All Your Base Is Belong To Us

I guess we have to do something with that $493 billion dollar defense budget. Like build permanent bases in Iraq. Britain's going to get one too:

BRITAIN is laying secret plans to maintain a permanent military presence in Iraq.

Ministers and military officials are in negotiations with their American counterparts over the British contribution to the long-term effort to maintain peace and stability in post-Saddam Iraq once the country is handed over to its newly elected government.

The scale of the commitment is yet to be formally agreed, but defence sources confirmed that it could see the UK maintaining a military base in south Iraq, near Basra, which it currently controls, for years to come.

The news of the potential extended military posting in one of the world's most dangerous trouble spots came as a commander admitted that British soldiers preparing to deploy to lawless southern Afghanistan were "apprehensive" about the threats they will face.

The Americans, who have yet to formally admit to concrete plans for long-term military bases in Iraq once the new government has been established, are expected to maintain at least one, much larger, facility near Baghdad. Critics claim the negotiations are part of a long-term plan to maintain US control over Iraq and its oil reserves, and to establish a valuable permanent presence in the Middle East.

Juan Cole seems skeptical and says "there's no such thing as a permanent base," but I wonder if he's been to Seoul recently. Or Germany, for that matter, and that's a remnant from the 1940s.

One would assume we'd be interested in keeping a base in Iraq to protect American oil interests. I guess that means we'll be negotiating with insurgents then:

Iraqi and American officials say they are seeing a troubling pattern of government corruption enabling the flow of oil money and other funds to the insurgency and threatening to undermine Iraq's struggling economy.

In Iraq, which depends almost exclusively on oil for its revenues, the officials say that any diversion of money to an insurgency that is killing its citizens and tearing apart its infrastructure adds a new and menacing element to the challenge of holding the country together.

In one example, a member of the Iraqi National Assembly has been indicted in the theft of millions of dollars meant for protecting a critical oil pipeline against attacks and is suspected of funneling some of that money to the insurgency, said Radhi Hamza al-Radhi, the chairman of Iraq's Commission on Public Integrity. The indictment has not been made public.

The charges against the Sunni lawmaker, Meshaan al-Juburi, lend credence to the suspicions of Iraqi officials that the insurgency is profiting from the nation's oil riches.

In another incident, the director of a major oil storage plant near Kirkuk was arrested Saturday, with other employees and several local police officials, and charged with helping to orchestrate a mortar attack on the plant Thursday, a Northern Oil employee said. The attack resulted in devastating pipeline fires and a shutdown of all oil operations in the area, said the employee, granted anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly about the matter.

Ali Allawi, Iraq's finance minister, estimated that insurgents reap 40 percent to 50 percent of all oil-smuggling profits in the country.

Of course, that's central and southern Iraq, not autonomous Kurdistan, who's rolling out the welcome mat:

Kurdish officials are inviting foreign oil companies to explore untapped reserves in their northern region, angering Arab countrymen and raising concern about chaos in Iraq's oil industry.

Kurds, their self-ruled federation firmly enshrined in Iraq's constitution, believe they are reclaiming their right to control northern oil fields after successive Iraqi regimes purged Kurds from the industry to bring it under exclusive Arab control.

Despite the Iraqi industry's many problems _ falling production, crumbling infrastructure and relentless insurgent attacks _ the prospect of drilling in the world's second-largest proven reserves has led eight small foreign companies to invest in Kurdish-ruled territory.

One of them, Det Norske Oljeselskap, or DNO, of Norway, struck oil in December, less than a month after starting to drill in Zakho near the Turkish border.

So this is a fertile region for oil and gas interests. But the big boys are sitting it out until the security situation gets under control. Into the breach has stepped the insurgency, profiting off of oil money. The US military presence will remain strong until control of the oil is wrested from the hands of the insurgents. And it will probably take a permanent base to make it safe for Exxon and Royal Dutch Shell to enter the fray.

The great game of oil continues, friends, and it's what's behind our entire foreign policy. Anyone who fails to account for it isn't being serious about Iraq.