http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...6061400626.html

2500 hundred dead and counting.

Now, as many US people have died in Iraq as did regular people in the WTC 9-11. (not counting resuers.)

Of course they say 30,000 to 100000 Iraqi's are dead and more wounded. MOre God loving fearing innocent people destroyed by Bush.

Bush is lying as usual, same as his mission accomplished. He is trying to inflate the polls with phony bravado. It will work short term. Then reality sets in. Another Katrina is just around the corner. (why do you think the right made such a fuss about some fraud in the FEMA stats which is probably more lies anyhow).

Soldier's Diary: Army Reenlistment Up, Soldiers Get Recognized in Iraq

With double whammy of good news, Iraq’s PM grabs control

So far so good for Iraq's Maliki

Winning the Iraq Wars

Bad news for liberals

The good news

News analysis

Good News Is Bad News for Tone Deaf Dems

An Accord In Iraq?

USDA heads to Iraq to help rebuild ag industry

Good news is no news

Plan for reconciliation among Iraqis deserves consideration, encouragement

Wages of defeatism

Something's Different in Iraq: Tipping Point Reached?

HMMMM - Tic Tac Toe anyone?


lenal

Iraq Lifts Oil Output in South

New and Reopened Wells Reverse
Declines, Show Fields' Potential
By CHIP CUMMINS in Basra, Iraq, and HASSAN HAFIDH in Amman, Jordan
July 19, 2006; Page A4

Iraqi engineers have significantly lifted crude-oil output capacity in the country's southern fields, delivering a short-term shot in the arm to Baghdad's new government and underscoring its oil supply's vast geologic potential despite increasing sectarian violence and insurgency.

For more than three years, Iraq's oil industry has struggled to claw back production lost during the U.S.-led invasion and its chaotic aftermath. Iraq's northern fields still are largely bottled up, frustrating that aim for the time being. The recent output gains in the south come from new or long-shut-down wells that are flowing again, representing the first significant capacity gains since the fall of Saddam Hussein. The new additions have reversed a sharp decline in output starting late last year and continuing through the first two months of this year.

Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman discusses escalating oil prices1 and the securing of Iraq's oil supply.Amid today's soaring global oil demand, the higher production in Iraq also offers a counterpoint to much of the oil-producing world, where state-run and publicly traded companies alike are chasing oil deposits in increasingly difficult and expensive places. Even Saudi Arabia, the world's biggest exporter, is turning to its harder-to-reach heavy crude to slake world markets.

Despite its troubles, Iraq remains one of the world's largest oil producers, pumping 2% of daily global demand. The recent gains in southern Iraq aren't enough to lower global prices in a marketplace where demand growth has been outstripping new supplies. Amid stretched markets, even minor disruptions in places like Nigeria have sent prices soaring. The extra Iraqi capacity, however, provides a welcome cushion.

In Iraq, war and sanctions have long kept production from living up to the country's vast potential, based on its estimated reserves of oil under the ground. Some experts have warned that years of poor oil-field management under Mr. Hussein and damage caused by looters and saboteurs in the past three years may have permanently damaged the country's big reservoirs. The recent output jump suggests Iraqi oil fields still can be tapped relatively easily once oil-field workers get a chance to work them properly.

Despite heightened violence in Basra recently, the nearby southern fields have remained relatively secure and accessible. Iraqi and U.S. engineers and contractors there have spent most of their postinvasion reconstruction efforts fixing aboveground infrastructure such as pumping stations, pipelines and processing plants. Now, they are turning their attention underground.

Officials from Iraq's state-owned South Oil Co., based in Basra, say the production gains come after they repaired, reopened or simply hooked up dozens of older, nonproducing wells and drilled some new ones. In recent weeks, the newly activated wells have boosted output in the south by about a fifth, to two million barrels a day, from 1.65 million barrels a day, they say.

The southern oil region is now pumping as much as it did before the invasion three years ago, according to South Oil. As of now, there is no outside verification for those figures, but production estimates from South Oil officials have generally matched reported output from third parties in the past. (Unofficial production could be even higher amid widespread allegations of crude-oil smuggling.)

