Chapter 3: The war

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By Paul Salopek | Tribune correspondent

July 29, 2006

The giant Rumailah oil field in southern Iraq is a war cemetery.

Rusting tanks, artillery pieces and eroding stumps of concrete blast walls jut like rotted teeth from the sands of the surrounding Ash Shamiyah desert. Some of the war junk is old, dating to the Iran-Iraq conflict. But much of the debris is newer: troop carriers and gun emplacements incinerated by U.S. or British jets during Operation Iraqi Freedom. Gas flares smudge the barren horizons a dirty khaki brown.

The few roads are empty and cratered. It is a scene of unsurpassed ugliness. And it is guarded by scruffy men in baggy blue uniforms: Iraq's new Oil Protection Force, the custodians of the world's third-largest petroleum reserves.

"This must be a joke!" snapped Mazin Yousif, peering out from the back seat of his SUV at a sandbagged OPF checkpoint. "Impossible!"

A former colonel in Saddam Hussein's army, Yousif, 49, works for Olive Group, a British security firm that specializes in oil field protection. He had just spent 18 months training 4,500 Iraqi recruits to patrol the nation's vital southern oil fields against sabotage and fuel smuggling.

But strange new faces were appearing at the checkpoints. They were the bearded members of local Shiite parties and their violent militias. His oil army was being infiltrated. In places like Rumailah, Iraq's boggling oil wealth was falling prey to sectarian greed.

A stiff, bespectacled man cocooned in body armor and escorted by a three-car convoy of British and Iraqi bodyguards, Yousif glared at the militiamen. They squinted back with open contempt.

"We are living in the Chicago of gangster times," Yousif said bitterly back at his house in Basra, the seedy port city that is Iraq's southern oil capital. "Mafia Chicago, without the nightclubs."

As it turned out, during that particular week, about 30,000 barrels of the Rumailah field's production -- high-quality crude dubbed Basrah Light -- were headed for Chicago. They were part of the Middle Eastern energy habit that the United States vowed to kick after the Arab oil embargo of 1973. The U.S. still buys 15 to 20 percent of its imported crude from the unsettled region.

It was late November in Iraq. Date harvesting season. Victims of Sunni-Shiite violence were being dumped, at the rate of five or six bodies a day, into the dry canals of Basra.

Yousif, an old secularist like most ex-members of Hussein's Baath Party, sat alone in his walled home. Three guards with machine guns patrolled his yard. Insurgents have threatened to kill him for cooperating with the coalition. For their safety, he sent his wife, Suad, and his daughters, Zaineb, 19, and Souhira, 14, into exile in the United Arab Emirates. (He'd been shot on the job already, in the leg, by unknown assailants.) A frustrated hunter, he spends hours at his computer looking at pictures of wild birds.

Three days before Yousif's disconcerting checkpoint encounter, a supertanker named the Front Crown loaded up on Iraqi crude at the Basra Oil Terminal.

The black-hulled vessel, flying the flag of the Bahamas and skippered by a Russian, chugged 36 days around the Horn of Africa, then steered northwest across the Atlantic to Galveston Bay. Five days later, according to Marathon schedulers, it docked at the high-tech Louisiana Offshore Oil Port, where pumps as mighty as locomotives sucked a million barrels of oil from its hold in 11 hours--the same volume of crude that was burned by all the Allied armies in World War I.

Most of the cargo ended up at refineries across the Midwest. A wisp, about 126 tanker trucks' worth, traveled north through pipelines to Marathon's Robinson plant.

These molecules snaked north through the Midwest at the pace of a walk, past rural roads whose telephone poles sometimes bore small, beribboned photos of local GIs killed in Iraq: a bitter enough irony, given that large volumes of crude are now being diverted in Iraq, intelligence sources say, to fund the anti-U.S. insurgency.

Indeed, of all the setbacks since the fall of Hussein, few match the ruinous decline of Iraq's oil sector--once deemed by the Bush administration to be the economic salvation of the country.

The Iraqi fuel reached South Elgin in a stew of Nigerian, Saudi and domestic hydrocarbons. Cruz Rodriguez, the Marathon's night clerk, bought 5 gallons on the chilly January night it arrived.

