Richard Perle Linked To Kurdish Oil Deal

So, it wasn't about the oil, eh? When will the citizen's of Wingnuttia apologize to all of us who had it right before the war. Never.

How about the cheer-leading freaking media?

	Published on Tuesday, July 29, 2008 by The Wall Street Journal by Susan Schmidt and Glenn R. Simpson Influential former Pentagon official Richard Perle has been exploring going into the oil business in Iraq and Kazakhstan, according to people with knowledge of the matter and documents outlining possible deals. Mr. Perle, one of a group of security experts who began pushing the case for toppling Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein about a decade ago, has been discussing a possible deal with officials of northern Iraq’s Kurdistan regional government, including its Washington envoy, according to these people and the documents. It would involve a tract called K18, near the Kurdish city of Erbil, according to documents describing the plan. A consortium founded by Turkish company AK Group International is seeking rights to drill there, the documents say. Potential backers include two Turkish companies as well as Kazakhstan, according to individuals involved. AK’s chief executive is Aydan Kodaloglu, who, like Mr. Perle, has been involved with the American Turkish Council, an advocacy group in Washington. She didn’t respond to requests for comment. Phyllis Kaminsky, who identified herself as the U.S. contact for Ms. Kodaloglu, said she herself was aware of the drilling plan but referred questions about it to Mr. Perle. “Richard would know the most,” Ms. Kaminsky said. “He is involved, I know that.” People with knowledge of the discussions said they involve Alexander Mirtchev, a Washington consultant and adviser to the government of Kazakhstan, and an associate of his, Kaloyan Dimitrov. Mr. Perle has attended events promoting the interests of Kazakhstan, an oil-rich nation whose ruler, Nursultan Nazarbayev, is involved in a long-running U.S. investigation of 1990s-era oil-company bribery. Mr. Perle has publicly lauded President Nazarbayev as “visionary and wise,” according to a publication distributed by the Kazakh embassy in Washington. Mr. Perle said by email that Mr. Mirtchev is a friend of his who once spent a night at his vacation home in France. Mr. Perle said Mr. Mirtchev is “justly…proud of his influence on the liberalization of the Kazakh economy.” Asked about pursuing oil concessions, Mr. Perle said, “I am not involved in any consortium involving Mr. Mirtchev or Mr. Dimitrov, nor am I ‘framing plans for a consortium’” involving either one. He declined to elaborate. Brian Shaughnessy, a lawyer for Mr. Mirtchev, said his client “is not working on oil related projects in Kazakhstan or Kurdistan with Richard Perle, nor have they done any business deals of this nature.” A lawyer for Mr. Dimitrov didn’t respond to questions about oil discussions. A spokesman for Qubat Talabani, the Kurdistan regional government’s representative in the U.S., confirmed that the envoy had been approached by Mr. Perle. In a statement, Mr. Talabani said “one of my duties…is to seek out potential investors for our new, growing economy in Iraqi Kurdistan as well as respond…to all legitimate requests for investment information.” Kurdish authorities have been granting oil-drilling contracts even though Iraq’s central government and the Bush administration want them to hold off until a national oil law is passed. The K18 concession, which is estimated to hold 150 million or more barrels of oil, would potentially be operated by Houston-based Endeavour International, according to documents and people familiar with the discussions. A spokeswoman for Endeavour said, “At this point we wouldn’t have anything definitely going on, and we wouldn’t comment on anything that hadn’t been publicly announced.” Mr. Perle also has explored obtaining an oil concession in Kazakhstan in tandem with a northern Iraq deal, according to people familiar with those discussions. Mr. Perle, who was an assistant Defense secretary in the Reagan administration, is known for his strong support of Israel and hawkish views on arms control. In the early days of the Bush administration, he was one of the most influential proponents of U.S. military action to oust Iraq’s President Hussein. Mr. Perle was chairman of the Defense Policy Board, which advises the Pentagon, but resigned in March 2003 amid criticism of his role as an adviser to a telecom company that was seeking U.S. government approval for a sale to Asian investors. He is a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute think tank. Copyright © 2008 Dow Jones & Company, Inc

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The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.

Kurdish Issue Will Expolode In Bush's Face.

By Amitabh Pal
June 8, 2007

What was the Bush Administration thinking when it invaded Iraq?

If further proof was needed that the United States opened up a can of worms with its decision, check out the coming conflict between Turkey and Kurdistan, a “sideshow” of the entire Iraq mess that has received comparatively little coverage in the U.S. media. (The New York Times’s Greek edition of its overseas counterpart, the International Herald Tribune, had a lot of focus on this subject when I visited Greece in April.)

For those not following the matter closely, the Turkish armed forces have engaged in a huge buildup on the Turkey-Iraq border to intimidate (or worse) the Iraqi Kurdish leadership into ceasing to provide haven to Turkish Kurdish guerrillas (members of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or the PKK). There’s only one problem: The Iraqi Kurds are perhaps the only friends of the United States in Iraq. So now you have Turkey, a really close U.S. ally, taking them on.

Could the Bush Administration have created a bigger mess?

The Turkish government was extremely wary about the Iraq War, and understandably so. It feared that the establishment of an independent Kurdish state next door would provide a bad example to Kurds in Turkey. This is the main reason why the Turkish government refused to join in, in spite of pressure from U.S. officials such as Paul Wolfowitz, who called on the Turkish military to override the democratically elected government. Although ill-treatment of the Kurds has eased up in recent years, for decades repression was so harsh that even the Kurdish language was banned. Tens of thousands of people died in a tit-for-tat guerrilla war between the PKK and the Turkish armed forces, with both sides engaging in massive human rights abuses. (John Tirman’s “Spoils of War: The Human Cost of America's Arms Trade” has details about the Turkish government’sbrutalization of its Kurdish minority.)

The impetus for the recent Turkish show of force has been an upsurge in Kurdish guerrilla activity following a years-long relative lull after the capture of PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan in 1999. The most notable incident has been a suicide bombing last month in Ankara that killed eight people. The Turkish government blames the PKK for carrying out the attack; the PKK vehemently denies it. The Bush Administration has been frantically warning the Turkish army to not invade Iraq.

The Iraqi Kurds have received generally good press in this country, partly due to (justifiably so) the repression they suffered at the hands of Saddam, and partly due to the fact that they are relatively secular and pro-Western. But the record of their leadership hasn’t been without blemish. The Kurdish administration has engaged in censorship and suppression of civil liberties. (See David Enders’s “Squelching Freedom in Iraqi Kurdistan” in the June 2006 issue of The Progressive.)

And they have discriminated against ethnic Arabs and Turkoman (another sore point for Turks) in Kurdish-dominated towns.

The Iraqi Kurdish leadership has been biding its time and waiting for the opportune moment to secede from the parent country.

Even though Iraqi President Jalal Talabani is a Kurd, and although the Kurds have a large amount of autonomy provided for in the Iraqi Constitution, it’s only a matter of time before they raise the unspeakable question. When this happens, the Kurds will be on an inevitable collision course with the Turkish government, which will be in little mood to tolerate such a step. The result would very likely be all-out war.

What does the Bush Administration plan to do then?


(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)

The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.