responsible, which in this case is the Bush administration.

“Saying that how can you fix a problem with a people who still blame the jews for killing Christ, shit get over it!! the rest of the world has, move on.”

What the hell are you rambling on about? The US didn’t invade Iraq because the Muslims hate Jesus, so what does anything you are saying have to do with anything else? You seem a little addle-brained.

“Your joking right please tell me your joking!! ha ha i am suprised you have internet in the nut house you live in.”

You just act dismissive because the truth is that you have nothing to refute his premise, right? What you’re doing is called an “ad hominem” attack. When someone uses ad hominem attacks in a discussion such as this, they are actually broadcasting the fact that they are out of ammunitition.

Michael - “I have to say I’m amuses by people like VET”

He’s been indoctrinated. People in Vet’s state of mind are actually similar to cult-members. They have a twisted sense of reality. Vet is susceptible to this due to his weak character and lack of education.

Warnings on WMD ‘Fabricator’ Were Ignored, Ex-CIA Aide Says
By Joby Warrick

link is here
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, June 25, 2006; A01

In late January 2003, as Secretary of State Colin Powell prepared to argue the Bush administration’s case against Iraq at the United Nations, veteran CIA officer Tyler Drumheller sat down with a classified draft of Powell’s speech to look for errors. He found a whopper: a claim about mobile biological labs built by Iraq for germ warfare.
Drumheller instantly recognized the source, an Iraqi defector suspected of being mentally unstable and a liar. The CIA officer took his pen, he recounted in an interview, and crossed out the whole paragraph.

A few days later, the lines were back in the speech. Powell stood before the U.N. Security Council on Feb. 5 and said: “We have first-hand descriptions of biological weapons factories on wheels and on rails.”
The sentence took Drumheller completely by surprise.

“We thought we had taken care of the problem,” said the man who was the CIA’s European operations chief before retiring last year, “but I turn on the television and there it was, again.”
While the administration has repeatedly acknowledged intelligence failures over Iraqi weapons claims that led to war, new accounts by former insiders such as Drumheller shed light on one of the most spectacular failures of all: How U.S. intelligence agencies were eagerly drawn in by reports about a troubled defector’s claims of secret germ factories in the Iraqi desert. The mobile labs were never found.

Drumheller, who is writing a book about his experiences, described in extensive interviews repeated attempts to alert top CIA officials to problems with the defector, code-named Curveball, in the days before the Powell speech. Other warnings came prior to President Bush’s State of the Union address on Jan. 28, 2003. In the same speech that contained the now famous “16 words” on Iraqi attempts to acquire uranium, Bush spoke in far greater detail about mobile labs “designed to produce germ warfare agents.”The warnings triggered debates within the CIA but ultimately made no visible impact at the top, current and former intelligence officials said. In briefing Powell before his U.N. speech, George Tenet, then the CIA director, personally vouched for the accuracy of the mobile-lab claim, according to participants in the briefing. Tenet now says he did not learn of the problems with Curveball until much later and that he received no warnings from Drumheller or anyone else.

“No one mentioned Drumheller, or Curveball,” Lawrence B. Wilkerson, Powell’s chief of staff at the time, said in an interview. “I didn’t know the name Curveball until months afterward.”

Curveball’s role in shaping U.S. declarations about Iraqi bioweapons capabilities was first described in a series of reports in the Los Angeles Times, and later in a March 2005 report by a presidential commission on U.S. intelligence failures regarding allegations that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. But Drumheller’s first-hand accounts add new detail about the CIA’s embrace of a source whose credibility was already unraveling.

More than a year after Powell’s speech, after an investigation that extended to three continents, the CIA acknowledged that Curveball was a con artist who drove a taxi in Iraq and spun his engineering knowledge into a fantastic but plausible tale about secret bioweapons factories on wheels.

But in the fall of 2002, Curveball was living the life of an important spy. A Baghdad native whose real name has never been released, he was residing in a safe house in Germany, where he had requested asylum three years earlier. In return for immigration permits for himself and his family, the Iraqi supplied Germany’s foreign intelligence service with what appeared to be a rare insider’s account of one of President Saddam Hussein’s long-rumored WMD programs.

