RE: Suggest me a name

A friend of mine had a dog called Saddam. Pity they had to put him asleep because he was getting too aggresive. 🙁

RE: Who is your fav simpsons character?

Homer, the selfish donut-eating dad, always in for a couple of beers, sees of himself as a workaholic. He’s a reflection of the modern western man.

I also like Chief Wiggum.

Scooter and Cyrrus

@ Scooter

<< You want facts? The only facts that you are interested in our Anti-American! >>

Why should I? I have said plenty of times that the US and Europe are very important for eachother, and yet, I said it again. I think it’s you who want to start a flame war, ain’t gonna work. I know a couple of Americans here (Mixtec) whom I have great respect for. They like their country, but they are not blind.

<< Where are your criticism of your Country or Europe? >>

Read the post about Berlusconi, The thread on Iraq, FN herstel. Full of criticism towards my own gov’t. If you haven’t seen that, you probably haven’t read anything.

<< For that matter I don’t see any of Iraq or the PLO or China to name a few. >>

This post I said Saudi Arabia, Nigeria should not become a member of the UNSC.

<< My fathers generation fought and died in your very country to give you the rights that you are expressing now. >>

Hmm, agree. We are still very gratefull, but you can’t stay on this argumenent forever. Remember, it’s France who give you your own country. It’s important to use historical facts, but I’m looking at the world today. My grandfathers generation also had to fight (He was from French descent), and I’m still appaled why I hear my grandmother telling stories about WWII. My grandfather he escaped Belgium and flee towards France so he could avoid working in the German factories. A couple of weeks later France was also captured. My grandfather was not a brave man, he just tried to save his life from the Nazi-oppression. I can’t imagine what it is to feel oppressed, and so can’t you, Scooter, so let’s not argue about that one, OK?

<< God forbid someone on this forum would take the US side on a issue. >>

The forum is a place to discuss personal opinions. Nobody is forced here to be pro are anti-US.

<< Because you would be right there to strike it down…….Grow up youngman it will be your undoing!!!!! >>

So now it’s my fault. Thanks a lot, Scooter. Maybe it’s also my fault that the new forum doesn’t work. }> Touché. :7

@ Cyrrus_666

666? Number of the devil? }>

<< I’ve been on this site for only a short time, but in that time I’ve read plenty of anti-American comments. >>

What’s the exact definition of anti-Americanism. AFAIK anti-Americanism is saying “I want to kill millions of Americans” or “yeah, Allah bless 9-11”. What we are doing is criticising the US, maybe a bit too much, but since the US dominates the news (and not Europe or China), and the US is asking a lot from the world.

<< Most of it due mainly to jealousy, but some of it to just out right ignorance. >>

Agree, we are jealous. Jealous because of your freedom and democracy, your health-insurance, education, higher living standards. Things we have never and will never experience in Europe. We don’t know democracy and freedom, my country is still ruled by an ‘evil despot’.

<< I look forward to following this thread and getting a chuckle out of all the “wishful” thinking that the America-haters come up with. >>

As I said to Scooter, I won’t help if you trigger a flame war.

<< Maybe the Brits, Canadians and Aussies (along with a few others perhaps) could join us in a new organization…but China, Russia, France, Syria, Iran, et al can go form their own despotic alliance somewhere else. >>

France and Syria indeed are about the same. I know Chirac is not a charismatic person, but at least he’s elected with an 80 % victory. When did that happen in Syria? And there’s already such a treaty, the ANZUS-treaty between the US, NZ and OZ.

Te morite salutant !

RE: UN security council

[updated:LAST EDITED ON 15-09-02 AT 10:23 PM (GMT)] 🙁 🙁 🙁 🙁

Has nothing to with anti-Americanism, scooter, nothing !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I said there shouldn’t be two European countries in the UNSC while the Arab world, Latin America and Africa are not represented at all. Yes, I do believe the UNSC should reform itself, and represent the whole world, not a couple of regions.

