Pipe Dreams: The Plundering of Iraq's Oil Wealth

by Erin Banco Narrated by Laura Jennings

Overview

When the Bush Administration invaded Iraq in 2003, it was promised that Iraqi Kurdistan would be developed into one of the most productive oil and natural gas regions in the world, and the profits would be used to win the war and rebuild the country. More than ten years later, those dreams lie in tatters. What happened to the oil wealth?

Based on exclusive troves of documents and sources in the Iraqi and U.S. governments, investigative reporter Erin Banco tells the story of how rampant corruption and gross mismanagement have sucked billions upon billions of dollars from Kurdistan's and Iraq's oil coffers-and how local people are suffering as a result.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

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

Kirkus Reviews

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.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940169530988
Publisher:	Brilliance Audio
Publication date:	01/27/2018
Edition description:	Unabridged

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