Big Dogs Weblog

At a Loss For Words

by Blake on Jul 18, 2009 at 08:36 Political

Everybody on the left has had a boring mantra with regards to the Iraq War- NO BLOOD FOR OIL. Sounds simple enough, but then these same people carp on how much this war is costing our country. Wouldn’t it be nice if we, the United States, got a little of that money back from Iraq in the form of oil, which we could use to alleviate some of the money crunch in this country? After all, it is the currency du jour in Iraq at the moment- but noooooo. Several Senators have taken it upon themselves to ensure that the Chinese get the sweet deals, not us. WTF?

The Iraqi government was poised to sign no-bid contracts with those firms this summer to help make immediate and needed improvements in Iraq’s oil infrastructure. The result would have been significant foreign investment in Iraq, an expansion of Iraqi government revenues, and an increase in the global supply of oil. One would have thought that leading Democratic senators who claim to be interested in finding other sources of funding to replace American dollars in Iraq, in helping Iraq spend its own money on its own people, and in lowering the price of gasoline for American citizens, would have been all for it. Instead, Senators Chuck Schumer, John Kerry, and Claire McCaskill wrote a letter to Secretary of State Rice asking her “to persuade the GOI [Government of Iraq] to refrain from signing contracts with multinational oil companies until a hydrocarbon law is in effect in Iraq.” The Bush administration wisely refused to do so, but the resulting media hooraw in Iraq led to the cancellation of the contracts, and helps to explain why Iraq is doing oil deals instead with China.

.weeklystandard.com

Isn’t that sweet of them, throwing the poor Chinese a bone like that-  after all, those poor Chinese have nothing, that’s what my mother always told me when I wouldn’t finish my meal, I was lectured incessantly about the starving people in China, so perhaps this was some kind of  “HusseinAid” or something, but it just didn’t seem right to me. Hadn’t we spent our blood and fortune over there to help the Iraqis? Shouldn’t we, as the Mafia might say, “get a taste?” Apparently not until Iraq mollifies these politicians, we do not.

Senators Schumer, McCaskill, and Kerry claimed to be acting from the purest of motives: “It is our fear that this action by the Iraqi government could further deepen political tensions in Iraq and put our service members in even great danger.” For that reason, presumably, Schumer went so far as to ask the senior vice president of Exxon “if his company would agree to wait until the GOI produced a fair, equitable, and transparent hydrocarbon revenue sharing law before it signed any long-term agreement with the GOI.” Exxon naturally refused, but Schumer managed to get the deal killed anyway. But the ostensible premise of the senators’ objections was false–Iraq may not have a hydrocarbons law, but the central government has been sharing oil revenues equitably and there is no reason at all to imagine that signing the deals would have generated increased violence (and this was certainly not the view of American civilian and military officials on the ground in Iraq at the time). It is certain that killing the deals has delayed the maturation of Iraq’s oil industry without producing the desired hydrocarbons legislation.

weeklystandard.com

Now these Senators are trying to insert themselves into the laws of Iraq, with disastrous results, but then look at what they do over here. At this rate, they should be able to completely undo all we have accomplished in Iraq in record time, nullifying everything that might contribute to Iraq’s independence. What- do they then dare blame the failure they brought about on Bush? I bet they do- it’s an infantile thing, like a baby screaming the only word it knows- “Mine, mine, mine–” .

Nor is it entirely clear what the senators’ motivations were. Their release (available along with their letter to Secretary Rice at the New York Observer quoted Senator McCaskill as follows: “‘It’s bad enough that we have no-bid contracts being awarded for work in Iraq. It’s bad enough that the big oil companies continue to receive government handouts while they post record breaking profits. But now the most profitable companies in the universe–America’s biggest oil companies–stand to reap the rewards of this no-bid contract on top of it all,’ McCaskill said. ‘It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to connect these dots–big oil is running Washington and now they’re running Baghdad. There is no reason under the sun not to halt these agreements until we get revenue sharing in place,’ McCaskill said.” So was this about what’s best for Iraq and American interests there or about nailing “big oil” in an election year?

 weeklystandard.com

Yep, let’s all cut off our nose to spite our face- these dumb-a$$ politicians wold rather the Chinese get this oil instead of the “big, bad, oil companies” that are United States based, and who would get the profits that would be taxed by our country- no that would be too logical, doing something that actually benefits our country. Well, we just can’t have that, can we? Might set a bad liberal precedent, and that just can’t be. 

Sometimes, what these liberal politicians do just has me at a loss for words.

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Tags: exxon, idiots, iraqi oil, liberals, schumer