Curveball described himself as a chemical engineer who had worked inside an unusual kind of laboratory, one that was built on a trailer bed and produced weapons for germ warfare. He furnished detailed, technically complex descriptions of mobile labs and even described an industrial accident that he said killed a dozen people.

The German intelligence agency BND faithfully passed Curveball’s stories to the Americans. Over time, the informant generated more than 100 intelligence reports on secret Iraqi weapons programs — the only such reports from an informant claiming to have visited and worked in mobile labs. Other informants, also later discredited, had claimed indirect knowledge of mobile labs.

In late 2002, the Bush administration began scouring intelligence files for reports of Iraqi weapons threats. Drumheller was asked to press a counterpart from a European intelligence agency for direct access to Curveball. Other officials confirmed that it was the German intelligence service.

The German official declined but then offered a startlingly candid assessment, Drumheller recalled. “He said, ‘I think the guy is a fabricator,’ ” Drumheller said, recounting the conversation with the official, whom he declined to name. “He said: ‘We also think he has psychological problems. We could never validate his reports.’ ”

When Drumheller relayed the warning to his superiors in October 2002, it sparked what he described as “a series of the most contentious meetings I’ve ever seen” in three decades of government work.

Although no American had ever interviewed Curveball, analysts with the CIA’s Center for Weapons Intelligence, Nonproliferation and Arms Control believed the informant’s technical descriptions were too detailed to be fabrications.

“People were cursing. These guys were absolutely, violently committed to it,” Drumheller said. “They would say to us, ‘You’re not scientists, you don’t understand.’ ”

In January 2003, Drumheller received a new request from CIA headquarters to contact the German intelligence service about Curveball. This time, Drumheller recalled, the U.S. spy agency had three questions:

Could a U.S. official refer to Curveball’s mobile lab accounts in an upcoming political speech?

Could the Germans guarantee that Curveball would stand by his account?

Could German intelligence verify Curveball’s claims?

The reply from Berlin, as Drumheller recalls it, was less than encouraging: There are no guarantees.
“They said, ‘We have never been able to verify his claims,’ ” Drumheller recalled. “And that was all sent up to Tenet’s office.”

When Drumheller listened to Bush’s speech several days later, he was astonished to hear the mobile labs described in detail.
“Boom, there it was,” he said.

A few days later, Drumheller was handed a draft of another key speech on Iraq: Powell’s remarks to the U.N. Security Council accusing Hussein of reconstituting his WMD programs. This time, the speech included an obvious reference to Curveball — an unnamed “chemical engineer” who worked in one of the labs — as well as detailed drawings of mobile labs inspired by Curveball’s descriptions.

Drumheller said he called the office of John E. McLaughlin, then the CIA deputy director, and was told to come there immediately. Drumheller said he sat across from McLaughlin and an aide in a small conference room and spelled out his concerns.
McLaughlin responded with alarm and said Curveball was “the only tangible source” for the mobile lab story, Drumheller recalled, adding that the deputy director promised to quickly investigate.

Portions of Drumheller’s account of his meetings with McLaughlin and Tenet appear in the final report of the Silberman-Robb commission, which was appointed by Bush to investigate prewar U.S. intelligence failures on Iraq’s weapons programs. The report cites e-mails and interviews with other CIA officials who were aware of the meetings.

In responding to questions about Drumheller, McLaughlin provided The Post with a copy of the statement he gave in response to the commission’s report. The statement said he had no memories of the meeting with Drumheller and had no written documentation that the meeting took place.

“If someone had made these doubts clear to me, I would not have permitted the reporting to be used in Secretary Powell’s speech,” McLaughlin said in the statement.

In their briefings to Powell on Feb. 4, one day before the secretary’s U.N. speech, Tenet and McLaughlin expressed nothing but confidence in the mobile-lab story, according to Wilkerson, Powell’s chief of staff, who was present during the briefings.

“Powell and I were both suspicious because there were no pictures of the mobile labs,” Wilkerson said. The drawings were constructed from Curveball’s accounts.

But the CIA officials were persuasive. Wilkerson said the two men described the evidence on the mobile labs as exceptionally strong, based on multiple sources whose stories were independently corroborated.

“They said: ‘This is it, Mr. Secretary. You can’t doubt this one,’ ” Wilkerson said.

