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

To: carranza2 who wrote (105149)	7/13/2003 7:15:38 PM
From: marcos	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Oil will come into it, for sure, as that Gulf is not so far away .... really i think the main value for the US in Liberia would be the opportunity to set a good example, in place of the rather poor one it is setting now in Iraq ... but it could be seen as strategic as well - just look at a radius of say 5000 kilometres from Monrovia, it includes Florida, Río de J, Capetown, Edinburgh, Kuwait - could make an airbase site for heavy-lift craft .... don't know about suitability of harbours for a naval base, but you could get some dutch engineers in there and build one for the price of a few millions barrels I don't see that much paranoia in the Guardian article - obv.org.uk .... looks like more a mention of the risks involved in oil development, along with the possibility of reward ... ? ..... eye of the beholder thing, i suppose eh ..... it's a fact though, that the common people of oil-rich nations tend not to do so well from its development, too much corruption, too much money going through government hands and too many greedy bastards fighting for power over its control ..... we fight about oil even in the g.w.n. - just go sometime to a Calgary bar and say you think Pee-air really had something there with that NEP, if you want to see a little action Liberia used to produce a lot of natural rubber - anybody know anything about the market for it lately? ... i know the price has some wild swings, a friend of a friend has on the seventeenth parallel a small plantation of hule, in around 1998 he had just made serious money on a harvest, when for many years previous it hadn't been worth collecting .... and then again by 2001 or so, it wasn't worth it again, and the buyers were very sniffy on grade, he felt they cheated him badly one year and hasn't harvested since But suppose liberians had decent police and education systems, to what industries is the country suited? .... timber comes to mind [well, to a logger's anyway] - there are only three millions souls in the nation, and it looks like a lot of rich land with many corners in which you could grow fine tropical hardwoods ... if people didn't cut them down as saplings, for firewood or for clubs with which to beat each other