Why can’t you just read what I said ????????????????!!!!!!! What in this post can be seen as anti-americanism???? I want facts, Scooter, facts. I haven’t even mentioned the US in this post. If you’re here to piss me off, you have succeeded. I can’t be that difficult, reading, can it?

Anti-American Propaganda, my ass! Try to find some better arguments.

Scooter

[updated:LAST EDITED ON 15-09-02 AT 10:12 PM (GMT)]Why always your country?

Than you didn’t read my post.
I said both Europe and the US are responsible for it.
I even gave you the example of Italy and mentioned I can give you examples of my own country.

Criticism on the US is seens as a bias, OK for me, as that is what you think.
Fact is, Europe (exept Britain) is not threatening Iraq, does not have any important military installations/bases in the ME, in other means, can do no #####.
A military weak Europe which can not make decissions on its own because we need the US to take care of our own problems (Yugoslavia, I’m not arguing if this war was right or wrong, just gave an example).
As long as Europe remains a military midget, the European gov’ts have to cooperate with the US.
Saddam is a dictator, a massmurderer, I agree with this, but without the full support of the UNSC I think any action undertaken by “coalition forces” is illegal, wheter they are American, British or European.
I’m disappointed in our own policy-makers who assured the people here they will do everything to prevent a new Gulf War from happening, but when they returned from NY, they have changed their stance on a war with 180°.
This has nothing to do with the US, it’s the hypocrisie of our own heads of state and gov’t leaders.

You say the US is not dependent on oil from the ME. Possible, but imagine what advantage they would have if they could controll the oil fields in Iraq, raising the oil prices tremendously. They could sell oil to Europe, India … earning billions with it. This is just a theory, but oil is always important, has always been and will always be. And Europe could also survive on its own without oil from the ME. There are still reserves in the North Sea + we could make a deal with Russia to drill oil and gaz over there.

And you still haven’t answered my question on Georgia.

Don’t mention the O word

Iraq’s oil

Don’t mention the O-word

Sep 12th 2002
From The Economist print edition

http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=1325264

Reuters

If America goes to war against Iraq, what will become of all that oil?

Get article background

AMERICA’S chief interest in going after Iraq’s president, Saddam Hussein, is doubtless to save the world from his actual or potential weapons of mass destruction. Another large consideration, secondary as it may be, has attracted less attention than it should have: the effects that would follow from the opening up of the country’s enormous reserves of oil.

Iraq’s reserves are the second-biggest in the world, after Saudi Arabia’s (see table). At present, thanks to UN sanctions and Mr Hussein’s attempts to evade them, the country is producing a fraction of its potential. If it were to produce oil at a rate to match its reserves, say some geopolitical strategists, it could end Saudi Arabia’s domination of world oil markets.

That would not come too soon for the United States. America is by far the world’s biggest oil-user, burning up a quarter of the total consumed. Its imports have risen in recent years, to more than half its total consumption. Since Saudi Arabia is the chief supplier of those imports, successive American presidents have gone to great lengths to cultivate the unsavoury and dictatorial House of Saud. They have also tolerated Saudi Arabia’s command of the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), which keeps oil prices much higher than they would be if market forces prevailed. Now America’s leaders increasingly feel—as Winston Churchill remarked of converting the British fleet from coal to petroleum before the first world war—that “safety and certainty in oil lie in variety, and variety alone.”

In hopes of finding such variety, George Bush is now changing American policy. He has openly embraced Vladimir Putin’s goal of expanding Russia’s oil industry, with talk of increased exports and a big ministerial conference on energy planned for Houston in October. Another opportunity, openly acknowledged or not, is the present showdown with Iraq. Rumours of war are likely to dominate the meeting of OPEC ministers on September 19th in Osaka, in Japan.

The fear premium
Conventional wisdom says war drums are good news for OPEC and the Saudis today, but bad news in the longer term. Talk of war always heats up the oil price, giving producers an instant windfall. Yet tomorrow, if America succeeds in toppling the bully-boy of Baghdad, the world could be awash in Iraqi oil. Look closer, and matters are more complicated.