On the eve of the U.N. speech, Drumheller received a late-night phone call from Tenet, who said he was checking final details of the speech. Drumheller said he brought up the mobile labs.

“I said: ‘Hey, boss, you’re not going to use that stuff in the speech . . . ? There are real problems with that,’ ” Drumheller said, recalling the conversation.Drumheller recalled that Tenet seemed distracted and tired and told him not to worry.

The following day, Tenet was seated directly behind Powell at the U.N. Security Council as the secretary of state presented a detailed lecture and slide show about an Iraqi mobile biological weapons program.

Tenet, responding to questions about Drumheller’s accounts, provided to The Post a statement he had given in response to the Silberman-Robb Commission report in which he said he didn’t learn of the problems with Curveball until much later. He did not recall talking to Drumheller about Curveball, and said it was “simply wrong” for anyone to imply that he knew about the problems with Curveball’s credibility.

“Nobody came forward to say there is a serious problem with Curveball or that we have been told by the foreign representative of the service handling him that there are worries that he is a ‘fabricator,’ ” Tenet said in his statement.

In late summer 2003, seven months after the U.N. speech, Tenet called Powell to say that the Curveball story had fallen apart, Wilkerson said. The call amounted to an admission that all of the CIA’s claims Powell used in his speech about Iraqi weapons were wrong.
“They had hung on for a long time, but finally Tenet called Powell to say, ‘We don’t have that one, either,’ ” Wilkerson recalled. “The mobile labs were the last thing to go.”

Jon,

As if those JDAMS and M-4 rounds have been all that discriminating.

The US has not deliberately bombed civilians. Civilians have died, but its usually because they were in the close proximity to the intended targets, or the weapon malfunctioned/human targeting error. How can you possible conflate that with sawing people’s heads off?

So were the couple of hundred thousand Iraqis the US forces have smoked so far.

That’s just nuts. We have not ’smoked’ 250,000 Iraqis. When you say stuff like that it puts you ‘over the line.’

Charles, you can yap yap yap all you want. A crime was committed according to US and international law. There is an orgy of evidence to support that statement as fact.

Fine Jon - take us to court. That’s great. Ra Ra. Now how about the real issue of how to stabilize Iraq, promote democracy, and defeat the terrorists? Its interesting to note that the recent overtures by sunni insurgents included a 2 year timeline for US withdrawal. I guess they don’t want us to leave too quickly. The US is actually a stabilizing factor and the sunnis want us so they don’t get steamrolled by the shia.

Dude, you’re fucking lying, ya rat bastard.

Dude, I’m not sure what you have been smoking but the various commissions made it quite clear that the while the IC was wrong, Bush was not lying when he used the IC as the basis for his testimony. The President relies upon the IC to inform his decisions. The IC told him that Iraq was in violation, reconstituting its programs, etc. Don’t bother responding with ‘But Saddam didn’t have any weapons dude” because I have already admitted that the IC was wrong on many counts. But that doesn’t mean the President lied.

Most of the major key judgments in the Intelligence Community’s October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), Iraq’s Continuing Programs for Weapons of Mass Destruction, either overstated, or were not supported by, the underlying intelligence reporting. A series of failures, particularly in analytic trade craft, led to the mischaracterization of the intelligence.

No, the bottom line is that Bush waged an illegal war of aggression which has killed hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis in violation of US and international law.

OK Jon. Take us to court. Follow the law. It will be quite a show! But again, that can just as easily be taken up after Iraq has stabilized. Legal or illegal, its a done deal and you cannot just turn the clock back.

Jon,

Stop already with the West Point Grads website link. Its only how you and they interpret the Constitution. Its not the voice of God or even our forefathers.

Prove how this war is “illegal”. Illegal compared to what? What law has been legally abridged? Until you can prove these things, your argument still remains only an opinion. And West Point’s argument remains only it’s opinion.

Why not take the case of this war to the Supreme Court?

The man in Iraq just won his case against Rumsfeld so it may serve you and the others you agree with some good.

Let’s get politics out of the way and let justice be served.

That way we can get on with our lives and worry about our own issues.

I would so love to take some of you to Iraq to see what really is going on.

