Kurds seize Iraq oilfields, ministers pull out of government

U.S. judge says cannot seize Kurdish crude for now Tue, Jul 29 18:36 PM EDT image By Anna Driver and Kristen Hays HOUSTON (Reuters) - A high-stakes dispute over a tanker carrying $100 million in Iraqi Kurdish crude took a surprising turn on Tuesday when a U.S. judge said she lacked jurisdiction given the ship's distance from the Texas shore and urged that the case be settled in Iraq. Federal magistrate Nancy K. Johnson said that because the tanker was some 60 miles (100 km) offshore, and outside territorial waters, an order she issued late on Monday for U.S. Marshals to seize the cargo could not be enforced. She said the dispute between Iraq's central government and the autonomous region of Kurdistan should be resolved in Iraq. Overnight Johnson signed an order directing the marshals to seize the 1 million barrels of crude from the United Kalavrvta tanker anchored in the Gulf of Mexico. Tuesday she scheduled a conference to give the two sides a chance to state their case. The ship could simply sail away, though it also could offload its cargo for delivery to another U.S. Gulf of Mexico port outside of Texas, lawyers said. Baghdad's lawyers had laid claim to the oil in a lawsuit filed on Monday, saying Kurdistan sold the crude without permission from the central government. The latest dispute over exports reflects Iraqi Kurds’ emboldened steps toward seizing greater political and economic autonomy, with oil sales seen as central to Kurdish dreams of independence that Baghdad opposes. While the sides fought the legal battle in Houston, they pressed the political fight in the courtroom of public opinion. Iraq warned companies against trying to buy other shipments of Kurdish crude after it won the seizure order, while Kurdish leaders asserted their right to sell the oil but said they would face obstacles. “The Ministry of Oil in Baghdad continues to interfere directly and indirectly with KRG oil sales," said Karwan Zebari, an official with the Kurdistan Regional Government’s representation in Washington. SEPARATE CLAIMS A lawyer in Houston for the Kurds said the regional government would file its own claim of ownership for the cargo, a sign the legal standoff might continue. Meanwhile, a Kurdish government official said export plans would be hurt. "We have to acknowledge that the ruling of the U.S. court will definitely have negative consequences on the region's attempts to market its oil," he said of the order to seize the cargo. "Buyers now will start to step back and think twice before purchasing Kurdish crude." Washington has publicly opposed direct oil sales by the autonomous region, fearing they could contribute to the break-up of Iraq. It has stopped short of banning U.S. companies from buying the oil while warning them of potential legal risks. Officials from the State Department and the U.S. Marshals Service said the judge's order could only be applied if the ship entered U.S. territory. In this case, that would be 12 nautical miles from shore, said Martin Davies, a law professor and the director of Tulane University’s Maritime Law Center in New Orleans. If the oil’s owner wants to stay out of U.S. courts, “they just have to order the ship to stay out," he said. While the rulers of Iraq’s northern Kurdish enclave have long aspired to independence, their position has strengthened in recent months as Kurdish Peshmerga troops have outperformed Iraqi soldiers against Islamist militants. Kurds have also succeeded in cementing their control of land and oil reserves around the resource-rich city of Kirkuk, while Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, a Shi’ite Arab who has been an adversary of Iraqi Kurds, has fallen out of favor in Washington. At least one cargo of Kurdish crude was delivered to the United States in May to an unidentified buyer, and four other cargoes of Kurdish crude have been delivered this year in Israel. The case is Ministry of Oil of the Republic of Iraq v. Ministry of Natural Resources of Kurdistan Regional Governate of Iraq et al, U.S. District Court, Southern District of Texas, No. 3:14-cv-00249. (Additional reporting by Lesley Wroughton, Missy Ryan and Tim Gardner in Washington, Isra' al-Rubei'i and Ahmed Rasheed in Baghdad, Terry Wade in Houston, David Ingram and Patience Haggin in New York,; David Sheppard and Julia Payne in London and Supriya Kurane in Bangalore; Editing by Marguerita Choy and Howard Goller) ========== Iraq Shia bloc wavering re parliament speaker: First wanted temporary speaker, now speaker from non-Muslim minorities http://alliraqnews.com/index.php/2011-04-18-02-57-37/139055-2014-07-13-10-26-20 … Reidar Visser @reidarvisser · 23h Another report claiming 225 MPs (out of 328) showed up at #Iraq parliament today. Kurds absent due to boycott http://burathanews.com/news/242131.html … Reidar Visser @reidarvisser · 23h Prior to today's aborted #Iraq parliament