In the short term, jittery traders are already handing oil producers a handsome windfall profit. Last week, on ill-founded rumours of a huge air strike by American and British planes in western Iraq, prices shot to their highest level in a year, passing $30 a barrel for West Texas Intermediate, America’s benchmark crude. Daniel Yergin, head of Cambridge Energy Research Associates (CERA), an industry consultancy, estimates that the “fear premium” on each barrel of oil is now $3-5.

As war gets closer, prices seem bound to go higher. During the Gulf war, a decade ago, prices spiked past $40 a barrel in nominal terms. Phillip Ellis of the Boston Consulting Group, who has analysed the history of oil shocks and their impact on prices, argues that prices fall into two ranges. The peace curve, as he calls it, “forms around an average of about $22-24 in today’s money. The war curve forms around a price north of $50.”

Some would put it higher. Sheikh Zaki Yamani, Saudi Arabia’s oil minister during the shocks of the 1970s, gave warning last week that if America invades Iraq, Mr Hussein could attack Saudi Arabia and Kuwait and so send oil prices to $100 a barrel. Iraq’s vice-president, Taha Yassin Ramadan, stirred the pot further this week by goading fellow Arabs to strike American targets in the Middle East if Iraq is attacked.

High prices are clearly a nightmare for consumers. Paradoxically, and here is where the complications begin, they are bad news for producers, too. Prices much above Mr Ellis’s “normal” range act as a brake on economic growth. There are signs of this happening already, especially in Asia. Some economists worry about an oil-induced global downturn. As the earlier oil shocks have taught OPEC, prolonged periods of high prices only kill the goose that lays the golden egg.

Another reason why sky-high prices are bad for OPEC, and especially for Saudi Arabia, is that they spur oil production from uneconomic places. In a genuinely free market, most of the world’s oil would be produced by Saudi Arabia and its neighbours, where the cost of exploration and production is a dollar or two a barrel. In contrast, trying to force drills through rocks in the Arctic or beneath deep water can heap up costs to $10-12 a barrel.

Getting round the Saudis
Because OPEC’s “price-defence” strategy has kept prices above $18 a barrel for three years, argues the Petroleum Finance Company (PFC), an industry consultancy, projects in non-OPEC regions—the frozen wilds of Russia, the turbulent Caspian basin, the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico—have attracted many billions of dollars in investment. High prices have already inspired the development of 2.6m barrels per day (bpd) of non-cartel oil, besides investment in projects that promise to deliver another 5.2m bpd from alternative sources by 2008. This new supply, says the PFC, “has and will continue to eat up all the increase in global demand, leaving OPEC no room to expand its own output and making the cartel’s price-defence strategy increasingly difficult to maintain.”

However, the pain is not equally shared among cartel members. It is felt mostly by Saudi Arabia, the self-appointed “swing” producer. That is because higher prices have also encouraged some of the smaller fry in the cartel, such as Nigeria, Algeria and Libya, to develop new production capacity and to bypass existing production quotas set by OPEC. John Mitchell, an energy analyst at Britain’s Royal Institute of International Affairs, offers a more fundamental reason to suppose that the cartel’s “aggressive collusion” will not endure: the ratio of production to reserves varies greatly among cartel members, and so the incentive to increase output rather than keep it flat also varies greatly.

The result, according to estimates by Deutsche Bank, is that new supply could outstrip expected demand by as much as 1m barrels a day by 2004. The only country that has historically been willing to reduce its own output—and revenue—by such a large volume to “balance” the market and prevent a price collapse is Saudi Arabia.

Reuters

With years of graft and heaps of money, they may be a force again

All this explains why Saudi Arabia has long advocated a moderate stance on prices. Yet when ministers meet in Osaka next week, they face a dilemma. Thanks to fears about war with Iraq, prices are high and the markets are anxious. Winter is on the way, and with it a seasonal upturn in demand for oil. On September 11th the International Energy Agency (IEA), a quasi-governmental watchdog set up by the world’s biggest oil consumers, said that stocks of crude were “uncomfortably low” going into the winter, and the whole situation “every bit as precarious” as in 1999, before a notably volatile spell for oil prices.

