Bush-Linked Companies Hunt For Kurdish Oil

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The Hunt for Kurdish Oil

Washington Dispatch: Inside the Bush administration's Kurdish oil paradox.

By Laura Rozen

July 31, 2008



One muggy evening this summer, Qubad Talabani, the 31-year-old son of the president of Iraq, was chatting over drinks at a Dupont Circle bar when his BlackBerry rang. "It's Ray Hunt," Talabani said, looking at the caller ID on his phone. The Washington representative of the Iraqi Kurdistan Regional Government apologized for the interruption, and turned away to take the call.

His caller is a man who has no trouble getting his phone calls answered at any hour, anywhere in the world. A Bush/Cheney fundraising Pioneer, a member of Bush's President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, and the president of the Dallas-based Hunt Oil company, Ray Hunt is the kind of Texas oilman with easy insider access to the Bush White House. Perhaps not coincidentally, he also heads the first American oil firm to have received an oil exploration contract with the Iraqi Kurdistan Regional Government, announced last September. As such, he has come to epitomize one of the more glaring contradictions about the Bush administration's policy toward Iraq and its oil wealth. Namely: If the Bush administration, as it proclaims, supports passage of an Iraqi oil law that would share the country's wealth across ethnic and regional divides, why do Bush-linked companies keep getting Kurdish-area oil concessions that bypass the Iraqi national government?

Hunt Oil isn't the only one. This week, the Wall Street Journal reported that another Bush administration insider, Richard Perle, had approached Talabani seeking an Iraqi Kurdish oil concession on behalf of a consortium involving Turkish oil companies and the Kazakh government. "The K18 concession, which is estimated to hold 150 million or more barrels of oil, would potentially be operated by Houston-based Endeavour International," reported the Journal. The Hunt Oil and Perle-Turkish-Kazakh ventures are among more than twenty oil contracts signed (with dozens more under consideration) by the Kurdish Regional Government, in a process conducted largely in the dark. As troubling, several of the proposed Kurdish oil deals would financially benefit key Washington figures with close ties to the Bush administration.

"Iraq is predicted to pump 70 billion dollars worth of oil this year. That gives them a 50 billion dollar budget surplus," notes a congressional staffer knowledgeable about the situation. "The administration, Iraqi government, and everyone say that getting this national oil law is a prerequisite for political reconciliation and the US being able to get out sooner. To the extent that the situation is becoming chaotic, it is hurting the chances for that."

On July 2, Henry Waxman, chairman of the House Committee on Government Oversight and Reform, wrote Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice a letter laying out documents that seemingly contradict Bush administration claims to have been kept mostly in the dark about the Hunt Oil deal with the Kurdish Regional Government.

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http://motherjones.com/washington_dispatch/2008/07/kurdish-oil-hunt.html