meeting, agreement on speaker & deputies reported: Jibburi, Hamudi, Sadun http://alliraqnews.com/index.php/2011-04-18-02-57-37/139043-2014-07-13-09-50-25 … Reidar Visser @reidarvisser · 24h 233 #Iraq MPs reportedly came to parliament today so quorum secured. Just pathetic that they couldn't elect speaker There is however still no published agenda for #Iraq parliament meeting Sunday http://ar.parliament.iq/LiveWebsites/Arabic/schedule.aspx … Reidar Visser @reidarvisser · 5h Will be positive and pathbreaking if #Iraq parliament goes ahead and elects speaker Sun without prior agreement on PM. Rumours say they may Reidar Visser @reidarvisser · 10h Going to take a long time to find Iraq PM if Shia alliance aims for both internal consensus & external acceptability for its candidate #PT Reidar Visser @reidarvisser · 10h Iraq MP: Shia alliance agreed on 3 PM criteria: Shia alliance member; internal Shia consensus; external acceptability http://burathanews.com/news/242068.html … =================== Iraq's Destruction Is a Reminder of the Ugly Face of American Empire Why are the cheerleaders of slaughter, who have been wrong about Iraq since before the invasion, still urging us toward ruin? Iraqi Turkmen pose with their weapons as they ready to fight against militants led by the jihadist Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) on June 21, 2014, in the Iraqi village of Basheer, south of Kirkuk June 23, 2014 The black-clad fighters of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, sweeping a collapsing army and terrified Iraqis before them as they advance toward Baghdad, reflect back to us the ghoulish face of American empire. They are the specters of the hundreds of thousands of people we murdered in our deluded quest to remake the Middle East. They are ghosts from the innumerable roadsides and villages where U.S. soldiers and Marines, jolted by explosions of improvised explosive devices, responded with indiscriminate fire. They are the risen remains of the dismembered Iraqis left behind by blasts of Hellfire and cruise missiles, howitzers, grenade launchers and drone strikes. They are the avengers of the gruesome torture and the sexual debasement that often came with being detained by American troops. They are the final answer to the collective humiliation of an occupied country, the logical outcome of Shock and Awe, the Frankenstein monster stitched together from the body parts we left scattered on the ground. They are what we get for the $4 trillion we wasted on the Iraq War. The language of violence engenders violence. The language of hate engenders hate. “I and the public know what all schoolchildren learn,” W.H. Auden wrote. “Those to whom evil is done do evil in return.” It is as old as the Bible. There is no fight left in us. The war is over. We destroyed Iraq as a unified country. It will never be put back together. We are reduced—in what must be an act of divine justice decreed by the gods, whom we have discovered to our dismay are Islamic—to pleading with Iran for military assistance to shield the corrupt and despised U.S. protectorate led by Nouri al-Maliki. We are not, as we thought when we entered Iraq, the omnipotent superpower able in a swift and brutal stroke to bend a people to our will. We are something else. Fools and murderers. Blinded by hubris. Faded relics of the Cold War. And now, in the final act of the play, we are crawling away. Our empire is dying. We should have heeded, while we had a chance, the wails of mothers and fathers. We should have listened to the cries of the wounded. We should have wept over the bodies of Iraqi children lined up in neat rows in the morgues. We should have honored grief so we could honor life. But the dance of death is intoxicating. Once it begins you whirl in an ecstatic frenzy. Death’s embrace, which feels at first like sexual lust, tightens and tightens until you suffocate. Now the music has stopped. All we have left are loss and pain. And where are the voices of sanity? Why are the cheerleaders of slaughter, who have been wrong about Iraq since before the invasion, still urging us toward ruin? Why are those who destabilized Iraq and the region in the worst strategic blunder in American history still given a hearing? Why do we listen to simpletons and morons? They bang their fists. They yell. They throw tantrums. They demand that the world conform to their childish vision. It is as if they have learned nothing from the 11 years of useless slaughter. As if they can dominate that which they never had the power to dominate. I sat in a restaurant Thursday in Boston’s Kenmore Square with military historian Andrew Bacevich. You won’t hear his voice much on the airwaves. He is an apostate. He speaks of the world as it is, not the self-delusional world our empire builders expect it to be. He knows war with a painful intimacy, not only as a Vietnam combat veteran and a retired Army colonel but also as the father of a U.S. Army