<a href=www.sfgate.com>SFGate.com Verne Kopytoff, Chronicle Staff Writer Sunday, April 13, 2003

WHO HAS THE OIL?

PRODUCTION Average daily oil production for 2002 in millions of barrels:

1. Saudi Arabia 7.62
2. Russia 7.41
3. United States 5.82
4. Iran 3.44
5. China 3.39
6. Mexico 3.17
7. Norway 2.99
8. Venezuela 2.60
9. United Kingdom 2.29
10. Canada 2.17
11. Nigeria 2.12
12. United Arab Emirates 2.08
13. Iraq 2.02

RESERVES Known crude oil reserves in 2002 in billions of barrels:

1. Saudi Arabia 259.2
2. Iraq 112.5
3. United Arab Emirates 97.8
4. Kuwait 94.0
5. Iran 89.7
6. Venezuela 77.7
7. Former Soviet Union 57.0
8. Libya 29.5
9. Mexico 26.9
10. China 24.0
11. Nigeria 24.0
12. United States 22.0

Source: U.S. Energy Information Administration / Source: American Petroleum Institute

Iraq's oil fields have emerged relatively unscathed after nearly a month of warfare, but the plan to revive the nation's most lucrative industry faces minor logistical problems and major diplomatic pressure.

U.S. leaders are confident they can get the fields up and running soon. The largest impediment to that effort is not in the desert, but in the theater of diplomacy where international leaders are expressing concerns over how the Iraqi riches will be managed, and by whom.

"Iraq's oil is a huge prize," said James Paul, executive director for Global Policy Forum, a New York organization that monitors the United Nations. "There's a tremendous interest from foreign oil companies to lay their hands on it."

At week's end, U.S.-led forces were occupying all of Iraq's major oil fields after capturing the important northern city of Kirkuk.

Iraq's oil industry has escaped the doomsday scenario many had feared before the invasion. U.S. officials worried about a repeat of the first Persian Gulf War in 1991, when Iraqis sabotaged nearly 750 wells in Kuwait.

"The situation is a lot better than had been expected," said John Lichtblau,

chairman of the Petroleum Industry Research Foundation in New York. "I think there's going to be every effort made to begin production and exports as soon as possible."

Before the war, fears that Iraq might set its oil fields ablaze -- in addition to an oil-worker strike in Venezuela -- sent crude prices skyrocketing to nearly $40 a barrel. Now the price for a barrel of oil has declined from $37.42 in mid-March to $28.25 on Friday.

Instead of an oil shortage, traders are now talking about a glut. Fears that Iraqi oil will soon flood the market has prompted members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries to discuss cutting their production -- after they had raised it in response to the war.

POST-WAR PRODUCTION

Vice President Dick Cheney said Wednesday that Iraq's oil production could surpass prewar levels of 2 million barrels a day and reach 3 million barrels a day within a year if given enough investment. Annual revenue could total as much as $20 billion, he said, which would go to rebuilding the war-damaged nation.

"The oil revenue is not to be diverted to any purpose other than specifically to service the immediate and, hopefully, long-term needs of the people of Iraq," Cheney said.

Iraq's oil is critical because it is expected to bankroll the nation's rebuilding. Plans to revive the industry are being watched closely, with many people suspicious that the United States is trying to gain undue control of Iraq's vast natural wealth.

Potentially, Iraq could become an oil powerhouse. It has the world's second- largest petroleum reserve, which was only modestly tapped under Saddam Hussein because of technological neglect and U.N. sanctions.

U.S. and British forces now control Iraq's southern oil fields, where 60 percent of the nation's crude is produced. In the north, soldiers are in the process of securing the other 40 percent.

The wells and pumping stations in the northern fields are largely intact. But Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said that Iraqis may have rigged some of the equipment with explosives, as was the case in the southern part of the country.

During the initial days of the invasion, Iraqis sabotaged about a dozen wells in the southern Rumailah field. Only one of the resulting nine fires is still burning.

BUSH'S OIL PLAN

The Bush administration's plan for restarting the country's oil industry calls for setting up an interim authority to oversee production. The team will be made up primarily of Iraqis, Cheney emphasized, but will also include international advisers.

