UN Lifts Iraq WMD Sanctions

UN Lifts Iraq WMD Sanctions

www.military.com

UNITED NATIONS - The U.N. Security Council on Wednesday lifted sanctions that barred Iraq from acquiring weapons of mass destruction and pursuing a civilian nuclear program, in a symbolic step to restore the country to the international standing it held before Saddam Hussein's 1990 invasion of Kuwait.

Iraq's constitution bars the country from acquiring weapons of mass destruction and the country is a party to the main nuclear, chemical, biological and missile treaties.

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Oh but it’s a very strange world we live in. Seven years after the coalition militaries and governments concluded there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, years after Saddam Hussein swung from the gallows pole, years after a series of ‘interim” governments have been installed “democratically” in Iraq the U.N. is now ending the Sanctions against the nation.

Well, kind of sort of. It won’t be until June of 2011, until the Iraqi Government can retake control of the nation’s oil and gas industry and receive any proceeds from it.

Which of course really makes on wonder who has been running Iraq’s oil and gas industry since the invasion and where and who those proceeds have been going to.

It’s a giant step forward in theory to Iraq regaining it’s lost sovereignty, yet it seems to me for the better part of a decade both Iraq and the U.S. Treasury itself have been raped, largely over a case of ‘false accusations and charges” that Iraq had Weapons of Mass Destruction.

It’s a strange world we are living in, where its bad enough a individual person can be falsely accused for the gain of the accuser, unfounded celebrity rape cases come to mind, as one example. That specter takes on a whole new dimension though when the false accusations can be used against an entire nation, and millions of innocent people made to suffer as a result.

The propaganda machine will tell us about the ‘new schools, and shopping malls, and better cellular phone reception’ as if all these things really are a consolation for the deaths of countless innocent people, and a landscape now littered with radioactive depleted uranium shells that will likely be causing contamination and cancers and birth defects for years to come.

We to a far lesser extend here in the United States have had to ‘pay’ for the war too, mainly tax dollars, and the ‘enhanced’ threat of terrorist reprisals, for raping a land.

Yet clearly during that whole time someone has been pumping Iraq’s oil and gas, and making a fortune off of it, it sure hasn’t been ‘we the people’ who fund the war department’s treasure chest, and it sure doesn’t appear to be the people of Iraq.


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(visit the link for the full news article)

reply to post by ProtoplasmicTraveler


I guess there's only one question now
Who is the seller that wanted the ban lifted?

Originally posted by ModernAcademia
reply to post by ProtoplasmicTraveler

 

I guess there's only one question now
Who is the seller that wanted the ban lifted?

That's a good question. I am guessing that the rights were 'leased' to some corporation or nation for a specified time period that ends in June 2011, and we (the US) want to stop funding the running of the Iraqi government from our own treasury and are now willing to let them have a cut of their most valuable commodity, and want to create the appearance that the Iraqi's themselves have negotiated the 'new deal' of who gets the lease(s) after June 2011.

Great question, maybe someone on ATS knows and can share that answer?

Thanks for posting.

reply to post by ModernAcademia


Russia

Originally posted by Nephalim
reply to post by ModernAcademia

 

Russia

There is something else involved here, that likely makes that player not Russia.

Warfare can be conducted economically too.

For instance when Ronald Regan sold his Star Wars space based defense initiative as being real at the SALT talks in the early 1980's, it added a new level to the arms race between the Soviets and the USA.

The thought of the US rendering Russia's missiles obsolete led the Russians to begin a lot of costly research and development in how to create their own space based defense initiative.

Regan though was trying to Bankrupt the Soviet State so to do that, he calluded with the Saudis, to up their gasoline production to keep the price of gasoline artificially low, by not just dumping oil cheaply on the spot market, but 'cooking' the books to make it look like the Saudi's had a lot more oil in the ground than they did.

Russia is rich in oil, but by keeping the price so low, Russia couldn't raise the revenues it needed to match Star Wars and wage the war in Afghanistan too. Eventually trying to do both bankrupted the Soviet State.

In the aftermath of the First Persian Gulf War, the sanctions aimed at Iraq, that prevented it from selling gasoline, by sanction, except a limited amount just for medicines, basically prohibited Saddam Hussein from waging economic war on the West, by using Iraq's oil reserves to do to America what the Saudis helped us do to Russia.

Hussein could have easily had his revenge, by hitting Exxon/Mobil, Shell and BP hard by dumping oil cheap on the market creating an artificially low price, that would have not only hurt those corporate interests but decreased the tax revenues off of gasoline.

The sanctions were sold to the world as a way to keep Saddam from rearming and acquiring more sophisticated weapons, but it was actually to prevent him from waging economic war with oil by selling it cheaply.

What is going on with Iran right now is also very similiar, by keeping Iran on a near constant war footing, it can't sell it's oil and gas cheaply just to hurt western interests, and still have the money it needs to bolster it's own defenses in case of attack from Israel and the United States.

A lot of what goes on in the Middle East is deliberately to keep the price of oil artificially high.

That's the whole real reason for the carte blanche support of Israel, because as long as Israel is unrestrained and flush with weapons and cash, it's always going to create the instability in the region to keep the price of oil inflated.

Of course this is great for the oil companies, and great for the governments and their tax coffers, but it's really bad for us the average consumer, where gasoline itself is like a tax because so many of us need it to get to work and lead our lives.

Russia has tons of it's own reserves, so it doesn't need Iraq to sell it's oil, and it too economically benefits from the high price of oil and gas since it has so much.

reply to post by ProtoplasmicTraveler


It will be interesting to see how it unfolds. Time is telling.