officer killed in a 2007 suicide bombing in Iraq. “In the 1990s there was a considerable effort made in the military, but also in the larger community of national security experts scratching their heads and [asking] what are the implications of all this technology,” he said. “They conceived of something called the Revolution in Military Affairs—RMA. If you believed in the Revolution of Military Affairs you knew that nothing could stop the United States military when it engaged in a conflict. Victory was, for all practical purposes, a certainty. People like Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, and I expect Dick Cheney also, bought this hook, line and sinker. You put yourself in their shoes in the wake of 9/11. An attack comes out of Afghanistan, a country frankly nobody cares about, and you conceive of this grand strategy of trying to transform the Islamic world. Where are we going to start? We are going to start by attacking a country [Iraq]—we had it under surveillance and sanctions for the past decade—where there is a bona fide bad guy to make a moral case and where we are confident we can make short work of this adversary, a further demonstration that the American military cannot be stopped. They utterly and totally miscalculated. Iraq is falling apart. And many of these people, either in government or outside of government, who were proponents of the war are now advocating for a resumption of the American war. Not one of them is willing to acknowledge the extent of that military miscalculation. Once you acknowledge it, then the whole project of militarizing U.S. policy towards the Greater Middle East collapses.” Bacevich blames the concentration of power into the hands of the executive branch for the debacle. He said that since the Kennedy administration “the incoming president and his team, it does not matter which party, see the permanent government as a problem. If we [the new officials] are going to get done what we want to get done we have to find ways to marginalize the permanent government. This has led to the centralization of authority in the White House and means decisions are made by a very small number of people. The consultation becomes increasingly informal, to the point it is not even documented.” “I do not think we even know when the decision to go to war with Iraq was actually made,” Bacevich said. “There is no documented meeting where [President George W.] Bush sat down with how many people—six, 10, 25—and said, ‘Let’s vote.’ The decision kind of emerged and therefore was implemented. Why would you operate that way? You would operate that way if you viewed the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, the CIA and the State Department as, in a sense, the enemy.” “The invasion of Iraq was intended to be a catalyst,” he said. “It was supposed to be the catalyst that would enable us ... to change the region. It turned out to be the catalyst that resulted in destabilization. The big question of the moment is not what can we do or is there anything we can do to salvage Iraq. The question is to what degree have our actions resulted in this larger regional mayhem. And to the extent they have, isn’t it time to rethink fundamentally our expectations of what American power, and particularly American military power, can achieve?” “We need to take a radically different course,” Bacevich said. “There is an analogy to be made with Great Britain in the wake of World War I. It was in World War I that Britain and France collaborated to dismantle the Ottoman Empire to create the new Middle East. While on the one hand there was an awareness that Britain was in decline, at the level where policy was made there was not a willingness to consider the implications of that fact. It took World War II to drive it home—that the [British] empire was doomed. I think that is where we are.” Out of this decline, Bacevich said, is emerging a multipolar order. The United States will no longer be able to operate as an unchallenged superpower. But, he said, similar to the condition that existed as the British Empire took its last gasps, “there is very little willingness in Washington or in policy circles to take on board the implications multipolarity would call for in terms of adjusting our policy.” The inability to adjust to our declining power means that the United States will continue to squander its resources, its money and its military. “By squandering power we forfeit our influence because we look stupid and we bankrupt ourselves,” Bacevich said. “We will spend $4 trillion, not dollars spent in the moment but dollars we will have spent the last time the last Afghanistan veteran gets his last VA check. That money is gone forever. It is concealed because in the Bush administration’s confidence that victory would be easily won the government did not bother to mobilize the country or increase our taxes. We weaken ourselves economically. People complain about