"Now, we are able to resume normal production from the south," said Jabbar el-Leaby, managing director of South Oil, in a phone interview from his Basra office.

The success is a welcome turnaround from January, when South Oil was struggling with a number of political and bureaucratic hurdles that delayed necessary oil-field work. Late last year and early this year, southern crude-oil production and exports sagged sharply.

This month, Iraqi officials also managed to sell significant quantities of crude from Iraq's northern fields for the first time in almost a year. The oil was pumped in fits and starts along an export pipeline and into storage tanks in Turkey. Insurgent attacks and maintenance problems have prevented that line from operating reliably for much of the past three years.

That has kept overall Iraqi production significantly below prewar levels of about 2.5 million barrels a day. Iraq briefly approached prewar production levels in 2004 only to see output slide again.


The oil industry remains a prime target of attacks amid the country's growing unrest. During the weekend, unidentified gunmen kidnapped the managing director of North Oil Co., the state-owned production company in the north, as he was attending meetings in Baghdad. Growing unrest in southern Iraq could unwind the recent gains. There have been isolated protests and threats of strikes from locals looking for work or oil-field hands dissatisfied with pay. Sectarian and insurgency-related violence also could spill into the fields, which stretch miles over dusty, brush-covered desert.

Mr. Leaby said big problems persist, including a lack of adequate funding from the Ministry of Oil. Mr. Leaby's independent-minded South Oil has jostled with the ministry over funding and control in the past. "We [will be] able to maintain this level of production and even increase it if the ministry renders us financial and administrative support," he said, without specifying any financial requirements.

Mr. Leaby said South Oil plans to raise output to 2.25 million barrels a day by the end of this year. Many production forecasts from Iraqi and U.S. officials in Baghdad have proved too optimistic in the past. U.S. military engineers, working with South Oil engineers on several projects, say Western contractors are expected to finish by the end of the year a handful of big jobs that could help bring new production.

One of those projects is hooking up and turning on more unfinished or capped wells, according to U.S. Navy Capt. Michael Sherbak, chief of oil projects for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in Baghdad. The wells were drilled years ago. Some were never completed because of a lack of parts, while others were shut down prematurely. Army engineers and their contractors are planning to help South Oil get 60 of these wells on line by year end, Capt. Sherbak said.

Write to Chip Cummins at chip.cummins@wsj.com2 and Hassan Hafidh at hassan.hafidh@wsj.com3

URL for this article:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB115327302781510646.html

July 17, 2006 Issue
Copyright © 2006 The American Conservative

American Petrocracy

Among the shifting rationales for the war in Iraq, the most plausible motive may be the least discussed: access to oil.

by Kevin Phillips

Few lies have wound up injuring Americans more—in everything from automobile gas tanks and winter heating bills to diminished U.S. global standing—than a rarely revisited three-year-old fib-fest involving George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, and Tony Blair. Since World War I, history is clear: the British and Americans have been pre-occupied with only one thing in Iraq—oil. Yet in 2003, as their troops again disembarked, the pretense was all about good and evil, democracy and freedom. The disastrous outcome of the unacknowledged Middle Eastern mission, the struggle for petroleum, has rarely been discussed.

In part, that’s because a credulous press has swallowed an extraordinary fraud. Speaking on behalf of George W. Bush, then White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer insisted in February 2003, “If this had anything to do with oil, the position of the United States would be to lift the sanctions so the oil could flow. This is not about that. This is about saving lives by protecting the American people.” In November 2002, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had likewise declared, “it has nothing to do with oil, literally nothing to do with oil.” On the other side of the Atlantic, British Prime Minister Tony Blair told Parliament in early 2003, “Let me deal with the conspiracy theory that this has something to do with oil. There is no way whatever that if oil were the issue, it wouldn’t be simpler to cut a deal with Saddam Hussein.”

