Is the oil, then?

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Writing in the LRB, Jim Holt thinks it is…

Iraq is ‘unwinnable’, a ‘quagmire’, a ‘fiasco’: so goes the received opinion. But there is good reason to think that, from the Bush-Cheney perspective, it is none of these things. Indeed, the US may be ‘stuck’ precisely where Bush et al want it to be, which is why there is no ‘exit strategy’.

Iraq has 115 billion barrels of known oil reserves. That is more than five times the total in the United States. And, because of its long isolation, it is the least explored of the world’s oil-rich nations. A mere two thousand wells have been drilled across the entire country; in Texas alone there are a million. It has been estimated, by the Council on Foreign Relations, that Iraq may have a further 220 billion barrels of undiscovered oil; another study puts the figure at 300 billion. If these estimates are anywhere close to the mark, US forces are now sitting on one quarter of the world’s oil resources. The value of Iraqi oil, largely light crude with low production costs, would be of the order of $30 trillion at today’s prices. For purposes of comparison, the projected total cost of the US invasion/occupation is around $1 trillion.

Who will get Iraq’s oil? One of the Bush administration’s ‘benchmarks’ for the Iraqi government is the passage of a law to distribute oil revenues. The draft law that the US has written for the Iraqi congress would cede nearly all the oil to Western companies. The Iraq National Oil Company would retain control of 17 of Iraq’s 80 existing oilfields, leaving the rest – including all yet to be discovered oil – under foreign corporate control for 30 years. ‘The foreign companies would not have to invest their earnings in the Iraqi economy,’ the analyst Antonia Juhasz wrote in the New York Times in March, after the draft law was leaked. ‘They could even ride out Iraq’s current “instability” by signing contracts now, while the Iraqi government is at its weakest, and then wait at least two years before even setting foot in the country.’ As negotiations over the oil law stalled in September, the provincial government in Kurdistan simply signed a separate deal with the Dallas-based Hunt Oil Company, headed by a close political ally of President Bush.

How will the US maintain hegemony over Iraqi oil? By establishing permanent military bases in Iraq. Five self-sufficient ‘super-bases’ are in various stages of completion. All are well away from the urban areas where most casualties have occurred. There has been precious little reporting on these bases in the American press, whose dwindling corps of correspondents in Iraq cannot move around freely because of the dangerous conditions. (It takes a brave reporter to leave the Green Zone without a military escort.) In February last year, the Washington Post reporter Thomas Ricks described one such facility, the Balad Air Base, forty miles north of Baghdad. A piece of (well-fortified) American suburbia in the middle of the Iraqi desert, Balad has fast-food joints, a miniature golf course, a football field, a cinema and distinct neighbourhoods – among them, ‘KBR-land’, named after the Halliburton subsidiary that has done most of the construction work at the base. Although few of the 20,000 American troops stationed there have ever had any contact with an Iraqi, the runway at the base is one of the world’s busiest. ‘We are behind only Heathrow right now,’ an air force commander told Ricks…

James Michaels RIP

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The man who turned Forbes into a great read, is dead. Nice obit in the Economist, which refers to his greatest scoop: he witnessed the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi. Here’s his report:

‘Bapu (father) is finished’

New Delhi, January 30, 1948: Mohandas K. Gandhi was assassinated today by a Hindu extremist whose act plunged India into sorrow and fear.

Rioting broke out immediately in Bombay.

The seventy-eight-year-old leader whose people had christened him the Great Soul of India died at 5:45 p.m. (7:15 a.m. EST) with his head cradled in the lap of his sixteen-year-old granddaughter, Mani.

Just half an hour before, a Hindu fanatic, Ram Naturam, had pumped three bullets from a revolver into Gandhi’s frail body, emaciated by years of fasting and asceticism.

Gandhi was shot in the luxurious gardens of Birla House in the presence of one thousand of his followers, whom he was leading to the little summer pagoda where it was his habit to make his evening devotions.