"Check it out, dude," Rodriguez said.

He ran a hand over the worn upholstery of his first car, a 1995 cherry-red Jeep that buried him $8,000 in debt. It gets 18 miles per gallon.

Rodriguez was all but broke after fueling up. He bought a 25-cent Zebra Cakes cookie for dinner. Working the cash register all night, he glanced compulsively out at the Jeep. He seemed worried it might disappear.

***

What are the hidden costs of America's imported oil? The answer is complex. It may ultimately be unknowable. But this hasn't daunted the likes of Milton Copulos.

A tenacious economist with the National Defense Council Foundation--a right-of-center Washington think tank--Copulos spent 18 solid months poring over hundreds of thousands of pages of government documents, toiling to fix a price tag on America's addiction to global crude. He parsed oil-related defense spending in the Middle East. He calculated U.S. jobs and investments lost to steep crude prices. He even factored in the lifelong medical bills of some 18,000 U.S. troops wounded in Iraq as of March. (About $1.5 million each.)

Copulos is a highly respected analyst in Washington. And his exhaustive findings flabbergasted the Senate Foreign Relations Committee this spring.

The actual cost of gasoline refined from imported oil, according to Copulos?

Eight dollars a gallon.

When he isolated the hidden costs of Middle Eastern crude in particular, the price jumped to $11. This included a war premium that swelled the Pentagon's spending to protect all Persian Gulf oil to $137 billion a year. In a truly transparent economy, by Copulos' math, filling up Rodriguez's Jeep would run about $230.

Consumers don't dodge the bill for all these masked expenditures. Instead, they pay for them indirectly, through higher taxes, or by saddling their children and grandchildren with a ballooning national debt--one that's increasingly financed by foreigners. The result: Unaware of the true costs of their oil habit, U.S. motorists see no obvious reason to curb their energy gluttony.

"Gas isn't too expensive," said Copulos. "It's way, way too cheap."

Or, as he put it to senators, quoting the cartoon character Pogo: "We have met the enemy and they is us."

In fact, many experts think Copulos' Olympian feat of accounting is still much too conservative. Nobody can really calculate, they say, the future security cost incurred by funneling petrodollars to regimes that have incubated Islamic terrorism, such as Saudi Arabia. Or tally foreign oil's role in global warming.

Or, for that matter, amortize loneliness.

***

No credible U.S. analyst pegs the agonies in Iraq primarily to oil. But Mazin Yousif does. Because, in effect, he has to.

"The Americans will not allow anything too terrible to happen here," Yousif said hopefully, a reference to the country's immense oil potential. "If you control Iraq, you control the economy of the world. I think, eventually, the coalition will help Iraq become stable and prosperous like Qatar or Kuwait."

His convoy was circling a dusty neighborhood in Basra. Gunshots popped sporadically in the distance. Riding shotgun with AK-47s tucked beside their seats, his bodyguards scanned the sidewalks, communicating by radio. When the street was empty, they gunned the vehicles to a metal gate and hustled Yousif through.

Once inside, the Iraqi plunked his combat helmet onto a kitchen table with disgust and chucked his flak jacket onto the carpet. In this way, at a time that always changes, he ends his commutes from the oil fields.

The house was silent. Yousif's son, Ali Yousif, 22, was absent again. Ali was the only family member who refused to evacuate Iraq for his own protection. Lately, he had been rebelling against his father's taut discipline. There were arguments over household chores. And the young chemical engineering student had begun spending lots of time at a local Sunni mosque, a hazardous display of faith in sectarian and Shiite-dominated Basra.

Yousif worries that his son is flirting with religious extremism. Shiite gangs in the city--the Mahdi Army, Master of Martyrs and others--have whipped schoolgirls for dancing at coed picnics, fire-bombed "impious" liquor stores. They have also dragged Sunnis and ex-Baathists, like Yousif, into the canals of no return.

"It cannot be easy to be the son of a former officer," Yousif admitted, looking in on Ali's vacant bedroom. "He is a good boy, but others put ideas in his head. I have tried to be his friend, to turn him around."

