Roberto Abraham Scaruffi

The Iraqi Oil Conundrum

Energy and Power in the Middle East

By Michael Schwartz

How the mighty have fallen. Just a few years ago, an overconfident Bush administration expected to oust Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, pacify the country, install a compliant client government, privatize the economy, and establish Iraq as the political and military headquarters for a dominating U.S. presence in the Middle East. These successes were, in turn, expected to pave the way for ambitious goals, enshrined in the 2001 report of Vice President Dick Cheney’s secretive task force on energy. That report focused on exploiting Iraq’s monstrous, largely untapped energy reserves -- more than any country other than Saudi Arabia and Iran -- including the quadrupling of Iraq’s capacity to pump oil and the privatization of the production process.

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