t r u t h o u t | Report Friday 04 April 2008
As violence rises again in Iraq, negotiations to institutionalize US economic dominance continue unabated.
(title link, read the whole article, Bremer made a bad situation worse)
This photo caught my eye because I remembered reading a post by Riverbend (can't remember exactly when it was, sometime after the war started, can't find it, blogger search sucks) where she wrote about being afraid of the cooking gas because it wasn't being mixed, or processed or bottled correctly, and gas bottles were blowing up. Looks like it's just being wasted in some places--flared off.
....the newly liberated gas was flared off. This was not the optimum engineering solution. A more elegant approach would be to send the liberated gas through another series of pipes to a natural-gas liquefaction plant, where it could be further refined and then sold. Some plants in Iraq did just that but many did not, for the simple reason that no one had ever gotten around to building the necessary infrastructure. The result, Sam said, was that Iraq burned away at least $10 million worth of gas every day. Indeed, due to its lack of domestic refinery infrastructure, Iraq is a long-time net importer not only of natural gas but also of gasoline, kerosene, fuel oil, and all of the other much-needed products that may be obtained from raw crude. (This is one reason Baghdad has so little electricity, which is generated in most Iraqi power plants by burning fuel oil or natural gas.) Rectifying this problem has proved difficult not only because of the war—and the looting and the years of sanctions—but also because the entire system had been allowed to collapse under Saddam. Every engineer I met in Iraq seemed to have a special loathing for the former dictator simply because he had taken what was, by the standards of the 1970s, a fairly good industrial infrastructure and run it into the ground...
....or how much smuggling goes on, or even how much oil is pumped out of the ground or back into it, because—almost unbelievably—the entire system lacks meters...
Still?
Hmmm, now what was I reading just the other day?
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