Horse manure. In the run-up to war, from Alberta to Texas, oilmen gossiped about the centrality of oil. Meetings of petroleum geologists buzzed about the so-called “peak oil” forecast that a dangerous top in global production was only a decade or two away. Specialized publications guesstimated how much taking over Iraqi oil could mean for profits and Exxon and Chevron. Polls of ordinary citizens from Europe to Latin America and the Mideast produced similar findings: people thought the invasion was about oil.

The Gulf War in 1991 certainly had been. When the first President Bush went into the Persian Gulf in force that year, it was indeed about petroleum. He openly stated, “our jobs, our way of life, our own freedom and the freedom of friendly countries around the world would all suffer if control of the world’s great oil reserves fell into the hands of Saddam Hussein.” The idea that Saddam Hussein was a second Hitler was a rhetorical embellishment. Back during the Cold War, even when Washington worried about the Soviet Union rolling into Iran and reaching the Persian Gulf, American concern arose out of the geopolitics of oil, not some abstract commitment to representative government and democracy.

The British had indulged their own motivational buncombe in the aftermath of the First World War when the Marquess of Curzon, Britain’s foreign secretary, said that the influence of oil in the new boundaries drawn for Iraq was “nil.” “Oil,” he said, “had not the remotest connection with my attitude, or with that of His Majesty’s Government, over Mosul.” By 1924, as the British agreed to cut American oil companies in for a share of Iraq’s oil production, the centrality of oil was obvious. Curzon’s claim that London sought to bring freedom and self-government to the Arabs was mocked in Parliament and on Fleet Street.

But that was 80 years ago, and today’s opinion-molding elites—in the United States, at least—are far more gullible. Too many are still psychologically embedded in the hard-charging pretense that surrounded the 2003 U.S. military incursion. The revelation that Saddam’s much trumpeted weapons of mass destruction seem not to have existed has yet to lead to the next logical re-evaluation: just how much more credibility should be given to the three sweeping “it wasn’t about oil” assurances quoted earlier? After all, if oil was involved, then the U.S. disaster in Iraq, doubly bungled, represents the greatest wartime failure since James Madison let the British burn Washington in 1814.

Vice President Dick Cheney, the one top official who avoided denying that oil had anything to do with the Iraq invasion, is precisely the man whose attentions must be examined to illustrate the depth of oil motivations. In 1999, when Cheney was still the head of Halliburton, the oil-services giant, he made a shrewd speech to the London Institute of Petroleum in which he gloomed over coming oil-supply problems: “By some estimates, there will be an average of two per cent annual growth in global oil demand over the years ahead along with conservatively a 3 percent natural decline in production from existing reserves. That means by 2010 we will need on the order of an additional 50 million barrels a day.”

Those barrels would have to come largely from the Middle East, and a few years earlier the Wall Street Journal had reported an Anglo-American oil company consensus: that Iraq, specifically, was “the biggie” in terms of potential future reserves. During 2001, the energy task force that became Cheney’s first major assignment as vice president spent much time poring over maps of the oilfields in Iraq and the rival nations—China, Russia, and France among them—to whom Saddam Hussein intended to give the concessions for development. Part of Cheney’s mandate involved “actions regarding the capture of new and existing oil and gas fields.”

This was getting down to the primal underpinnings of the 2003 invasion. According to Paul Roberts in his 2004 book The End of Oil, Cheney and his task-force colleagues

pored over maps of Iraqi oilfields to estimate how much Iraqi oil might be dumped quickly on the [post-invasion] market. Before the war, Iraq had been producing 3.5 million barrels a day, and many in the industry and the administration believed that the volume could easily be increased to 7 million by 2010. If so—and if Iraq [under U.S. control] could be convinced to ignore its OPEC quota and start producing at maximum capacity—the flood of new oil would effectively end OPEC’s ability to control prices.

The Anglo-American firms, in turn, would be in the catbird’s seat.