This being so, the Saudis might argue at Osaka for a modest increase in quotas. On the other hand, as Venezuela and Iran point out, the greatest risk facing the cartel is not high prices but a price collapse. That could happen if OPEC releases oil into a weakening global economy. It did precisely that in the run-up to the Asian economic crisis a few years ago, and oil prices fell to around $10 a barrel.

Even if Saudi Arabia somehow smooths over the meeting in Osaka, some argue, the longer-term picture for the cartel is bleak. The expulsion of Mr Hussein, which looks likelier than not, could turn the oil market upside down. This is because Iraq, with its vast reserves, is the only country that could challenge the Saudis by throwing open the taps.

If a post-Saddam regime did that, Saudi Arabia’s strategy of keeping OPEC prices between $22 and $28 a barrel would be under threat. If the flood of Iraqi oil continued indefinitely, goes the argument, the Saudis would have no choice but to abandon price (and, with it, their allies in OPEC with higher costs and smaller reserves) and go for volume instead. Though politically difficult, that need not be economic folly: Deutsche Bank calculates that Saudi Arabia could maintain oil revenues at $60 billion or so either by producing 6m bpd at around $30 a barrel, or by cranking out 10m bpd at about $17 a barrel.

Will the flood of Iraqi oil occur? It is possible. Any future government in Iraq, needing vast amounts of money to rebuild the country, will try to expand the oil sector as fast as it can. At least some oil executives believe that this bonanza could draw much foreign capital into Iraqi oil production. Even if the new government did not break ties with OPEC, as the United States might like, it would probably argue—bearing in mind the years of UN supervision of its oil exports—for a lengthy exemption from quotas.

OPEC, RIP?
It might seem, then, that knocking out Mr Hussein would kill two birds with one stone: a dangerous dictator would be gone, and with him would go the cartel that for years has manipulated prices, engineered embargoes and otherwise harmed consumers. Yet several factors suggest that the transition to a post-Saddam oil world will be messy—and that such a world could still have a forceful OPEC in it.

Consider again Sheikh Yamani’s fear: that Mr Hussein, in a desperate last act, may attack the Saudi and Kuwaiti oil infrastructure and bring the global economy to a halt. The oilfields could be set ablaze, as they were during the Gulf war. Refineries and terminals could be contaminated with radioactive or biological agents. With help from outsiders, Mr Hussein might be able to shut down shipping lanes such as those in the Straits of Hormuz, preventing Saudi Arabia from getting its oil to market.

On balance, though, the risks of a prolonged physical disruption seem small. One senior European oilman insists that it would be very difficult to engineer a complete shutdown of all Middle Eastern oil: “That’s a bit like thinking you could shut down all North Sea production by firing SCUD missiles from Germany.” CERA’s Mr Yergin says it is difficult to target all the oilfields, pipelines and export terminals that matter in the area. Saudi Arabia has plenty of spare capacity and transport options for its oil; besides, pipelines are pretty quickly patched up.

The world also holds emergency stocks of oil much bigger than those it held back in the 1970s. These should not inspire complacency; as the chart shows, they cover only a few weeks of disruption, and a prolonged war could still mean disaster. Yet the world at least has the IEA, monitoring oil markets and emergency stocks and engaging OPEC in “consumer-producer dialogues” (another one will take place in Osaka next week) to encourage stable prices. If oil supplies are suddenly threatened, as Robert Priddle, the IEA’s boss, explains, governments have even given him the extraordinary power to release oil stocks unilaterally.

