LIQUID WEALTH A MIRAGE: Oil income not enough to cover the costs of rebuilding

San Francisco Chronicle ^ | April 12, 2003 | Carolyn Lochhead

[sarcasm]

Washington -- Iraq sits atop the world's second-largest oil reserves. Yet oil will not come close to covering the immediate expenses of rebuilding its broken economy.

In fact, experts warn that the vast pool of liquid wealth under Iraqi soil is a mixed blessing that complicates the reconstruction of Iraq's political and economic life while posing separate dangers to the Bush administration's navigation of oil politics.

[UCFRoadWarrior]

Uhhh...according to the Far Left...this was a "war for oil"...."no blood for oil"

Now....its "not enough oil to rebuild".

The Commies were wrong before...I guess they will be wrong again

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[HiTech RedNeck]

"That's simply not going to be possible," even if Iraq gets its production up to the $18 billion a year it was earning before the war.

It'll be much, much better. Iraq was using 60's era oil technology. Turn our engineers loose on their fields and they will soon be talking maybe $50 billion worth.

[WhiteGuy]

Filling the breach will require a major commitment from U.S. and world taxpayers, as well as debt forgiveness from Iraq's many creditors, most analysts agree.

How about considering the needs of the hard working taxpayers of The United States of America?????

C'mon president bush, PUT AMERICANS FIRST!

[AndyJackson]

said Thomas Carothers, director of the Democracy and Rule of Law Project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Is this their oil-field expert? How many oil wells has Mr. Carothers brought on line in his life-time? How much high-test has he refined?

The reason that the left is crumbling is that their entire base of experts is based on panty-waisted ivy-league graduates who have spent too much time studing the hate literature of the left and too little time doing anything useful. These guys think they can do tell everyone how to run their business when they cannot even run their own lives.

[NYS_Eric]

Iraq's Ba'athist regime owes Russia and France tens of billions. There's a good article on Weekly Standard this morning by Irwin Stelzer that argues wiping out this debt will leave more than enough for Iraq to rebuild quickly. There is no moral argument for repaying this debt. Hussein did not feed his people or build his nation's infrastructure with these dollars. It was all used to support a despotic police state (as Russia and France well knew when they entered into these "agreements").

[Snuffington]

Uhhh...according to the Far Left...this was a "war for oil"...."no blood for oil"

Now....its "not enough oil to rebuild".

Lol... better and more concise than anything I was going to say. I'll just bump your comments.

[Tredge]

The quickness of this war is a product of American ingenuity. We have the ingenuity to prosecute this war, and we have the ingenuity to rebuild Iraq.

Like everything else we tackle beyond our borders, this is not a one-way-or-the-other situation. Anybody who has spent time working in American life knows things don't come that comfortably.

It takes hard work to make progress! If you work in America you learn that. No quick rule changes the fact that hard work is what brings success.

I have the feeling the journalists who write the stories are more interested in writing a story people can follow than writing about the facts as they happened. War is ugly and doesn't always translate. Some journalists grapple with that and some of them exploit it. It's up to us to know the difference.

[sarcasm]

There is no moral argument for repaying this debt. Hussein did not feed his people or build his nation's infrastructure with these dollars.

The same can be said about many governments. Default on these obligations will set a horrible precedent - I'm sure that African and Latin American nations will quickly jump on this bandwagon.

[Freebird Forever]

The reason that the left is crumbling is that their entire base of experts is based on panty-waisted ivy-league graduates who have spent too much time studying the hate literature of the left and too little time doing anything useful. These guys think they can do tell everyone how to run their business when they cannot even run their own lives.

I nominate the above for post of the day!

[LS]

This writer stupidly stumbled onto a critical point: oil "wealth" is purely extraction. Oil can be a wonderful commodity, but like gold is USELESS unless employed toward an increase in standard of living. This is accomplished but taking the money that is generated by the oil and INVESTING it into businesses and firms that make products that SERVE people.

This is something almost none of the Arab oil states have learned. Their oil will run out, just as Spain's New World gold ran out---and when that happens you better have created a wealth PRODUCING economy rather than a wealth EXTRACTING economy.

[FreedomPoster]

OK, then forgiving the debt can be France and Russia's contributions to rebuilding. If they get huffy about it, France never did pay back their WWI debts, nor Russia their WWII Lend-Lease debts. We can hold that over their heads to keep them in line.

[nanny]

C'mon president bush, PUT AMERICANS FIRST!

Wouldn't that be nice for a change?

I don't know why the article was written - but I suspect it is the first of such articles and before long the American taxpayer will be convinced the only way to rebuild Iraq is for taxpayers to sacrifice and do it for them.

I do hope I am wrong

[LS]

Uh, dude, who do you think will rebuild and staff those oil fields? Who will transport much of that oil? Whose computer technology will control the pumping? Whose engineers will design the systems, and the supporting systems?

I bet you whined about the Marshall Plan loans ("nobody ever repaid them"). Course, people forget that the seed money of the Marshall Plan led to billions upon billions of dollars' worth of purchases of U.S. goods, far outstripping whatever paltry amount was loaned. Don't be so shortsighted.

[LS]

However, i did see on Fox that Russia was already considering forgiving some/all of its debt (most likely to get some favors in the "rebuilding" of Iraq).

[Night Hides Not]

Allow me to second your nomination.

I fondly recall former Sen. George McGovern's comments when describing his experience as an owner of a bed-and-breakfast hotel in New Hampshire:

Paraphrased: Had I known the effects of all of this government regulation on business, I would have voted differently in the Senate.

With his bed and breakfast long since vanished into bankruptcy, Sen. McGovern has forgotten those lessons and returned to the Democrat fold.

George, allow me to thank you for starting me on my path to conservatism...I worked on your 1972 campaign in California as a know-nothing 18 year old. Unlike my peers who toe the intellectually lazy, intellectually dishonest Democrat Party platform to this day, I am a proud supporter of the great works of George W. Bush, Ronald Reagan, and the brave and heroic men and women of our armed forces (not necessarily in that order).

[knarf]

Where, I ask, is it written that anything must be paid for all at once, in advance?

The enemies of America .. foriegn and domestic .. will soon learn that Americans no longer have their heads in the sand and that our voices are louder and clearer than, perhaps, since colonial days.

Let's roll.

HighTechRedNeck nailed it ... turn our engineers loose and the oil technology would provide energy for the entire planet at a fraction of the cost.

American know-how and determination is the only answer to the planets problems.

[MarkL]

Maybe, maybe not, but a big chunk could be offset by the siezing of Saddam's personal assets, if they can be tracked down, and I'm sure that they could... If only the "Axis of Weasels" would get the hell out of the way!

Mark

[Chancellor Palpatine]

BINGO - We have a winner.