As for the supposed weapons of mass destruction, these had already played a crucial role. The United Nations sanctions imposed in the early 1990s included provisions that Saddam could not sign over development of the big Iraqi oilfields to foreign companies. On one hand, this gave the French, Russians, and Chinese an incentive to get Iraq out from under the sanctions. But on another, the key allegations that enabled the U.S. and Britain to keep sanctions in place were—what else?—Saddam’s alleged weapons of mass destruction. Without WMD, the sanctions would have fallen away, and the rivals of the U.S. and Britain would have gotten the “biggie” oilfields.

In short, the weapons of mass destruction drumbeat was substantially tied to oil and had already done its essential job by the time the invasion took place. Accept this logic and it makes mincemeat out of the Bush-Rumsfeld-Blair pretense.

The cynic will say, yes, but why could Bush and Rumsfeld not talk a little bit about oil just as the first Bush had prior to the Gulf War? Strategically, there were major differences. In 2003, there was no Kuwait to liberate as a justification for tangling with Saddam. This time it was a flat-out invasion to topple Saddam and take control. Admitting that oil was a principal motivation would have lost the public-relations battle not just in the Middle East but around most of the world. The administration had to have some larger, more noble rationale, and the war on terror offered a broad umbrella. At every opportunity, officials of the Bush administration, not least the president himself, tried to tie Saddam Hussein to terrorism and, indirectly, even to 9/11.

Furthermore, the White House had to consider the huge religious and biblical element of the coalition that elected Bush in 2000. Newsweek polling back in 1999 found that 45 percent of American Christians believed in Armageddon and the end times, and almost as many thought that the Antichrist was already alive and on the earth. Because such beliefs concentrate among very pro-Bush evangelicals, fundamentalists, and Pentecostals, my estimate is that some 55 percent of the people who voted for Bush in 2000 would have told pollsters about believing in the end times and Armageddon.

This will strike many as an exaggeration, but the phenomenon is an important one. Richard Cizik of the National Association of Evangelicals noted in 2003 that since the break-up of the USSR, “evangelicals have substituted Islam for the Soviet Union. The Muslims have become the modern-day equivalent of the Evil Empire.” According to University of Wisconsin historian Paul Boyer, by the 1990s many prophecy believers saw Saddam as the Antichrist or his forerunner, partly because Saddam was rebuilding the ancient evil city of Babylon. The Left Behind series by Tim LaHaye fictionalized the Rapture-Tribulation-Armageddon sequence so successfully that it sold a whopping 60 million copies in book and tape form. Most of the readers were Bush backers.

Politically, this confronted the White House with both a strategic dilemma and a parallel opportunity. On the plus side, the huge chunk of Bush voters would want to view the U.S. attempt to topple Saddam Hussein in terms of the war of good versus evil. Weapons of mass destruction were a prop but collateral to the larger biblical context. Invading Iraq would evoke that context because Saddam was one of the evil ones—maybe the Evil One, given his Babylon tie-in. Toppling him could aspire to biblical interpretation. Aiding Israel was also biblically vital. Bush had already carved out a related, overarching “good versus evil” posture with his heavily religious post-9/11 rhetoric.

The minuses were fewer but cautionary. It was fine for the White House to criticize the United Nations because the international body was a favorite whipping post among the high-octane preachers given to quoting the Book of Revelation. Oil, however, wasn’t part of the biblical prophecy framework. In LaHaye’s series, petroleum was a minor strategic gambit of the Antichrist, not the business of the good guys. Oil’s increasing centrality was a bad sign on the websites of omen-counters like raptureready.com.

Maybe this had something to do with the Bush-Rumsfeld-Blair posture of oil not being at all involved and maybe it didn’t. However, the rhetorical fact remains: oil-related motives and objectives were insistently forsworn, even if they were prominent—especially in Dick Cheney’s petroleum-savvy mind. Many Americans think his task force has been kept wrapped in secrecy because large oil companies were closely involved, but keeping oil-related war motivations hidden may have been even more vital.

If the Americans and British did act substantially for oil—and that seems highly likely—then it is fair to judge the Iraqi failure by oil-policy yardsticks and outcomes. The quick summation, obviously, is that whereas oil was selling at roughly $30 a barrel in 2002 as the White House was plotting its invasion and occupation, by late 2004 it cost a more painful $40 per barrel. By the time the operation was marking its third anniversary this spring, petroleum was flirting with $75 a barrel.