Waiting for Ali, he sat down at his computer. He began clicking through pictures of birds. "Look--cranes," he said. "We have beautiful cranes in Iraq."

***

Like Mazin Yousif, Cruz Rodriguez was awaiting the return of a loved one.

He was tapping out an e-mail at the Elgin public library.

"Hey bro, just got your e-mail and was able to get away from work for a bit of time ... Would really like to meet up and do something like shoot some pool or if you know where we could go fishing ..."

Rodriguez was writing an older half-brother who had walked out of his life 16 years before. Rodriguez had located the man by sheer chance, as you can only in America: He'd spotted him on an episode of Oprah, about rekindling a sex life in marriage. A few minutes' search on the Internet connected the rest of the dots.

The Marathon night clerk punched the "send" button. He blinked at the empty screen--a pale, stocky kid with "Rodriguez" tattooed on one side of his neck and "Pure Pleasure" on the other. Then he drove to the Marathon to work graveyard.

Cops show up at the station like clockwork at midnight every night, looking bloodless under the astringent lights. They buy coffee and cigarettes. Then come the usual insomniacs. The bar-closing refugees at 2 a.m. And, a bit later, haggard strippers from Blackjacks, a men's club on Highway 25.

"Know where to buy some dope?" one asked, drunk.

"This ain't an all-service station," deadpanned Rodriguez.

That night he sold more than 1,000 gallons of regular: enough to quench America's 250-gallons-a-second oil thirst for the space of a few heartbeats.

***

Iraq's state-run Southern Oil Co., one of the biggest petroleum corporations in the world, occupies a sprawling, concrete cube in Basra.

Its halls are hung with bright new posters. They announce in Arabic, "With Our Oil, We Realize Our Ambitions." Yet a peek into any office reveals unhurried people drinking sweet tea over ancient electric typewriters. Or abandoned desks. Or snoozing security men in their stocking feet. The reception office is decorated with a large portrait of pudgy-cheeked Moqtada Sadr, the hotheaded Shiite cleric who has twice rebelled against U.S. forces and would doubtless like to again.

From this drab building, virtually all of Iraq's daily output, 2 million barrels, is being managed.

Vice President Dick Cheney predicted the country's output might surge by 500,000 barrels a day within a year of Baghdad's fall. These liquid riches were then supposed to bankroll the nation's reconstruction, as well as supply U.S. markets.

President Bush's then-chief economic adviser, Lawrence Lindsey, was even bolder. "When there is a regime change in Iraq, you could add 3 million to 5 million barrels of production to world supply," he said in 2002. "The successful prosecution of the war would be good for the economy."

Since then, reality has been harsh.

Iraqi output still sags far below prewar levels despite a recent allocation of $1.7 billion in U.S. taxpayer money to patch up Iraq's decrepit oil fields. Violence stunts production. In mid-July, gunmen abducted the head of Iraq's Northern Oil Company. Demoralized Iraqi oil workers are burying pipelines in concrete to keep insurgents from blowing them up.

World-class reserves are being pumped at full blast, a procedure that shortens the life of the reservoir but generates lots of money. Corruption, meanwhile, is blatant. Iraq's finance minister, Ali Allawi, estimates that about half of all the profits from oil smuggling are being used to fund the insurgency. Rebels divert tanker trucks almost as soon as they leave loading terminals. Drivers who don't cooperate are shot.

Iraq's petroleum spoils are even fracturing the U.S.-supported government. In oil capital Basra, scores of people have been slaughtered in political turf wars over oil revenue. The governor's Fadilah party and at least some police are said to be involved. Much of the new construction visible in the dog-eared city is the garish mansions of oil warlords.

"The interfactional fighting over oil is getting worse, not better," said Jamal Qureshi, an oil analyst at PFC Energy in Washington, an energy consulting firm. "I continue to pencil in declines in Iraqi output for the next couple of years. This isn't pessimism. It's a real mess."

***

By contrast, life seemed to be looking up at the corner of Illinois Highway 25 and Middle Street.

Michelle Vargo began appearing at the Marathon station with newly curled hair and fresh nail polish. She even began calling the sullen cigarette salesmen "Sweetheart."

