Hunt Oil Co. Wins the War

Curmudgeon Chronicle for 9/18/07


As you know it doesn't take much to set the Curmudgeon off. He can be easily pissed off by fairly small matters. He is naturally skeptical and suspicious of the intentions of virtually everyone. But dammit this time they have really gone too far.

If curmudgeons cared about what other people thought (and we don’t) enough to feel that they needed to organize (and we don’t) and have a spokesman (still nope) the choice would be obvious. I’m pretty sure if you Google curmudgeon it shows his picture, if not it should. Close your eyes and picture what a curmudgeon should look like. You pictured Alan Greenspan didn’t you? (Well, you should have.) The former Chairman of the Federal Reserve has a face that only a curmudgeon’s mother could love.

Mr. Greenspan has a new book out this week “Age of Turbulence.” He has in there his predictions about the possibility of a recession and other tidbits of economic advice. Mr. Greenspan is a self-described “libertarian Republican” (think Joe Don and Ron Paul). Whatever, he ain’t no liberal.

So what does he think about the War on Iraq? "I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil."

What? Surely not. This war is about WMD’s, Spreading Democracy and Freedom, Fightin’ them over there so we don’t have to fight them over here, 9/11, the Pottery Barn. This is about lots of important stuff, but only some crazyass, black helicopter seeing, conspiracy theorist would believe it was about oil. Right?

Then there was this little tidbit in the news. The agreement between the Iraqis about how to share their oil revenues, the only source of revenues they have left, has collapsed. One of the apparent reasons is that Hunt Oil Co. of Dallas, Texas has signed a production sharing agreement with the government of Kurdistan. The Kurds have apparently given up trying to work with the crazier factions of the Iraqi government and working out a deal that would help everyone. They just want to produce oil, and revenue.

Similarly the Hunt Oil Co. of Dallas, Texas seems to have given up on working with the crazier factions of the US government and working out a deal that would help everyone. They just want to produce oil, and revenue. But is difficult to call Hunt Oil a rogue company. Ray L. Hunt, the CEO of Hunt Oil Co. of Dallas, Texas has long been a friend of the Bushes and a major political contributor. Moreover, he is a member of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, and one would think in a pretty good position to know what is going on in Iraq.

So Mr. Hunt is betting that an agreement with the Kurds is going to be better in terms of producing oil than an agreement with an Iraqi government would be. Why would an insider make such a bet? Obviously he does not believe that an Iraqi government will be in any position to make such an agreement for many years to come. The Kurds can make such an agreement even over the objections of the central Iraqi government, because the central Iraqi government has no ability to stop them. The US government has no interest in stopping them.

So what is it that pisses off the Curmudgeon today? Is it that we are killing hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and dislocating millions of others? Is it the nearly 3800 American soldiers who have now died and the 26,000 who have been maimed? Is it the $12 billion a month we continue to flush? All in the name of oil?

Nope. Today what pisses the Curmudgeon off is that Hunt Oil Co. of Dallas, Texas is a privately owned company and I can’t buy any stock in it. If the war is, as Mr. Greenspan says, about oil, we now know who won the war. Hunt Oil Co. of Dallas, Texas, a privately held company.