There is no room in this article to document that prior to the U.S. invasion in 2003, everything about Iraq (and neighboring Kuwait) generally boiled down to oil. Suffice it to say that Iraq’s new boundaries were drawn around oil after World War I; Axis forces invaded from Syria in 1941 in pursuit of petroleum; important Persian Gulf surveys generally concentrated on oilfields; the maps Cheney looked at in 2001 were about oil; and on entering Baghdad in 2003, the first government building U.S. troops occupied was the Oil Ministry, with its seismic maps of the rich Iraqi oilfields.

Anglo-American politics had also become increasingly shaped by oil. The Bush administration marked the first time that both the president and the vice president hailed from the oil industry. British Prime Minister Tony Blair, in turn, was so close to British Petroleum that wags called BP “Blair Petroleum.”

Besides, if oil had nothing to do with the invasion, why did top officials of the Bush administration mention it in predicting how well the invasion would work out? Cheney opined that by the end of 2003, Iraqi oil output would hit 3 million barrels a day, and Lawrence Lindsey, the White House economic adviser, talked about 3-5 million, saying in September 2002, “the key issue is oil, and a regime change in Iraq would facilitate an increase in world oil” so as to drive down prices. Paul Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld’s deputy in the Pentagon, enthused that increased Iraqi oil revenues could pay for the war. And White House speechwriter David Frum wrote in his 2003 book on Bush that the war on terror was designed to “bring new stability to the most vicious and violent quadrant of the earth—and new prosperity to us all, by securing the world’s largest pool of oil.”

The best way to assess the oil-related outcomes—all bungles, no boons—is to use three different yardsticks: postwar oil supplies and prices; recrimination against the U.S. dollar; and the rising portion of U.S. defense outlays that had to be spent on protecting land and deep-water oilfields, pipelines, and sea lanes vital to oil tankers.

The administration’s hope that a quick and overwhelming victory in Iraq would unleash enough new oil production to flood the markets and undercut OPEC, however absurd in retrospect, tantalized traders during the invasion weeks. On March 21, 2003, the Financial Times noted, “futures prices suggest that when it is over, OPEC will shower the world with crude and the price will fall out of its $22-28 band late next year.”

Instead, occupied Iraq turned into a quicksand of guerrilla and sectarian rivalry. Insurgents attacked and disrupted pipelines and refineries, and truck drivers refused to transport oil from the north. During the winter of 2005-2006, Iraqi production dropped as low as 1.1 million barrels a day, and covering this production gap took almost all of OPEC’s spare capacity and forced prices higher. Dalton Garis, an economist at the Petroleum Institute in Abu Dhabi, told the Associated Press in April 2006, “Iraq could be making a tremendous difference.” Instead, its shortfall is “a significant contributing factor to the high price of oil.”

American economists Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes, in a draft paper entitled “The Economic Costs of the Iraq War: An Appraisal Three Years After the Beginning of the Conflict,” reached a similar but much more detailed and buttressed conclusion. Publicly, Stiglitz and Bilmes attribute $5-10 of the increased per barrel cost of oil to the mess in Iraq, but their private view seems to be that a very large portion of the now $45-per-barrel oil-price increase is attributable to Iraq.

That makes sense if one considers the hostile reactions of many of the world’s oil-producing nations to the behavior the Bush administration was exhibiting in Iraq and elsewhere. For several years prior to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, that nation had been insisting—contrary to global policies in effect since the 1970s—that it would price its oil sales in euros, not dollars. Other major OPEC producers—Venezuela and Iran—also began talking about kindred moves and so did elements of the European community. Just after the U.S. invasion, Newsweek’s Howard Fineman wrote that the real clash was not over weapons of mass destruction but over the dollar versus the euro—“who gets to sell—and buy—Iraqi oil, and what form of currency will be used to denominate the value of the sales ... yet another skirmish in a growing economic conflict.” Few others had the courage to raise the issue.

