Bruno

Discussion (3) ¬

1. 
   SenseiKen

   January 28, 2017 at 5:13 am | #

   I thought it would be over in weeks. Foolishness.
2. 
   M.A.

   January 28, 2017 at 3:01 pm | #

   I didn’t think “weeks”, but I certainly didn’t expect so many years.
3. 
   Peter Rogan

   January 28, 2017 at 9:53 pm | #

   Oh, it’ll never be over. See, the oilheads under Cheney wanted Iraq’s oil production stopped PERMANENTLY. That would allow them to raise the annual price increase on petroleum from 5.5%, where it had been since 1923, to 6.5%, which it obtained for about four years. Then the independents waded in, followed by Daesh, and you know the rest. The good news is that the Saudis, by opening the taps in 2014, kept oil from reaching $70 a barrel, which would make the Alberta tar sands and the Wyoming shale oil deposits worth recovering… and had that happened, the US oil majors would regain control of the world oil pricing mechanism that they had lost in 1973 with OPEC’s formation. Which, by the way, is when I got interested in oil economics and petro-politics.

   Iraq’s oil refused to be bottled up — a pathetic fallacy that means there were too many people willing to risk being shot and blown up to open the fields and ship out what they could to whoever was buying. The end result, ExxonMobil’s purchase of a good chunk of the Permian Basin reserves in Texas, is the US oil majors have given up on tar sands and bitumen and are concentrating on domestic oil production dominance. That means they aren’t interested in putting more money into Iraq or Aramco, so their fuel isn’t going into those fires any more. Russia’s now providing that funding, for political purposes outside of oil, since they have nearly as much oil in reserve as Saudi Arabia. But the Middle East will stay as messed up as it has ever been since before the First World War a century ago, with little interest on the part of world powers to bring about or enforce a peace. And the refugees, and the people not as fortunate as the refugees who could leave, will continue suffering, because no one cares. No one, no one at all. Ecce humani!