Philip Carroll, a former chief executive of Shell Oil Co. who went on to lead the construction giant Flour, will reportedly lead the interim oil authority.

Iraq's citizens are expected to regain control of its oil industry after a government is formed. Analysts believe that could take up to a year.

The Iraqi oil ministry will be advised by a group of Iraqis who are sponsored by the State Department. The members have met several times, most recently in London last weekend.

Dara Attar, an oil consultant from London who represents the Kurds in the advisory group, said members already agree on several key points. One is that foreign oil companies should be allowed into Iraq.

The firms could begin drilling new fields in perhaps three or four years, Attar said. They would share their proceeds with the Iraqi government in deals similar to those signed by other nations and foreign firms, he said.

"Our oil industry is ruined," Attar said. "We are going to try to raise our production, and for this purpose we need foreign help."

Chris Gidez, a spokesman for ChevronTexaco, the oil giant headquartered in San Ramon, said his company is always considering future opportunities, including Iraq. But he added that it's too soon to speculate about specific opportunities there.

One fear is that U.S. oil companies such as ChevronTexaco and ExxonMobil will have an advantage getting contracts because of the wartime role of the U. S. military. The French and Russians worry about being frozen out, though Attar said that will not be the case.

"It will be a fair process," he said.

Oil companies from France, Russia and China already hold contracts signed years ago under Saddam Hussein to open new fields in Iraq, but they have yet to begin pumping because of the U.N. sanctions. It's unclear whether the contracts will be honored by a new Iraqi government.

'POLITICAL FAVORS'

Attar said many of the contracts were granted "as political favors" and should be reviewed. However, the Russians in particular have said they will file suit if their deals are thrown out.

Another issue agreed on by the advisory group is that money from oil should be spent evenly throughout Iraq. Under Saddam Hussein, the money was handed out to favored regions and cities.

Currently, Iraq's southern oil field is being maintained by Halliburton, an oil services company from Texas formerly led by Vice President Cheney. The deal could be worth up to $7 billion over two years.

The contract has raised questions from some members of Congress, who criticize the fact that it was awarded without competitive bidding. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which gave Halliburton the contract, said it did so for the sake of speed and because the firm had a previous contract to plan the rebuilding of Iraq's oil industry.

Analysts expect Iraq to begin exporting oil again within the next few months. But damage and outdated equipment is just one of the problems facing the nation's oil industry.

A diplomatic rift between the United States and other U.N. members has emerged over who can sell Iraq's oil in the near term.

QUEST FOR AUTHORITY

The United States clearly wants the authority. However, some of the other permanent members of the Security Council -- France, Russia, China and Britain -- may think otherwise.

The Security Council has oversight of Iraqi oil as part of its oil-for-food program. Proceeds from oil sales go into an escrow account controlled by the United Nations.

The system was imposed on Iraq in 1995, as a way to pay for that nation's food and medicine without it being diverted to buy weapons. It's still in place, even though Hussein's regime has fallen.

"The legalities will be addressed," White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said Friday. "It doesn't require necessarily an international stamp to engage in commercial transactions legally. The United States provides products around the world that the United Nations doesn't have to say we can do."

Paul, from the Global Policy Forum, said sanctions against Iraq will be lifted at some point. But he added that there would be opposition to oil money then flowing directly "into the pockets of the occupation authority."

Iraq already has 9.2 million barrels of oil in storage at Ceyhan, a Mediterranean port in Turkey. Loadings of Iraqi oil there stopped just before the war began.

Buyers were confused about the oil's ownership. Moreover, no one was answering the phone at Iraq's oil marketing company to consummate the deal.

If not for diplomatic issues, loadings could begin at Ceyhan at any time.

The United Nations has agreed to adjust orders of goods yet to be delivered through the oil-for-food program to better address the immediate needs of Iraq.

About $2.8 billion in cash remains in the program's escrow accounts.

E-mail Verne Kopytoff at vkopytoff@sfchronicle.com.