Had a U.S. triumph in Iraq enabled Washington to control and open the oil spigots in Iraq, OPEC would have been obliged to desist from talking about dropping the dollar to price oil in euros or a so-called basket of currencies. But as the various dimensions of U.S. failure became clear in 2003 and 2004, other nations—Indonesia, Malaysia, and Russia (not an OPEC member)—began to show their currency claws. Six months after the U.S. invasion, as Iraqi oil output shrank in the face of relentless sabotage of pipelines and other facilities by insurgents, even Saudi Arabia displayed its disdain, not by currency actions but by giving a big gas-development contract to French Total instead of ExxonMobil.

As of 2006, the U.S. dollar has been dropping again, with the ever more conspicuous failure of Bush administration energy policy—this year the U.S. will spend $300-350 billion on imported oil—a significant backdrop. Should these trends intensify and OPEC cease to price oil in dollars, the added burden on Americans will register in everything from home heating oil in northern winters to the prohibitive cost of long-distance driving in the remote exurbs of metropolitan commuter belts. The effects of the great bungle in Iraq may only be beginning.

Still another oil cost-burden that the Iraqi failure imposes on the American people involves the huge and finally starting to be noticed portion of U.S. defense outlays that are undertaken to protect foreign oil supplies from disruption. Michael Klare, a leading U.S. scholar on resource wars and oil geopolitics, has tabulated oil-related tasks being assumed by the military from South America and West Africa to the Persian Gulf, Central Asia, and the Straits of Malacca. His conclusion: the military “is being used more and more for the protection of overseas oil fields and the supply routes that connect them. … Such endeavors, once largely confined to the Gulf area, are now being extended to unstable oil regions in other parts of the world. Slowly but surely, the U.S. military is being converted into a global oil-protection service.” How much do these tax-financed costs effectively add to the price of a gallon of gas or heating oil sold in the U.S.—25 cents, 40, 85?

In sum, the energy-related price of the administration’s dishonesty and massive miscalculation in Iraq ought to be a central discussion point in this election year and again in 2008. The citizenry has to comprehend just how much is at stake and how the nation’s future has been jeopardized.
_________________________________________

Kevin Phillips’s latest book, American Theocracy: The Perils and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money, was published in March by Viking Penguin.

July 17, 2006 Issue

I'd guess the republicans will let the antiwar candidates get into full swing about no WMDs in Iraq then spring this on them about two weeks before the mid-terms.

Iraqi General: WMD Went to Syria - Interview with Ali Ibrahim Al-Tikriti
Ryan Mauro - 2/14/2006
Ali Ibrahim al-Tikriti was a southern regional commander for Saddam Hussein’s Fedayeen militia in the late 1980s and a personal friend of the dictator. Units under his command dealt with chemical and biological weapons. He was known as the “Butcher of Basra” due to his campaigns and defected shortly before the Gulf War in 1991. This interview aims to gain some insight into the current situation in Iraq.

RM: Is there a single incident that you can point to that made you regret your actions and turn against the Baath Party?

IT: The single incident was my wife being willing to stand before me, not as my wife but as an Iraqi, and before one of Saddam's most brutal enforcers and question my tactics. This really made me think because no one has ever even considered to question the tactics of myself or any others and lived to tell about it. This courageous move made me think deep and hard.

RM: Do you still maintain good sources inside Iraq to draw information from?

IT: I still maintain very close sources in Iraq and outside of Iraq. Some of Saddam's key scientists are personal friends of mine as well as other key leaders in the former Iraqi military. I have helped draw information since my defecting to the United States government voluntarily and with the permission of these contacts. The only difference between many of them and I, is that I had the opportunity to defect and they didn't.

RM: Many observers say the Syrian and Iraqi Baath Parties did not trust each other and were rivals until around 2000. How serious was the disagreements between Syria and Saddam Hussein?

