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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: teevee who wrote (65581)	1/12/2003 1:08:11 PM
From: Win Smith	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

Oddly enough, your take not be too far off. At least by this account, official policy may be driven by Israeli think tank graduates. This imagined chain of events--beginning with Saddam's ouster and concluding with the transition to a democratic, free-market Mideast--is based in part on an optimistic assessment of how quickly Iraq's oil industry can be revived and how much oil it can eventually deliver. Says one official, "If we are going to be making a stand in the Arab world of reconstruction and establish a new political order, Iraq is a good place to start because it has the resources to fuel a reconstruction. It doesn't need the vast amount of aid. That is one big advantage of oil." Administration officials directed me to Paul Michael Whibey, a Washington energy expert who used to work in the Washington office of a conservative Israeli think tank, the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies (IASPS) but who has now formed his own consulting business in Northern Virginia. Whibey argues for an Iraqi oil boom. "In the post-Saddam Iraq, I think we will see very significant additional volumes from Iraq. Iraq probably has oil reserves equal to or surpassing that of Saudi Arabia," he says. Whibey, who directed an IASPS project on African oil, argues that production from Russia and from West Africa, which he compares to the Persian Gulf in its early days, could dramatically reduce U.S. dependence on Saudi oil and speed the demise of OPEC. In such a scenario, says Whibey, "We don't get much oil [from the Saudis]. We don't need military bases in places like Saudi Arabia. We have to redefine our strategic interests." From Whibey's perspective, and those of the neoconservatives, it is not merely desirable for the United States to break with the Saudi regime; it is possible to do so without jeopardizing America's current or future oil supplies. ( from TNR, tnr.com , via #reply-18425049 ) There may a few too many pigs at the trough on this one, though. I'm sure the Friends of Cheney have their own ideas.