Thursday, March 30, 2006; A22
Robert D. Novak's March 23 op-ed column, "Iraq's Oil Crisis," highlighted one result of the Bush administration's decision to retain nationalized ownership of the oil industry. Government control of Iraq's major source of income is the biggest institutional obstacle to creating representative government.
The petro-states in the Middle East have been able to maintain their authoritarian rule because they own all the oil. If the Iraqi provisional government had begun reconstruction efforts by announcing that the country's oil fields would be privatized and that each Iraqi citizen would be given a share in the enterprises and the profits, Iraq might be on its way to becoming a successful society now.
Moreover, subjects in other nearby petro-states might have started demanding that they, too, be given shares in their inefficient and corrupt nationalized oil companies, launching a political transformation throughout the Middle East.
MYRON EBELL
Director, Energy and Global Warming Policy
Competitive Enterprise Institute
Washington
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Robert D. Novak said the problem with Iraqi oil production is rampant corruption. Corruption and terrorist attacks on pipelines have slowed progress, but the main reason that the Iraqi oil industry isn't up and running is that the infrastructure -- rigs, pumping stations, storage plants and pipelines -- is decrepit.
When the United States and other coalition forces entered Iraq, they saw how Saddam Hussein had run the oil industry into the ground. Also, almost all of Iraq's storage capacity was wiped out in the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s and was never rebuilt.
Iraq's prewar oil production from 1997 to 2002 averaged 2 million barrels of oil a day; the average now is 2.5 million barrels. The near-term goal is 3 million barrels a day, but the sky is the limit. With only 10 percent of Iraq seismically explored, Iraq already is known to have the third-highest oil reserves in the world behind Saudi Arabia and Canada.
HOWIE LIND
McLean