IT: The disagreements were not as dramatic as many would lead you to believe. Yes they were deep enough that Iraq and Syria could never move in the direction of forming one pan Arab nationalist state but both remained the closest of allies. The ideologies of both were identical in almost every respect but the biggest problem was with the fact that Saddam and Assad were so alike they couldn't bare each other in terms of sharing power.

RM: What can you tell us about Iraqi sponsorship of terrorists, from Palestinian groups to Al-Qaeda?

IT: Iraq had sponsered Palestinian militant organizations for the longest time with logistical and some material support. Most of the material support came around after the first Gulf War in terms of buying munitions for the various terrorist organizations in the West Bank and Gaza. As far as Al-Qaeda is concerned this support was limited for a long time, mainly due to the fact that Al-Qaeda had the hopes of creating an Islamic empire while Saddam wanted a secular Arab nationalist empire. They only really came to terms in the mid 90's due to the fact that both knew they shared the same short term enemy. Once they came to terms on this Saddam provided Al-Qaeda with intelligence support and whatever money or munitions they could provide. Saddam has had very long standing contacts in the black market as well as with Moscow and would provide whatever munitions he could through these contacts.

RM: In your experience, would either side (the Iraqi Baathists or radical Islamists) be able to put aside their differences to cooperate against the United States?

IT: Yes, as I have noted above they did and will continue to strengthen ties until both are defeated. If you look in Iraq today you are witnessing Arab nationalist terrorist organizations and Islamist terrorist organizations working together to fight the United States.

RM: Is it true the United States helped bring Saddam Hussein to power, as some allege, and then arm him with WMDs?

IT: This is absolutely ludacrous. I was in the Ba'athist Revolution who receieved support from the Soviet Union because of the socialist ideology behind it. The Soviet Union openly supported and backed the Ba'athist revolution in Iraq at the time and I am sure you can find news articles about it in European press agencies and others at the time. I was there helping with the revolution and worked on two occassions with Soviet KGB officaials to help train us, much like the United States did with the Taliban during the Soviet campaign in Afghanistan. The United States never directly gave us any WMDs but rather ingredients. They were not mixed and these 'ingredients' could have been easily used for commercial use but were rather used to build low life chemical weapons.

RM: Why do you think Iraq's weapons of mass destruction are in Syria? Why didn't he use them or simply destroy them before the war?

IT: I know Saddam's weapons are in Syria due to certain military deals that were made going as far back as the late 1980's that dealt with the event that either capitols were threatened with being overrun by an enemy nation. Not to mention I have discussed this in-depth with various contacts of mine who have confirmed what I already knew. At this point Saddam knew that the United States were eventually going to come for his weapons and the United States wasn't going to just let this go like they did in the original Gulf War. He knew that he had lied for this many years and wanted to maintain legitimacy with the pan Arab nationalists. He also has wanted since he took power to embarrass the West and this was the perfect opportunity to do so. After Saddam denied he had such weapons why would he use them or leave them readily available to be found? That would only legitimize President Bush, who he has a personal grduge against. What we are witnessing now is many who opposed the war to begin with are rallying around Saddam saying we overthrew a soverign leader based on a lie about WMD. This is exactly what Saddam wanted and predicted.

RM: What can you tell us about Iraqi and Iranian relations? There have been reports that small amounts of Iraqi WMD went to Iran and that Iran is currently helping the Iraqi insurgency.

IT: The reports on weapons being sent to Iran are absolutely false. They have no basis and are written by people who have no knowledge of Middle Eastern affairs or they are being written by people who are just intellectually dishonest. As far as the support for the insurgency today, there is no doubt in my mind that Tehran is backing the Islamist insurgency of the Shiites. Iran would want nothing more than a destabalized Iraq, not because they want to control Iraq as much as they want something to throw at the United States politically on the international stage.

RM: On what levels did Iraq and Libya cooperate? Some reports indicate Iraq was involved in Libya's nuclear program.

