Quote of the day: “It’s absolutely nuts to lose 5,000 people, have 31,000 injured, and spend a trillion dollars, and you didn’t even get the oil,” says Oil Tycoon T. Boone Pickens.
Pickens urged Bush to take Iraq’s oil
by Andrew Travers, Aspen Daily News Staff Writer
Monday, August 23, 2010
aspendailynews.com
As the last American combat troops left Iraq last week, oil-tycoon-turned-clean-energy-innovator T. Boone Pickens was at the American Renewable Energy Day conference in Aspen, lamenting that the U.S. didn’t take hold of the rich oil fields in the war-torn Middle Eastern nation before they left.
Pickens at first elicited laughs from an audience at the Paepcke Auditorium on Saturday night, as he bluntly made the case for America’s right to Iraq’s oil. Those laughs subsided as he recalled how he personally lobbied Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama to seize Iraq’s natural resources.
“I’ve heard people accuse President Bush of going to Iraq for their oil,” he began, in a public conversation with CNN founder Ted Turner and New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman. “That didn’t happen. We didn’t get the oil.”
Pickens argued that the American blood shed in the war was reason enough to take the oil. But, he said, Bush was too concerned about his image and appearing as if the war were a ploy to get the oil to follow Pickens’ plan.
“It’s absolutely nuts to lose 5,000 people, have 31,000 injured, and spend a trillion dollars, and you didn’t even get the oil,” Pickens said.
The 82-year-old Texan recalled a conversation with President Bush as his days in office waned, in which Bush asked about how they could bring the oil to market and battle the public perception that Operation Iraqi Freedom was a war for oil.
“He said, ‘People will think we’re there for the oil.’ And I said, ‘That was eight years ago, a lot’s happened since then — a lot of money spent, a lot of lives lost.’ And he said, ‘How would you price it?’ I said, ‘Price it on the market every day.’”
Bush then asked more detailed questions about the pricing structure, and Pickens recalled pushing those concerns aside and telling the president, “That’s a high-class problem. We can figure out how to get it in the hands where it’d do best for America.”
“He never took it seriously,” Pickens said.
He made a similar plea to Obama, Pickens said, with similar results.
“I went to Obama and said, ‘Don’t leave Iraq.’ Look where we are now.”
Instead of Iraq’s greatest oil supplies going to the country that waged a seven-year war of liberation there, Pickens bemoaned, they went to China, which cut deals to mine the oil fields of Ramallah, which Pickens estimates holds 15 billion barrels of crude.
“Here we were,” Pickens said. “We paid the price and [we] don’t get it ... . It’s heartbreaking to me to lose our people and the Chinese end up with the oil.”
Pickens’ evening comments capped a slate of AREDAY panels that included calls for action on climate change and renewable energy development from some of the most rich, successful — and outspoken — men in America. Among them were Pickens, Turner, filmmaker James Cameron and entrepreneur Sam Wyly.
Earlier Saturday, Pickens blasted the ongoing war in Afghanistan, stating that billions of American dollars going to OPEC nations for oil are being directly funneled to U.S. opponents and the Taliban.
“We are paying for both sides of the war,” Pickens repeated several times.
“That Afghan war,” he said. “That is the most stupid thing. Eleven hundred people killed, I don’t know how many injured, $345 billion spent, and what in the hell do we have for it?”
He touted his “Pickens Plan” to install massive wind power infrastructure across the country as a way to move toward domestic energy sources, including natural gas. He is currently lobbying congressional leaders to move the trucking industry entirely onto American-mined natural gas.... |