To see the good the Multinational Forces are doing and to show you that they are not murdering people for the fun of it.

If you reallybelieve they are you are so dumb and ignorant it begs belief.

Its fine for peole who have never been and seen to give comment, but come on over and see, Talk to the people on the ground about what really is going on not the insurgent spokesperson or a political party or the local mulla, just the regular Iraqi, you might be suprised.

I asked my close friend Ahmed how do you feel about the Multinational Forces being here, he said and i quote” we like the British and the others just not the US, i asked why not the US the only answer was they are friends of Israel” how fucked up is that?

What law was broken when the Coalition invaded Iraq?

What was it? i hear people say it was illegal, so what law was broken?

I have to say without quoting from a paper but from talking to iraqi’s they are glad the coalition came, they want the insurgents to stop and they want the Forces to leave when Iraq is secure, and that is upto the insurgents and the Iraqi Goverment.

Maybe i look at it in black and white but hey stop fighting = coalition leave = Iraq stable and free, wow it seems so simple.

I have lived in Basra and Baghdad, Baghdad right now and i have electricity and water, yes its intermittent now and again but hey stop blowing up the power stations and water sources, its not the US doing the damage.

I suppose your friend paid a man called Joe right?

Your friend would have a job if the reconstruction programme could get moving but its too dangerous, because of the insurgents, so hey have a chat to them and explain to them its not working, its just delaying the futre.

Its a shame your friend had a problem at the hospital but its not the fault of the coalition, its the fault of the Hospital and the coruption.

Shit stop fighting th coalition the UN will return after they murdered the head of mission…mmmmm did we forget that the UN came to help and you repaid them by killing the head of mission.

You need to visit and i would love to take you , how long do you think it would be till the people you defend put you in a boiler suit and cut your head off with a blunt spoon

Here’s an example of the US forces involvement in extortion.

link is here

U.S. military officials say California Army National Guard troops charged Iraqi merchants illegal rent, the Los Angeles Times reports.

The announcement Friday is the latest in an ongoing investigation into the conduct of the Guard’s 1st Battalion of the 184th Infantry Regiment, based in Modesto, Calif.

The battalion’s commander, Lt. Col. Patrick Frey, has already been suspended and one of the battalion’s companies has been taken off patrol duty.

An unnamed officer also has had disciplinary action taken against him. Lt. Col. Cliff Kent, a spokesman for the 3rd Infantry Division in Iraq, said that two vendors inside Baghdad’s Green Zone paid the rent to members of Bravo Company.

Army officials claim only $4,000 was paid, but battalion troops say it was more than $30,000.

The money allegedly went into a soldier’s fund, used to pay bills back home and for items such as t-shirts and commemorative coins in Iraq.

Baghdad right now and i have electricity and water,

That is not true,

Electricity is 6 hours a day only

link is here

Currently, even in the best neighbourhoods of Baghdad there is only twelve hours of electricity per day, and this only intermittently.Most areas of the city have between six and eight hours of power per 24 hours,

Amd with your news clippings about one person i the US forces doing the charging people, i think its wrong too but i do not label every other member of the US military with the same brush, one does not make all evil.

The same goes for Iraqi’s, not every iraqi is a insurgent.

Michael - in a way this is a childish punch but in a way it’s not. I’m going to bet that you are a “Christian�? and since international law is such a vauge and ambigious thing, let’s take it back to the real big basics.

Yes of course I’m a Christian, but International Law is quite clear as I’ve already detailed above. The invasion of Iraq was contrary to the Geneva Convention and International Law, there’s not the slightest bit of doubt about that. Sure the Yanquis don’t want to know just as the Nazis invading Czechoslovia didn’t want to know, but the time will come when you have no doubt.

Wake up dude - Jesus was a liberal. Again - I’m going to bet that you claim Jesus in whatever way you do it. Great. Live it. Killing follows killing. Jesus was all about tha killin’ right?

I may be a Christian by I’m not a Christian fundamentalist or extremist of the kind you see in the USA. They are the people that give religion a bad name.

Yep, we lost 3000 people on 9/11 - know any of them? I do. My best friend from college wen’t down. My very best friend. Would he have been happy to hear that a single iraqi child died to make sure someone got it back for him? no fucking way.