IT: Iraqi scientists were turned over to Libya along with many documents and research from Iraq on nuclear weapons. There is no doubt that Saddam was attempting to use Libya as a labratory to further his nuclear development just like he was attempting to do by sending his weapons to Syria. Saddam knew after the Gulf War he needed to start shipping his weapons and programs outside of his borders to avoid detection which is exactly why Saddam became so emboldened and laughed at the West everytime he stood in front of the camera. If you were to compare him in the 80's and 90's you would see a much more confident and defiant Saddam in the latter due to the fact he knew there was nothing to materially pin him on within the borders of Iraq.

RM: Why do you think the insurgency is still living on in Iraq? What can be done to win the guerilla war there?

IT: The insurgency is still alive and well in Iraq today due to mismanagement and failure on the part of those managing the rebuilding effort. If you want to break the back of the insurgency what is needed is, obviously, to continue the military campaign and train the Iraqi forces BUT you need to rebuild more schools, provide more jobs and increase the standard of living. You can't rely on the Army Corps of Engineers to do most of the civil rebuilding. They are a great company and have done much good but something of this magnitude requires large private companies to be engaged. If you provide the Iraqis with jobs and really show them a better way of life you will win thier hearts and minds which will cripple the insurgencys efforts to find safe haven in Iraq, material support in Iraq and above all, recruits in Iraq.

RM: Are you optimistic or pessimistic about the near-term future of Iraq?

IT: There is no doubt that the United States military has learned the mistakes of the past and are really getting on track in terms of the learning curve of the reconstruction of Iraq. My criticism was aimed at the politicans on the Hill who are beginning to run the war from Congress and taking this role from the military. I see this in the very near future. I have a lot of fears that with upcoming elections and poll numbers down for the Iraq war the politicans are sticking their fingers in the air and they are wanting to cut and run essentially and isolate themselves from the war.

I am optimistic that the Iraqis and the U.S. military can salvage whatever damage may be done due to this. There is much more progress in Iraq today than there was in Vietnam when we pulled out than. The biggest hurdle is going to be putting enough pressure on the Hill to just let the Pentagon run the war and allow our military establishment to do what we entrusted them to do. Win the war and reconstruct the country. The day the politicans take that away from the Pentagon is the day I really see a serious escalation in terrorism to continue a propoganda war from Iraq to persuade the politicans to cut and run. Zarqawi and the rest have been attempting to do this from day one and they are getting closer to their goal if you look at the sentiment within the Senate alone.

I am still quite optimistic that the Iraqis will prevail due to the amount of progress and reconstruction the United States military has made in Iraq but there is always that small amount of doubt and fear which I have. I have seen politicans try to rake the reigns of a war from the military and the war is lost almost immediately. The ball though is in the Iraqis court in terms of defending their newfound democracy and being able to energize the public enough to make this work regardless of what happens in Washington or the number of troops left in Iraq in the near future.

That being said I think the Iraqis have a very good shot of developing a true and vibrant democracy but it really is up to them and how badly the Iraqis public really wants it and if they are up to the sacrifice, both financially and in terms of body count.

RM: Do you support the rumored partial withdrawal of American troops in spring of 2006?

IT: Now of course I would like to see a drawing down of U.S. troops as to have them return back stateside and be with their families. It would also give the Iraqi security forces the opportunity to prove what themselves to the Iraqi people. The problem though is the political climate here in Washington as I explained earlier.

If there is no sight of the political environment changing in the near future than there is no doubt that drawing down U.S. troops will be more disastrous in the long run than just leaving them there until the Administration or the political climate changes here at home. We can not take the chance of allowing another Vietnam to occur because this will be the Mujahadeens victory over the Soviet Union to the 10th power.

Ryan Mauro is a geopolitical analyst. He began working for Tactical Defense Concepts (www.tdconcepts.com), a maritime-associated security company in 2002. In 2003, Mr. Mauro joined the Northeast Intelligence Network (www.homelandsecurityus.com), which specializes in tracking and assessing terrorist threats. He has appeared on over 20 radio shows and had articles published in over a dozen publications. His book "Death to America: The Unreported Battle of Iraq" is scheduled to be published in the coming months. He publishes his own web site called World Threats. He may be reached at tdcanalyst@aol.com