“Last week a Colorado energy consultancy firm, IHS, stunned some of Iraq’s politicians and oil engineers by declaring that the country’s oil reserves were about 215 billion barrels – about double the estimates that have held in Iraq for many years, Time magazine reports. That would make Iraq a giant oil power, second only to Saudi Arabia.”

Thanks for the tip, and a hat tip, to Debbie at Right Truth for telling me about a new Iraq oil-reserves report. I looked that up and read it this morning. Looks like twice as much oil as was thought and spread over more of Iraq, giving the minority Sunnis a big part, 100 billion barrels instead of no part. This changes the equation but not the fighting.

It’s always been about the oil. We’re fighting for the oil while the muslims are fighting for Islam. They kill us because we’re not of their faith, which is basically the same reason they kill each other. The “insurgency” is the minority Sunnis trying to regain the power they had with Saddam over the majority Shiites. Both sects consider each other to be apostate, which they feel is adequate reason to kill outside of the fight for national control.

So we come in, open these floodgates and then try to restore order so we can get control of the oil, and both sides start killing us. Nice, huh?

The only way I can see the Iraqis reaching a peaceful settlement is if one side is so backed into a corner that there’s no escape, then they’ll deal. Not until then and not until the various power brokers and factions get whittled down to a few instead of the many they have now.

The oil-sharing bill may not be a dead item but it is up against more opposition now than it was before the new reserves report. With the Sunni dominated area sitting on 100 billion barrels, they suddenly have more clout and want more say in both revenue sharing and in governmental power.

With this new report, Iraq has become an even bigger quagmire than before, yet the greed potential here for the Sunnis may outweigh their religious zealotry and be what brings them to the bargaining table at last. In order for this to happen, we will have to remove our “infidel” selves from the fighting and act strictly as developers of oil fields. I don’t think we have a hope of helping one side win over the other as long as both sides want us dead. The Shiites are only working with us as much as they are now, which isn’t all that much, because we’re helping them beat down the Sunnis, which we justify by calling the Sunni fighters the “insurgency”. Both sides are insurgent.

This war has dragged on for so long that reading about it is probably getting pretty boring. I admit that I’ve been avoiding getting into detailed posts about it lately because of that. This new oil report is going to have an impact on the future of the Mid-East, however, and is worth filing away for those who are following the ins and outs of Iraq.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 26th, 2007 at 5:10 pm and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.