Dressed as always in his homespun sacklike dhoti, and leaning heavily on a staff of stout wood, Gandhi was only a few feet from the pagoda when the shots were fired.

Gandhi crumpled instantly, putting his hand to his forehead in the Hindu gesture of forgiveness to his assassin. Three bullets penetrated his body at close range, one in the upper right thigh, one in the abdomen, and one in the chest.

He spoke no word before he died. A moment before he was shot he said–some witnesses believed he was speaking to the assassin–”You are late.”

The assassin had been standing beside the garden path, his hands folded, palms together, before him in the Hindu gesture of greeting. But between his palms he had concealed a small-caliber revolver. After pumping three bullets into Gandhi at a range of a few feet, he fired a fourth shot in an attempt at suicide, but the bullet merely creased his scalp.

From A treasury of great reporting: literature under pressure from the sixteenth century to our own time, edited by Louis L. Snyder, Simon & Schuster, 1949.

Speak, memory

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It’s funny how some books linger in the mind, long after you’ve turned the last page. W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn has had that effect on me. I wrote about it the other day, when I was just over half-way through, and I had a nice email from my friend and colleague, Martin Weller, who had seen my post and had been looking for something unconnected with work to bring with him on holiday. He’d been moved by what I’d written to get the Sebald book.

It was an unfamiliar literary form for me – a meditative travelogue. But Andrew Motion argued in a recent review of The Wild Places by Robert Macfarlane that actually this is a relatively venerable form with its roots “in late 19th-and early 20th-century travelogues of the kind written by Edward Thomas”.

I felt slightly ashamed that I hadn’t known more about Sebald, who died in 2001 aged 57 when his car veered off a foggy road in East Anglia. A friend dug out two newspaper pieces, one an interview by Maya Jaggi published in December 2001, the other the Guardian obituary by his friend and fellow Norfolk resident, Michael Homberger (who features in The Rings of Saturn).

Sebald was born in a small Bavarian village in May 1944, the child of a “working-class, small-peasant” family. His father prospered modestly under the Nazis and rose to the rank of captain in the Wehrmacht. Like many (most?) German children of his generation, Sebald initially knew nothing about what had gone on during the Third Reich. “Until I was 16 or 17”, he told Jaggi, “I had heard practically nothing about the history that preceded 1945. Only when we were 17 were we confronted with a documentary film of the opening of the Belsen camp. There it was, and we somehow had to get our minds around it – which of course we didn’t. It was in the afternoon, with a football match afterwards. So it took years to find out what had happened. In the mid-1960s, I could not conceive that these events had happened only a few years back”.

Perhaps this is why his writing is suffused with a preoccupation with memory. And why he always approaches things obliquely. The thing that struck me about The Rings of Saturn was that he always seemed to be coming from left field. Homberger says in his obit that Sebald believed that “attempts to look directly at the horror would turn a writer into stone, or sentimentality”.

The other interesting thing I discovered is that Sebald was a devoted photographer. (The Rings of Saturn is richly illustrated by low-grade reproductions of the kind of pictures taken by someone who uses – as I do — a camera as a kind of visual notebook.) “I’ve always been interested in photographs”, he told Jaggi, “collecting them not systematically but randomly. They get lost, then turn up again. Two years ago in a junk shop in the east End of London, I found a photograph of the yodelling group from my home town. That is a pretty staggering experience. These old photographs always seem to have this appeal written into them, that you should tell a story behind them. In The Emigrants [another of his books] there is a group photograph of a large Jewish family, all wearing Bavarian costume. That one image tells you more about the history of German-Jewish aspiration than a whole monograph would do.”

He’s right. I hope Martin enjoys The Rings of Saturn as much as I did.

Freakonomics and Radiohead

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Interesting comment by Simon Goodley:

From this week, those wanting to listen to the boys’ next LP, In Rainbows, can pay as much or as little as they like for the album, which will be available to download on the band’s website.

It is a classic honour system, most famously described by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner in their bestseller Freakonomics (which inspired this stunt, some eggheads insist).

