Foreign Correspondence

[Amaunet]

It was the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) that recommended the restructuring of Iraq into six states.
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And there was a little omission in that ‘excellent’ text. This could be an example of the CFRs alignment with Israel.

Who gets the oil?
Sunni Arabs and Kurds are virtually on the brink of civil war in northern Iraq: the daily situation in both Kirkuk and Mosul is explosive - ambushes, assassinations, car bombings - but scarce information filters south to Baghdad and to the outside world. Kirkuk is nominally under Kurd control. But what the Kurds want most of all is to control Northern Oil - part of the Iraqi National Oil Co, in charge of the oilfields west of Kirkuk. Sunni Arabs say "over our dead bodies". No wonder the key local battlefield is the oil pipeline crossing Kirkuk province: it was blown up again this Wednesday.
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Per a report in the latest issue of the New Yorker, Israel is actively involved in supporting the Iraqi Kurds, who are fast sowing the seeds of their independence, albeit often under the convenient guise of a new Iraqi federalism. According to the article by veteran writer Seymour Hersh, who has aptly unearthed the secrets of Israel's nuclearization, not to mention the Abu Ghraib prison torture fiasco, Israel's secret service, Mossad, is engaged in covert operations among Iranian and Syrian Kurds, in addition to training Iraqi Kurd commandos and setting up the latter as a counterweight to Shi'ite militias.

Albeit this is not purely a response to Israel’s fear of militant Shi'ism emanating from Iran, and the US's inability to contain this threat. The economic dimension of Israel's push for a Kurdish state or, at the least, a largely autonomous Kurdish region in Iraq which could realize the long sought-after dream of an oil pipeline from Mosul to Haifa, echoing the statement last March in the Israeli paper, Haaretz, by Minister for National Infrastructures Joseph Paritzky, that such a pipeline would diversify Israel's sources of energy and lessen its dependence on expensive Russian oil. The fact that this pipeline would have to travel through the "weak" and compliant state of Jordan does not seem, at least from the prism of Israel's national (security) interests to be an insurmountable problem.
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At present, Iraqi oil is being shipped via Turkey to a small Mediterranean port near the Syrian border.

Ankara, which considers the transit fee it collects an important source of revenue, has warned Israel it would regard the talked-about Kirkuk-Mosul-Haifa pipeline as "a serious blow to Turkish-Israeli relations."
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A long-held Israeli dream is to create an economic link between oil-rich Kurdish Iraq and Israel itself, with the ultimate aim of a Mosul-Haifa oil pipeline through pliant Jordan.

For Arab public opinion, the Israeli-Kurdish link in Iraq confirms with even greater force its view that the pattern of recent developments is at root an Israeli-American plan to dominate the region, with the Arab world’s oil resources a key prize.
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-Am