our crappy infrastructure. Give me $4 trillion and I probably could have fixed a couple of bridges. And we must never forget the human cost. Lives lost, lives damaged. And in these two wars [Afghanistan and Iraq] there does seem to be this increase in PTSD that we don’t know what to do about. It is a squandering of human capital.” Bacevich said the “military mind-set” has so infected the discourse of the power elite that when there is a foreign policy problem the usual response is to discuss “three different courses of military action. ... Should it be airstrikes with drones? Should it be airstrikes with manned aircraft? Special operations forces? Or some combination of all three? And that’s what you get.” The press, he said, is an “echo chamber and reinforces the notion that those are the [only] options.” The disintegration of Iraq is irreversible. At best, the Kurds, the Shiites and the Sunnis will carve out antagonistic enclaves. At worst, there will be a protracted civil war. This is what we have bequeathed to Iraq. The spread of our military through the region has inflamed jihadists across the Arab world. The resulting conflicts will continue until we end our occupation of the Middle East. The callous slaughter we deliver is no different from the callous slaughter we receive. Our jihadists—George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Perle, Thomas Friedman and Tommy Franks—who assured us that swift and overwhelming force in Iraq would transform the Middle East into an American outpost of progress, are no less demented than the jihadists approaching Baghdad. These two groups of killers mirror each other. This is what we have spawned. And this is what we deserve. Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, writes a regular column for Truthdig every Monday. Hedges' most recent book is "Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle." ============================== Kurds seize Iraq oilfields, ministers pull out of government Fri, Jul 11 16:20 PM EDT By Raheem Salman and Mustafa Mahmoud BAGHDAD/KIRKUK (Reuters) - Kurdish forces seized two oilfields in northern Iraq and took over operations from a state-run oil company on Friday, while Kurdish politicians formally suspended their participation in Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's government. The moves escalated a feud between the Shi'ite-led central government and the autonomous Kurdish region driven by a Sunni insurgency which threatens to fragment Iraq along sectarian and ethnic lines three years after the withdrawal of U.S. troops. The Kurdish forces took over production facilities at the Bai Hassan and Kirkuk oilfields near the city of Kirkuk, the oil ministry in Baghdad said. It called on the Kurds to withdraw immediately to avoid "dire consequences". Kurdish forces took control of nearby Kirkuk a month ago after Iraqi troops withdrew in the face of a lightning assault by Islamic State militants, who have seized large parts of northern and western Iraq. The two oilfields have a combined production capacity of 450,000 barrels per day but have not been producing significant volumes since March when Baghdad's Kirkuk-Ceyhan export pipeline was sabotaged. An oil ministry spokesman in Baghdad described the takeover as dangerous and irresponsible and called for the Kurdish forces to withdraw immediately. Kurdish authorities said they had moved to "secure the oilfields of Bai Hassan and the Makhmour area" of the giant Kirkuk oilfield after hearing that the oil ministry planned to disrupt a pipeline designed to pump oil from Makhmour. Bai Hassan and the Makhmour part of the Kirkuk oilfield had been under the control of the state's North Oil Company (NOC). "The Kurdish Regional Government learned on Thursday that some officials in the federal Ministry of Oil gave orders to a number of NOC staff to cease their cooperation with the KRG and to dismantle or render inoperable the valves on the new pipeline," the Kurdish authorities said in a statement. The statement said the Bai Hassan field and other fields in the Makhmour district were under Kurdish government management and that NOC staff had been told they should cooperate with Kurdish authorities from Saturday or leave. It also said any production at the fields would be used primarily for domestic supply. The Baghdad ministry rejected Kurdish assertions that they had acted to protect oil infrastructure, saying it had worked to raise output at the fields and increase investment in local gasoline production. Fighting between government forces and militants is raging in and around several cities in northern and western Iraq, some insurgent-held - like Tikrit - and others under tenuous control of government forces like Ramadi in Anbar province. Security forces repelled an Islamic State militant surge on Friday on the Anbar Operations Command centre and police headquarters in Ramadi. Fighting lasted several hours before the militants were