"Roy's proposed," she confessed, grinning. "We're gonna get hitched in June." Roy Draino had shown up at the station spit-polished and self-conscious in a black leather jacket. Appropriately, plastic Valentine's Day hearts decorated the convenience store.

He poked at the pink stuffed monkeys that screeched "Hoo-hoo-hoo" when touched, one of the gas station's selection of romantic gifts. Then, he never returned.

Draino had a run-in with the law, Vargo explained later. He was arrested while driving on a revoked license. For now, the wedding was off.

Her fingernail polish grew chipped. She closed her office door more often. And the store profits flat-lined. The Iraqi crude molecules wafted from the station's nozzles for about five days, and finally disappeared.

***

Mazin Yousif wanted a break from war. So two bodyguards with AK-47s accompanied him to Basra's sandbagged airport.

He careened past buildings plastered with the dour visage of the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the patriarch of Iran's Islamist revolution and a popular figure among Iraqi Shiites. Yousif slipped by tanker trucks, British tanks and beggar widows who lunged suicidally at passing traffic, gnarled hands outstretched. Gray-suited Chinese oil company workers crowded the departure terminal. (They were combatants of a sort too: the risk-tolerant vanguard of Beijing's increasingly urgent quest for petroleum.)

"If I had lost faith in Iraq, I wouldn't be here anymore," Yousif said, boarding a flight to Sharjah, one of the glistening commercial capitals of the United Arab Emirates. "I'm waiting to see what happens with the new government. If things don't improve, I will leave--go someplace else."

But where that could be is hard to imagine.

Though deeply alienated by the war, Yousif is as Iraqi as the white cattle egrets that flock in the dry fields around Basra. His bearing, his worldview, his history, even his shiny brown business suit betrayed his nationality upon landing. At Sharjah, his pride could barely endure the minutes-long inspection of his passport at immigration. Scowling, the lieutenant colonel in him bristled.

An hour later he rang a doorbell in a modern skyscraper. His daughters and wife bounded happily out.

"So where's my gift?" demanded Souhira "So So" Yousif, his sassy youngest daughter and his pet. "No gift?"

"I am your gift," Mazin retorted.

"That's not good enough!"

"You see, she doesn't love me," Mazin said, beaming. "She loves my wallet."

"No, I love you both!"

It was a good act.

But So So, in her mall-rat jeans and T-shirt, was receding from the aging soldier even as he hugged her. Neither of his daughters, Suad Yousif would tell her husband later, wanted to return to Iraq.

***

Cruz Rodriguez held a reunion of his own.

After weeks of exchanging phone calls and e-mails, the Marathon clerk and his runaway brother finally agreed to meet, for the first time since 1990, at a shopping mall. The brother, a half-sibling by a different father, was wary. Family life had been bruising. (Rodriguez described his parents' early years as "serious partying.") But the rapport between the two men was immediate and warm.

Rodriguez's brother was an engineer in his 30s. He brought snapshots of his wife and kids. Rodriguez owned no photo album but spoke of his troubled years with the Gangster Disciples gang.

"He wants to take it slow," Rodriguez said back at the gas station. "He still don't want to see my dad." To Rodriguez, the meeting was another sign, like his red Jeep, of a new phase opening in his life. He threw himself into extra chores at work, like cleaning the security camera lenses. Also, he began dating Kelly Hanson, the other night clerk, declaring the two wanted to do "something good with our lives."

In the meantime, the gasoline flowed. One customer showed up to buy gas in a bathrobe and slippers. Another, a hungry-looking senior, hauled in a plastic bag full of Kennedy half dollars--55 of them--for a fill-up. A businessman in a BMW, hearing that a fraction of his tankful originated in Iraq, snorted, "In that case, it should be free."

Fuel from yet another global hot-spot already was making its way toward the station. It came on the heels of a blizzard that marooned South Elgin in an antique stillness, emptying the streets of all sound and movement.

For a few hours, Highway 25 reverted to the dark, glacier-scraped steppe it once had been. But then the plows broke through. And the cars groped their way back, once again, to the Marathon.

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