How Yanquis like to remind everyone about 9/11 but either want to forget Albright’s 500,000 children being “worth it” or simply are in ignorance. The world didn’t start revolving on 9/11 and it could be argued that it was totally deserved.

No it is not you are crazy and talking crap, you know nothing, you moan for no reason, yes bad thinkgs have happend but i do no thear you condeming the insurgents or the saddam regime, not once have you all you do is bitch the USA

The answer is simple “Vet”, without the illegal invasion none of the deaths in Iraq would be happening right now.
“If we lose this war, oil will be $100 a barrel, and if we win, it will be, like, $25 a barrel.” — Donald Rumsfeld, American Defense Secretary

“If we lose this war, oil will be $100 a barrel, and if we win, it will be, like, $25 a barrel.�?

Any chance someone could provide a direct link on that quote?

Rummy may be evil and sinister and mean and make milkshakes out of babies, but he is far from stupid. That is just stupid.

Iraq makes up about 2% of world production. Even if we stole ALL of Iraq’s oil, thereby decreasing world market demand by about 2%, it would not impact market prices in the least. Well, maybe a tiiiiiiny bit. But probably not since world consumption is increasing at a similar rate.

Its very odd that he would say that.

Perroquet - what is the original source for this? I tried googling but it all seems to lead back to an op-ed from Mohamed Elmasry. He does not reference the quote.

If its true, I’m glad Runny is responsible for military issues and not the economy…

Perroquet,

Why are your posts always filled with such hate and fantastic hyperbole? You seem a bit unhinged.

Now if we actually consider the facts - and not your hyperbolized fantasies, we would see that Iraq produces roughly 2% of the worlds oil. If ALL of that were stolen (there is no historical precedent for this type of action, nor is there any evidence to suggest this), then it would NOT significantly impact world market prices. This is because rising world demand would compensate for the decrease in US demand from world markets.

Now if the US were somehow able to instantly increase production in the sorely run down infrastructure by 5x-10x, then it would impact prices. But if the increases in production were spread out over the next 5-10 years, it would be absorbed by increased US and world demand. Keep in mind, as prices dropped, there would be an increase in demand as people consumed more, so things would actually balance out.

All of your extremist conclusions are based on fantasies you invent perroquet.

You really do have a knack of coming out with crap. Must of Iraq’s current oil production, limited though it is, is being unmetered. In other words no one actually knows for sure how much is being produced and therefore it’s impossible to know what price the USA is paying for it, if anything at all. Clearly this has an effect on whether OPEC can sell their oil at the desired price, at least it would if the US could improve production, therefore it would under those circumstances affect all oil prices.
link is here

Iraq Oil Reserves and Production History. With 115 billion barrels of provencrude oil reserves, Iraq has the world’s second-largest endowment of oil, amounting to 11% of the global total. Only 17 of 80 oil fields have been developed; the mostsignificant are Kirkuk in the north and Rumaila in the south. There has been virtuallynoexploration for many years, suggesting that Iraq may have much more oil than currentlyestimated. Iraq also has significant proven natural gas reserves; virtually all areundeveloped. As a point of reference, Saudi Arabia, at 260 billion barrels of proven oilreserves, has the largest reserve base and can produce as much as 10.5 million barrels perday (mbd).

Iraqi Oil Production Potential. With 112 billion barrels of proven oil reserves,Iraq could potentially produce far more oil than has been realized in its history. Given astable security situation, very large amounts of capital investment, and the involvementof one or more large oil companies, it would be realistic to suggest potential outputramping up to 5 or 6 million barrels per day over a period of several years. But, givencurrent difficulties, it would seem that this sort of eventuality is far off.

Again, tripling oil production over several years, if it were in fact all stolen, would not cause a collapse in oil prices. World demand is increasing as fast or faster than production increases. Also, if prices were to drop, that demand would simply increase faster.

I think the simple fact that you are overlooking, or more likely not prepared to admit, is that the current reduced oil production is not a part of the plan. You can tell from Rumsfeld’s quote that the expectation was that the oil would actually pay for the invasion. Thanks to the resistance that ambition has not been realised.

