Word: basra
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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British Prime Minister Gordon Brown this week announced his plan to reduce the British force around the southern city of Basra from 5,000 to 2,500 by next spring. Drawing less attention, however, is the extent to which American forces have quietly withdrawn from the rest of southern Iraq. By so doing, the U.S. is ceding huge swaths of territory to shaky provincial governments that have to face increasingly powerful Shi'ite militias very much alone...
...seems clear the President has won this round. An optimistic general will trump a skeptical politician anytime. Even when Petraeus gave sketchy, disingenuous answers-expressing hope about the three-way Shi'ite gang war in the oil-rich port city of Basra-not even the most knowledgeable Senators had the facts to dispute him. The general was armed with the modern military's deadliest weapon, the PowerPoint-presentation-serried ranks of bar charts marching toward victory, which provided camouflage for the gaping holes and contradictions in the Petraeus-Crocker story. Crocker, for example, seemed particularly insistent on roping Iran into...
Still, Iraq has 115 billion bbl. of proven reserves and produces nearly 2 million bbl. daily, mainly from the Basra area in the south and Kirkuk and Kurdistan in the north. That's a sharp drop from about 2.8 million bbl. a day before the U.S. invasion in 2003 and an even steeper decline from a peak of about 3.7 million bbl. before the 1980 war with Iran. (From 100,000 to 300,000 bbl. a day are lost to smugglers.) The law would allow oil companies to explore hundreds of new oil fields under 10-year agreements and then...
...evaporated. Fierce arguments have raged over how much control Baghdad and the Iraq National Oil Co. should have over production. Oil workers' unions argue that the law gives Big Oil huge profits while potentially undercutting the interests of Iraqis. The major union staged a demonstration in July in Basra, calling for the law to be killed. Union leaders will convene a conference in Basra in early September to draft alternatives to privatizing the industry...
...BASRA, IRAQ British troops withdraw from Basra Palace...