pushed back, a security source in Ramadi told Reuters, adding that the situation in Ramadi had worsened in recent weeks as the militants had become more aggressive in their attacks. On the southern edge of Kirkuk province, where thousands of displaced have fled from the city of Tikrit and other areas overrun by militants last month, 18 civilians were killed and 26 more severely wounded when a suicide bomber drove a car into a checkpoint, police and medics said. POLITICAL DEADLOCK Efforts to reach agreement on a new government in Baghdad to confront the insurgents have been complicated by the tensions between Maliki and the Kurds. The United States, the United Nations and Iraq's own Shi'ite clerics have urged lawmakers to form a new government swiftly to deal with the Sunni insurgency. The first session of the national parliament elected in April took place last week but failed to reach agreement on nominations for the top three government posts. The second had been due to be held on Tuesday but was delayed until Sunday. Regional Kurdish President Massoud Barzani told his parliament in Arbil last week to prepare a referendum on independence, infuriating Maliki. The relationship hit a new low this week when Maliki accused the Kurds of allowing their capital to be used as a base for the Islamic State and others, including former members of Saddam Hussein's now-banned Baath Party. In protest against the accusation, the Kurdish political bloc announced they were suspending participation in the Baghdad government on Friday. Foreign Minister Hoshiyar Zebari said the Kurds would continue to attend parliament. Zebari, who is a Kurd, said Iraq risked falling apart if a new inclusive government is not formed soon as "the country is now divided literally into three states - "Kurdish, a black state (ISIL) and Baghdad". Unless Iraqi leaders rose to the challenge "the consequences are very dire: complete fragmentation and failure" of the country, he said. Zebari said the suspension decision would be re-evaluated if Maliki apologised for his comments. After the announcement, Maliki appointed Hussain al-Shahristani, the deputy prime minister, as acting foreign minister, an official in Shahristani's office told Reuters. Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shukri met Maliki in Baghdad on Friday to stress Cairo's support for efforts to avoid "the threat (of) sectarian confrontation and the spread of extremism and terrorism in the name of religion". CALL FOR CALM A spokesman for Kurdish leader Barzani said Maliki, who is seeking a third term in office in the face of political opposition, "has been afflicted by a true hysteria". The increasingly bitter political accusations prompted the country's senior Shi'ite cleric on Friday to urge Iraq's leaders to end their bickering and for fighters to avoid targeting people because off their sect or politics. "We have repeatedly called for the closing of ranks and for unity and to refrain from radical discourse," Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani said in a sermon delivered by an aide. Sectarian rhetoric from politicians had already incited Iraqis and could destabilise things even further, he said. Tens of thousands of people responded to a call from Sistani on June 13 to take up arms against the Sunni insurgency. Fighters should "not ... transgress against any innocent citizen, no matter their sectarian or ethnic affiliation or whatever their political stance," aide Abdul Mehdi Al-Karbala’i told worshippers at the Imam Hussein shrine in the Shi'ite holy city of Karbala. A senior Iraqi Shi'ite politician has told Reuters that in the first week after Sistani's call, Sunnis were killed by militia that had quickly mobilised. They had now been brought under control. But there have been continued reports of disappearances and suspected mass killings. On Wednesday, south of Baghdad, Iraqi security forces found 53 corpses, blindfolded and handcuffed, with bullets to the chest and head. Locals found the corpses of three men on Friday in Injana village near the town of Adaim, north of Baghdad in Diyala province, a police officer told Reuters. The bodies were apparently dumped on the street. A medical source said the men had been killed recently because their bodies had not decomposed. The area is mainly Sunni. The identity of the dead was not immediately clear, the police officer said. Baghdad had seen few attacks compared to the violence in other areas hit by the Islamic State's offensive last month, though bombs still hit the capital on a fairly regular basis. In the predominately Shi'ite district of northern Baghdad, three civilians were killed by a roadside bomb on Friday afternoon, police and medics said. (Additional reporting by David Sheppard in London, Isabel Coles in Arbil, Isra' al-Rubei'i in Baghdad; Writing by Dominic Evans and Maggie Fick; Editing by Gareth Jones) ======================================================