But there is still nothing to suggest that the US would be capable or even strategically interested in stealing the oil production. That would be hard not to notice. Even in our most gruesome imperialistic moods, we are still happy to pay a fair price.

Really? you do come out with some crap.

“In the past, dependence on oil has cost our economy dearly. Oil price shocks and price manipulation by the OPEC cartel from 1979 to 1991 cost the U.S. economy about $4 trillion, almost as much as we spent on national defense over the same time period and more than the interest payments on the national debt. Each major price shock of the past three decades was followed by an economic recession in the United States. With growing U.S. imports and increasing world dependence on OPEC oil, future price shocks are possible and would be costly to the U.S. economy.”
(Source: U.S. Department of Energy, Spring 2002.)

link is here

Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz: “There’s a lot of money to pay for this that doesn’t have to be U.S. taxpayer money, and it starts with the assets of the Iraqi people…and on a rough recollection, the oil revenues of that country could bring between $50 and $100 billion over the course of the next two or three years…We’re dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction, and relatively soon.�? [Source: House Committee on Appropriations Hearing on a Supplemental War Regulation, 3/27/03]

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld: “If you [Source: worry about just] the cost, the money, Iraq is a very different situation from Afghanistan…Iraq has oil. They have financial resources.�? [Source: Fortune Magazine, Fall 2002]

State Department Official Alan Larson: “On the resource side, Iraq itself will rightly shoulder much of the responsibilities. Among the sources of revenue available are $1.7 billion in invested Iraqi assets, the found assets in Iraq…and unallocated oil-for-food money that will be deposited in the development fund.�? [Source: Senate Foreign Relations Committee Hearing on Iraq Stabilization, 06/04/03]

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld: “I don’t believe that the United States has the responsibility for reconstruction, in a sense…[Reconstruction] funds can come from those various sources I mentioned: frozen assets, oil revenues and a variety of other things, including the Oil for Food, which has a very substantial number of billions of dollars in it. [Source: Senate Appropriations Hearing, 3/27/03]

Although world petroleum consumption growth has slowed because of higher prices, projected consumption growth nevertheless remains strong at 1.7 million barrels per day (bbl/d) in 2006 and 1.9 million bbl/d in 2007.

What has this to do with the US calling it’s own price on Iraqi oil?

check this out liar, it’s about unmetered oil

UNITED NATIONS, Feb. 24 – While Iraq is on lockdown, that country’s oil continues to flow unmetered. Basic information about the issue continues to be shrouded in mystery by the International Advisory and Monitoring Board for the Development Fund for Iraq. In just-released minutes of IAMB’s Jan. 23 meeting in Paris, it is vaguely stated that “the IAMB was informed that no progress had been made with regards to the metering contract.�?

4/3/2006
link is here
Iraqi oil exports dive; there’s no telling where the money went
Filed under: General Commentary Weldon’s Page Eat the Press— Weldon Berger @ 3:57 pm
Permanent Link
Iraq’s oil exports hit another post-invasion low in December and January, according to the Oil & Gas Journal. How do they know? Good question: according to Reuters, production and exports have gone unmetered since the Coalition Provisional Authority took over the country following the 2003 invasion; until new meters are installed, everybody’s just guessing.

Among the best chronicles of the haziness surrounding Iraq’s oil production and exports — and the general pall of corruption that hangs over the country — comes from journalist Ed Harriman, writing in the July, 2005 issue of the London Review of Books. Harriman wrote that in addition to the roughly $9 billion in Iraqi oil funds that vanished without a trace during CPA head Paul Bremer’s reign, the International Advisory and Monitoring Board established to oversee and audit CPA expenditures of Iraqi cash “discovered that Iraqi oil exports were unmetered.�?

Iraq would be producing 3 times more oil than it does now

Certainly not a bad thing for Iraq.

It could be of course, if Iraq wasn’t occupied and that the profits are being creamed off by American companies and in some cases simply embezzled.

and at a price the USA calls

Where does this come from?

Are you doubting it? Did you not read the link concerning the missing $9 billion in oil revenues during the time that Bremner was in charge? Now of course it’s being un metered. Why exactly, are meters hard to come by?

But you have already drawn a conclusion before such a thing has occurred. Your claims lack logical validity.

And your denials lack all credibility, even for a professional liar.