Fears of a physical disruption to supply are therefore overblown. More worrying, however, is the possibility that Saudi Arabia will decide it does not want to get extra oil to market. Historically, the Saudis have always acted as the market’s guarantor of last resort. During the Iran-Iraq war, for example, they stepped into the breach and increased output to smooth prices. As they intentionally keep a whopping 3m bpd or so of spare capacity to hand, their country alone can easily compensate for the loss of Iraq’s current output.

But the Saudis do not like the way the Bush administration is setting about Iraq. The regime also faces great anger on the “street” for its cosiness with the American government. Add to that the Saud dynasty’s precarious grip on power, and the ruling family might find it politically impossible to crank up production to help the Americans. The result could be chaos in the world markets, and OPEC left firmly in control.

Another reason to doubt that an invasion would kill off OPEC is the state of Iraq’s oil infrastructure. Thanks to a dozen years of UN sanctions, and many more years of mismanagement and over-exploitation, the country’s petroleum industry is in pitiful shape. Even in its best times, the country produced only 3m-3.5m bpd: a third of Saudi Arabia’s peak and half of Russia’s. As one American oil executive says, “Under the very best scenario, Iraq might manage that peak again.” To do better, the country would need massive investment from the world oil industry.

Expect no miracles
That, says the same senior oilman, will be slow in coming until companies are sure that the new regime will be stable and will respect the rule of law. Realistically, experts say, it will take Iraq perhaps five years of hard work, western know-how and big money to turn its oil industry into a serious force again. CERA puts it bluntly: Iraqi output can only increase from today’s low levels, but that does not mean “a massive, rapid increase in production that will depress prices, displace other Gulf producers and render OPEC impotent.”

In short, a “regime change” of the sort that Mr Bush has in mind for Iraq might rewrite all the rules of the oil game—on paper. The president’s new friendship with Mr Putin also heralds an important change in the geopolitics of energy. In practice, however, the second Bush to take on Mr Hussein will probably be long gone from the White House before the oil markets are transformed by Iraqi oil. Don’t write off Saudi Arabia, or OPEC, just yet.

Scooter;

<< Maybe because your a spoiled 18 year old something that thinks that knows it all? >>

I’m sorry to inform you but I’m not a spoiled 18 year old something. My father died when I was two years, so at home, things weren’t always that easy. I had to take care of a lot myself, my mother was too busy trying to earn the money. So next time you insult somebody, please get to learn the person first. And don’t come with the “Sorry, I didn’t know that”-crap, I won’t buy it.

Anyway, I asked a question, you didn’t answer it. Why is the US so concerned about a possible Russian military intervention in Georgia, while it got all support for their war against terrorism in A’stan^, using the “You’re with us or against us”-doctrine.

<< Than I would say that “most” Europeans and the rest of the World for that matter support the US view! >>

I’m sorry but I think it’s you who don’t know what you’re talking about. First of all the public opinion in Europe is not the public opinion of the rest of the world. A military intervention backed by the UN still seems to be acceptable amongst many Europeans, but I doubt the Arabs think that way.

Anyway, read some of the pan-European press and it will get clear. And not only BBC World, but also the French and German press (http://www.fr-aktuell.de/) (http://www.figaro.fr/)
Ipso facto.

<< So, unless you can prove that most Europeans countries are puppets of the United States or that there leader place no thought in what the majority want. >>

In some cases, yes. I’ll give you the example of Berlusconi (Il Duce), both the PM and minister of foreign affairs in Italy (didn’t know one could combine that job). Today, Thousands of protestors demonstrated against him, but Silvio doesn’t seem to care. In fact, his parliamentary majority just voted a new law which will make it impossible to prosecute him during his years in office. He also fired all judges from the suppreme court (so much for polarity), sended home the top of the RAI (state TV) and replaced them with his own people.

Now you say what has that to do with Iraq? Well, I think many leaders of democratic countries don’t seem to care anymore about what their people think. Not only in the US or Italy, I can give you some examples of my own country. Since 9/11 freedom has been restricted in a lot of countries, including Europe and North-America.
Some people might call this “Real politik”, I think it’s an assault on democracy.