Because the Radiohead sale is being conducted online (where customers register) the whole thing could end up telling us quite a lot about Radiohead fans.

Similarly, in Levitt and Dubner’s work, an entrepreneur who delivers bagels to companies decides that, rather than hanging around and waiting for each customer to pay him in turn, he will simply leave behind a cash box and a note asking them to leave what they owe.

Amazingly, the sharks in America’s offices didn’t bankrupt him after a week and payment rates consistently hovered around 90pc. Meanwhile, his accounts unearthed some fascinating trends…

Comment dross

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I see that the Telegraph has made the same mistake as the Guardian in allowing people to post comments under assumed names. Here, for example, is ‘Lickyalips’ responding to an opinion piece about Gordon Brown and a petition on the Downing Street website:

Cameron should have responded by telling the deep-fried McMars Bar that people are not interested in the phony Downing Street petitions website after the government ignored 1.8 million signatures against the road-pricing scheme, which is going ahead regardless.

That would have put the sporran-faced gobshite in his place.

As the man said, if you set up a cockpit, people will fight.

Wiki wars

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From the Telegraph…

Submission of new articles is slowing to a trickle where in previous years it was flood, and the discussion pages are increasingly filled with arguments and cryptic references to policy documents. The rise of the deletionists is threatening the hitherto peaceful growth of the world’s most popular information source.

Even though anyone can edit all but the most controversial pages, the English-language Wikipedia is governed by a group of a little over 1,000 administrators drawn from the ranks of enthusiastic editors. Only they have the power to finally delete an article or bring it back from the dead.

The group is forming itself into two factions: inclusionists and deletionists…

Google now accounts for half of all web searches

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From the Telegraph…

Google was used for over half of the world’s 61 billion internet searches in the month of August, according to a report.

The US search engine powered 31 billion queries during the month, say the web analysts comScore.

Google sites recorded 37 bn searches in August

In total more than 37 billion searches were carried out across all Google sites.

Google-owned video-sharing phenomenon YouTube scored 5 billion searches in August.

Second on the list was Yahoo!, another US-based search engine, which was a long way behind Google with 8.5 billion searches recorded across the month.

Third was the Chinese search engine Baidu with 3.2 million searches, followed by all Microsoft sites, such as MSN, with 2.1 billion. Fifth was Korea’s NHN, with 2 billion.

ComScore’s Bob Ivins said: “Seeing Asian search engines like China’s Baidu.com and Korea’s NHN ranked alongside Google and Yahoo! underscores the fact that search has become a truly global phenomenon.”

The report is billed as “the first comprehensive study of worldwide search activity”.

It also revealed that the Asia-Pacific region, including China, Japan and India, contained the greatest number of unique searchers, with 258 million conducting over 20 billion searches during the month.

Second was Europe with 210 million searchers making 18 billion searches, followed by North America, with 206 million making 16 billion searches.

The most underdeveloped area in terms of web searches was the Middle East-Africa region, with 30 million recording 2 billion searches…

Decline of the record industry, contd.

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From TechCrunch…

Since reporting Monday that Nine Inch Nails had dumped its record label and was to offer future albums direct to the public, Oasis and Jamiroquai have also joined the move away from the record industry, but the biggest announcement of all is news today that Madonna has dumped the record industry.

According to reports, Madonna has signed a $120million deal with L.A. based concert promotion firm Live Nation to distribute three studio albums, promote concert tours, sell merchandise and license Madonna’s name.

Whilst the deal differs from Nine Inch Nails in that Madonna is not offering direct-to-public albums, Live Nation isn’t a record company. The deal shows that even for a world famous act, a record company is no longer required in the days of digital downloads and P2P music sharing.

The only real question now is how fast will the music industry model come tumbling down. When Radiohead led the way in offering their music directly to fans many predicted that the move was the beginning of the end; Madonna may well be the tipping point from where we will now see a flood of recording artists dumping record labels and where todays model will shortly become a footnote in Wikipedia.