– One of the news sources I read daily is the Daily Brief from the Council on Foreign Relations. They put together an excellent summary of the significant foreign events of the day and, for the most part, I recommend them.
– However, today, the Daily Brief had a collection of stories about Iraq and Oil that I found to be a bit surreal. Most of us who understand the implications of Peak Oil, understand that one of the major reasons why the U.S. is in Iraq is to secure oil for its future. Modern industrialized nations absolutely depend on adequate supplies of oil – if they want to continue to be modern industrialized nations.
– There were several things that struck me as disingenuous. One was the following statement about the decision making of the Iraqi government as it considers letting foreign oil companies into the country again:
“Offers by the Western companies-Exxon Mobil, Shell, Total, BP, Chevron, and a handful of smaller firms-reportedly prevailed over bids from companies in Russia, China, and India, and a new deal is expected to be announced on June 30.”
– Did anyone seriously expect that the U.S. would allow Russia, China or India to gain effective control over the vast supplies of Iraqi oil in today’s world? Does anyone really imagine that the U.S. is really leaving such decisions to the current Iraqi government?
– As a further irony, here in the U.S., the Bush administration and McCain are both flooding the media with calls to resume oil exploration/drilling (read ANWR). This, in spite of the fact that it is widely agreed that it will take years for any oil produced from such drilling to hit the market and that when it does, it will only make a very small contribution to solving a very large deficit.
– So, what do I think is going on?
– Well, the stories about the decision making regarding which companies are going to get to process the Iraqi oil are simple PR. In a world where many of the players (read nations) are essentially democratic, such PR is effective because democracy’s weakest point is that its decisions are largely made by those in the middle of the norm curve. And those folks rarely analyze things in more than a cursory manner. So PR spun to them is effective in blunting the responses of those nations by confusing their voters who are the ones who ultimately motivate their political decision makers.
– As for the current push to resume oil exploration in the U.S., I think it is driven by the fact that oil companies here in the U.S., which have an inordinate affect on the decision making processes in the U.S. government and the mostly business driven Republican Party, see significant profits in the exploration itself. The fact that after the work is done and we’ve trashed ANWR and built a huge amount of oil infrastructure, we won’t have much to show for it in terms of oil delivered to the market is irrelevant. Between now and then, the companies involved will show many profitable quarters as the work is done and that’s the bottom line in such decisions.
– I was, and am, a bit disappointed that the Council of Foreign Relations chooses to report these things without a deeper analysis of why the decisions are being made but then I suppose they see their mandate as simply describing the important decisions as the public largely perceives them rather than rendering a deeper analysis of why they are being made. In this, I think they either underestimate their audience or they’ve become a mouthpiece for those who create the spin to obscure the substance.
