[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").

[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.

[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.

[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

[cgbg]

This socialist rag is incapable of understanding why the Iraq economy will be booming in a few years and will be the dominant economy of the Middle East for generations to come.

It is called capitalism. Let the Iraqi people free to use their talent and ingenuity and watch out!

Gloom and doom schemes are based on assuming the socialist command economy method of production and distribution of wealth. Private Iraqi citizens, not foreign governments, should own the oil wells of Iraq.

Hopefully they won't make the mistake of Germany and Japan and allow their riches to be depleted on stupid social welfare schemes.

[B4Ranch]

I opened the thread to see who this article was from; San Francisco Chronicle/Carolyn Lochhead. Well, there's no need to even read it to know her conclusions. Carolyn is not a well known economic analyst so I'll let this one slide.

[lewislynn]

Not enough oil money?

Iraq; American business' next cheap labor/industrial state.

[hove]

Since when was it America's/Bush's job to see that Iraq...or any other nation...get schools roads...etc. We got our regime change and stopped the threat of Saddam's WMD's. Our job is done. The Iraqi's are extremely fortunate to be sitting on their large oil reserves. At least they will have the resources to rebuild...as long as a stable..honest..government is formed. Let them solve their own problems. We are done....it is time for America to move on!

[RightWhale]

"I think it's foolish to talk about looking to oil revenues to take care of all the needs of the country. That's just very misleading."

Alaska's oil production is about the same as Iraq's. There is no way oil revenues would produce a modern city the size of Bagdad in Alaska. Iraq needs something else, just as Alaska does.

[F.J. Mitchell]

We can build it back a lot less expensively than the original-no gold trimmed faucets, commodes, wash basins or deuche bowls.

[F.J. Mitchell]

We can build it back a lot less expensively than the original-no gold trimmed faucets, commodes, wash basins or douche bowls.

[blake6900]

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.

I look at it this way...if this nonsense were even remotely true liberals would have been shoving this down our throats from the get-go along with "The war will take years" and "Inspections are working".

The fact that they didn't proves they just came up with this when it became obvious they were wrong on all other accounts. And if this is the best they can do, they outta go back to Pelosi's "We could have knocked down that statue for a lot less." At least her statement was laughable. This is just BS...

[Mike Darancette]

If Iraq would privitize its oil industry the could raise $1 Trillion Dollars almost immediately plus providing 10s of thousand of jobs.