Word: multibillions
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...Before oil production rights could be sold there is a further legal hurdle to be overcome. Both France's TotalFinaElf and Russia's Lukoil negotiated multibillion- dollar contracts with Iraq to explore and produce oil as soon as sanctions were lifted. Lukoil has already threatened to impound tankers carrying Iraqi oil if their contracts are not honored. Clearly, it would not be in the best interest of the Iraqi people to restrict any firm from future auctions. So, both of these firms, despite American desires to punish them should be allowed to participate in future contract bidding. By extension...
...What role Blix and UNMOVIC play in the lifting of sanctions will inevitably emerge from a deal between the U.S.-led coalition and Russia and France. There's more than a whiff in their standoff of the politics of oil. France and Russia signed multibillion dollar contracts with Saddam's regime to develop Iraqi oil fields after sanctions, and they want those contracts respected. But even as Washington is concerned to allay Arab - and, particularly, widely-held Iraqi - suspicions that the U.S. seeks to control Iraq's oil wealth, it will also counter the Russians and French by arguing that...
...needs an additional heavy Army division. The Administration sent Franks into combat without the 4th Infantry and other reinforcements that he expected to have. Those heavyweight 62,000 troops were supposed to swoop down on Baghdad from bases in Turkey to open a second front. The Administration assumed a multibillion-dollar aid gift plus permission to put Turkish troops across the Iraq border into Kurdish territory would persuade its NATO ally to allow U.S. forces to use Turkish territory. What the Administration didn't seem to factor in was the strong opposition of Turkey's mainly Muslim population...
...force some of the skeptics to follow Turkey's lead and make their peace with a war they oppose. Turkey's parliament is due to vote Saturday to allow the U.S. to station more than 60,000 troops on its soil, after the government extracted promises of a multibillion dollar aid-and-loan package from Washington and agreement on Turkey deploying its own forces inside northern Iraq to suppress the nationalist ambitions of the Iraqi Kurds...
...Turkey, of course, is still playing hard-to-get. Ankara on Thursday again delayed a parliamentary vote authorizing the deployment of some 60,000 U.S. troops on Turkish soil. The government has been negotiating over a multibillion dollar aid package from the U.S. as well as over Turkish involvement in northern Iraq. But some 90 percent of Turkey's electorate opposes a war, leaving the ruling party in a tough predicament...