Pipe Dreams: The Plundering of Iraq's Oil Wealth

by Erin Banco

Overview

What happened to Iraq’s oil wealth?

Iraq sits on top of more than 140 billion barrels of oil, making it the owner of the world’s fifth largest reserves. When the United States invaded in 2003, the Bush Administration promised that oil revenue—according to one report, totaling some $700 billion since the invasion, accounting for at least 80 percent of the Iraqi government budget—would be used to win the war and to rebuild and democratize the country. But fifteen years later, those dreams have been shattered. The economy has flat-lined, millions of people are internally displaced, and institutions like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank have had to provide billions of dollars to the country every year. Where did all the oil revenue go?

Based on court documents and on exclusive interviews with sources who have investigated energy companies, American, British and Iraqi government officials, and the middlemen between them, reporter Erin Banco traveled to oil-rich Iraqi Kurdistan—an autonomous region that holds, according to the regional government, some 45 billion barrels of crude—to uncover how widespread corruption, tribal cronyism, kickbacks to political parties, and the war with ISIS have contributed to the plundering of Iraq’s oil wealth. The region’s economy and political stability have been on the brink of collapse, and local people are suffering. Pipe Dreams is a cautionary tale that reveals how the dream of an oil-financed, American-style democracy in Iraqi Kurdistan now looks like a completely unrealistic fantasy.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780997722949
Publisher:	Columbia Global Reports
Publication date:	01/30/2018
Pages:	140
Product dimensions:	4.90(w) x 7.30(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Erin Banco is a Middle East reporter, and has been covering armed conflict and human rights violations in the Middle East for six years. She began her career as a freelance reporter in Cairo during the Arab spring. She covered the revolts in the region and the war in Syria. After graduating from Columbia's School of International and Public Affairs, she worked as the Middle East correspondent for International Business Times, breaking stories on the rise of the Islamic State group and on the Free Syrian Army arms program. Banco also traveled to Gaza to cover the war with Israel in the summer of 2014. More recently, Banco began covering the Islamic State group's economy by tracking illicit oil sales in Turkey and Iraq. She is a graduate of the Universityof Wisconsin and lives in New York City.

Table of Contents

Introduction Return of the Resource Curse 12

Chapter 1 Capital of the Oil Mirage 22

Chapter 2 The Wizard of Oil 41

Chapter 3 All in the Family 52

Chapter 4 Here Comes the West 59

Chapter 5 Game Changer 74

Chapter 6 Revolving Door 82

Chapter 7 Strange Cargo 89

Chapter 8 The Sufferings of Corruption 97

Chapter 9 The ISIS Oil Grab 103

Chapter 10 The Guardians of the Treasure 111

Conclusion No Place Like Home 116

Acknowledgments 125

Further Reading 127

Notes 131

Editorial Reviews

A fascinating and revealing dive into the murky world of oil contracts that shape power and politics in Iraq.” —Loveday Morris, The Washington Post Jerusalem bureau chief

“Investigative reporter Erin Banco reveals the complicated conspiracies keeping the richness of Iraqi oil from trickling down to the general populace.... Banco’s reportage vividly shows the human toll that deceit and subterfuge have taken on a land so rich in natural resources.” —Kirkus Reviews

“Pipe Dreams is a deeply reported account of an all-too-predictable state of affairs, with corporations and rapacious officials taking advantage of an institutionally weak and unstable country surrounded by war. Many characters in the book emerge with financial credit to their name, but few emerge with any moral credit.” —William Armstrong, Hürriyet Daily News

“With her trademark meticulous reporting, Erin Banco brings us the woefully untold story of theft in Iraq: the robbing of the Iraqi people’s natural resource rights. She takes us behind the scenes of broken promises and charts an ongoing network of corruption and deceit that has continued to plunder not only Iraq’s oil wealth, but the lives of its would-be beneficiaries. The result is a journalistic tour de force that can’t be ignored.” —Lauren Bohn, co-founder of Foreign Policy Interrupted and Middle East correspondent for The GroundTruth Project

“Erin Banco expertly tells the complicated story of corruption that lies at the heart of the endless problems gripping Kurdistan and greater Iraq. Her investigative work on the country’s troubled oil industry is deeply researched and engagingly told—and it shows how mismanagement and greed have turned a resource that should be a blessing into a curse. The book offers a unique and timely window onto the country’s tumultuous past, as well as a lens for understanding the instability and violence that continue to plague it today.” —Mike Giglio, Buzzfeed

From the Publisher

2017-11-28
Star-Ledger investigative reporter Banco reveals the complicated conspiracies keeping the richness of Iraqi oil from trickling down to the general populace.The U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 and removal of Saddam Hussein was accompanied by promises that the Iraqi people would share the wealth from the country's oil. It is no fault of this investigative reporter, who has plenty of experience and contacts in the Middle East, that readers are likely to finish this short book—which reads like a long magazine article—feeling more confused than ever. This is the way that big oil wants it, writes Banco, who shares WikiLeaks documents, tales of familial and tribal infighting, schemes of multinational empire-building, and charges of American perfidy to show that rather than sharing the wealth from oil, the displaced Iraqi citizenry is generally poorer than it was before. As has often been charged, the American invasion in the wake of 9/11 was something of a shell game, using Osama bin Laden as a pretext for the oil ties with which the Bush administration was inextricably bound. The reporting "focuses on what happened behind the scenes between the Kurdish government and international oil companies—negotiations, payouts and kickbacks that exacerbated the plundering of the region's oil." Needless to say, these were deals made behind metaphorical closed doors, as the nation has been torn by internal warfare while also fighting terrorism. The only simple aspect of this story is that the people had very high hopes that were dashed. Everything else is complicated, for, as the author suggests, "one explanation for government failure in Iraqi Kurdistan is that government itself isn't what it seems to be. Here, politics, business and family are inseparable." The plots thicken under the big foot of multinationals such as ExxonMobil, "the largest non-state oil company on the planet, with about $240 billion in annual revenues."Banco's reportage vividly shows the human toll that deceit and subterfuge have taken on a land so rich in natural resources.

Kirkus Reviews