NYT: Report Offered Bleak Outlook About Iraq Oil [View All]

[kskiska]

WASHINGTON, Oct. 4 — The Bush administration's optimistic statements earlier this year that Iraq's oil wealth, not American taxpayers, would cover most of the cost of rebuilding Iraq were at odds with a bleaker assessment of a government task force secretly established last fall to study Iraq's oil industry, according to public records and government officials.

The task force, which was based at the Pentagon as part of the planning for the war, produced a book-length report that described the Iraqi oil industry as so badly damaged by a decade of trade embargoes that its production capacity had fallen by more than 25 percent, panel members have said.

Despite those findings, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz told Congress during the war that "we are dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction, and relatively soon."

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Now, as the Bush administration requests $20.3 billion from Congress for reconstruction next year, the chief reasons cited for the high price tag are sabotage of oil equipment — and the poor state of oil infrastructure already documented by the task force.

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http://nytimes.com/2003/10/05/international/middleeast/05OIL.html?hp