The Oil Drum: The Stability of Iraq

Courtesy of The Carpetbagger, I came across this superb Brookings Report on the situation in Iraq. This is my kind of report – almost solid graphs and tables. You can read it for an hour and have a far better idea of the situation than reading the newspaper for a year, and I
highly recommend you do so.

As we’ve discussed before, there’s almost certainly a lot of untapped oil reserves in Iraq, and whether they ever get produced or not is primarily controlled by
whether the country stabilizes. So, while I should stress that the human and political dimensions to the situation are very important, the main way it interacts with Oil Drum concerns is whether or not the energy can be counted on in the world’s supply budget or not.

In short, is the overall trend of recent years in this next graph going
to continue? Or is the improvement in the last few months the start of
a real turnaround?

Much more after the jump to The Oil Drum.