Word: basra
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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...
...north, but that will be politics, not policy. And policy-the question of what, if any, role the U.S. military should have in Iraq-is where the congressional questioning should focus. Will Petraeus propose moving U.S. troops into the restive Shi'ite south? What will he do about Basra, the crucial southern oil port where the British retreat has left slow-motion anarchy, a Shi'ite gang war? What will he do about Muqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi Army, the most powerful and popular force in Shi'ite Iraq? The general's own staff is divided on many...
...with your own preconceptions," he told me. And Kilcullen's bottom-up tribal assumptions don't fit very well into the top-down struggle between the Hakims and Sadrs and their respective militias. As I reported two weeks ago, when asked if there was a U.S. military role in Basra, Crocker said, "Under a different set of circumstances, you might argue-as some are now doing-that we need a Basra surge ... But you'd need a fairly large force, and we don't have the troops. And if we even proposed it, the political element in the U.S. would...
...Meanwhile, the continuing American and British policy is to draw down, not increase, their military presence in southern Iraq. The British are in the midst of pulling out of the port city of Basra. The long-standing American policy has been to defer to Shi'ite religious sensibilities and keep as low a profile as possible in holy cities like Karbala and Najaf...