 |
|
Just Out: The Hunt for Kurdish Oil.
I previously profiled Talabani here:
One muggy evening this summer, Qubad Talabani, the 31-year-old son of the president of Iraq, was chatting over drinks at a Dupont Circle bar when his BlackBerry rang. "It's Ray Hunt," Talabani said, looking at the caller ID on his phone. The Washington representative of the Iraqi Kurdistan Regional Government apologized for the interruption, and turned away to take the call.
His caller is a man who has no trouble getting his phone calls answered at any hour, anywhere in the world. A Bush/Cheney fundraising Pioneer, a member of Bush's President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, and the president of the Dallas-based Hunt Oil company, Ray Hunt is the kind of Texas oilman with easy insider access to the Bush White House. Perhaps not coincidentally, he also heads the first American oil firm to have received an oil exploration contract with the Iraqi Kurdistan Regional Government, announced last September. As such, he has come to epitomize one of the more glaring contradictions about the Bush administration's policy toward Iraq and its oil wealth. Namely: If the Bush administration, as it proclaims, supports passage of an Iraqi oil law that would share the country's wealth across ethnic and regional divides, why do Bush-linked companies keep getting Kurdish-area oil concessions that bypass the Iraqi national government?
Hunt Oil isn't the only one. ...
Qubad Talabani is one of those cultural anomalies who somehow seem like natural creatures of Washington. Few twenty-nine-year-olds are trusted to serve as the top envoy of a foreign entity to the United States, as Talabani—the son of Iraqi President Jalal Talabani—is by Iraq’s Kurdistan Regional Government. But Talabani—slim, goateed, English-accented, a onetime Italian-car mechanic with an American wife—handles his duties with aplomb, rushing around town in subtle suits to meet with policy makers and power brokers. His most distinctive attribute may be that he represents perhaps the sole triumph to emerge from postwar Iraq: a relatively peaceful region free of foreign troops, eager for American protection and open for business. ...