<a href=www.vheadline.com> Venezuela's Electronic News Posted: Sunday, April 13, 2003 By: Joyce Paterson

VHeadline reader Joyce Paterson reviews the BBC FOUR screening: The Revolution will not be televised -- Was this a coup, or wasn’t it? It was good to view two reports of the same series of happenings because they complemented each other; the first, all hand-held immediacy, blurry, uncut, and the second more measured, structured, focused. In both accounts the sincerity of the followers of Hugo Chavez shone through; these people believed passionately in the justice of their cause and in the ability of Chavez to secure that justice for them. No hidden agendas for them; they were so low that the only way was up, with Chavez extending a hand to pull them from their miserable poverty towards a share in the good things that Venezuela’s oil, their country’s oil, might offer them. More credit, then, to the sole state-owned television channel for giving them air-time, for showing their resounding support for Chavez.

That was the have-nots; the haves, too, had their own sincerity, of its kind. They believed with equal passion in their undisputed right to the good things of life by virtue of being industrious, decent citizens who had got where they were by hard work; this is the doctrine of those who believe, as an article of faith, that the poor are poor because they deserve to be so, that they have neither the brains nor the will to be otherwise.

How should these two camps have anything but scorn for one another? It must be well nigh impossible, with the social divide between them, that either could sympathize with the feelings and aspirations of the other. Gross ignorance of each other’s situation could only exacerbate the tensions between them.

So did these events arise spontaneously, from intolerable internal pressures?

Not, myself, being a great fan of conspiracy theories, I am reluctant to jump to easy conclusions; nevertheless, one has to ask the question -ú who has the most to gain from removing Chavez from power?

From where I sit (several thousand miles distant), it does seem to me that the wealthy few had relatively little to fear from Chavez’s projected share-out of the country’s oil wealth. Suppose, for a minute, that Chavez had already implemented his promises of a fairer division of wealth; Sure, initially the very rich would have moaned and complained, but, unless the redistribution had been very radical indeed, those on top of the social heap would be unlikely to find that their comfortable way of life had been drastically altered; who knows, they might even have found that a fully-employed and aspiring populace was less threatening than unemployed, hopeless and desperate masses. In short, the old Victorian ethic of Enlightened Self-Interest might have kicked in, and they might have found there were gains all round, with a more stable, safer country to live in.

Was there, then, any evidence that what Chavez had in mind was a Soviet Union style rearrangement of the social order?

Did the rich really believe he intended to bring about a Marxist-type society, with the wealthy forced to live in barracks and dig ditches?

Being a simple soul, I thought, ‘hmm, define your terms’ ... so I looked up coup d’etat in Collins English Dictionary, where it is described as ‘a sudden violent or illegal seizure of government.’

To my mind, this would mean that a faction within a country fervently desired a change of government; for example, if enough of the Iraqi army had conspired to remove Saddam Hussein from power.

Well, in Venezuela, it was certainly not the oppressed masses rising up against a hated tyrant; nor did the entire fighting force conspire to change the head of state -ú in fact, it was notable that few of the forces appeared to be in favor of Chavez’s removal.

If this was a coup, then it was a singularly inept one; it would seem axiomatic to be sure of your power base before attempting a step which risked violent destabilization of one’s country. And, whilst the upper classes might fervently desire a change of President, it is hard to see how they could engineer this without the wholehearted acceptance of the military.

It would, however, be extraordinarily easy for an outsider who had a vested interest in Chavez’s removal, to manipulate public opinion in such a way as to create a climate in which this could happen with apparent spontaneity.

To do this you need only play on two things -ú wealthy people’s avarice and their fear of the mob. Remember that almost all the media in Venezuela are privately-owned; how easy to plant the idea that Chavez is mentally unstable, that he is a danger to his country, that he is planning to strip the wealthy of everything they have sweated so hard to acquire.

How easy, too, with sophisticated editing techniques and spin, to make the raw television images tell the story the way you want it -ú so that the victim of bullets becomes the attacker, the mediator becomes the fomenter of unrest.

What can one say of the clumsy scheme physically to remove Chavez to ‘an island’ -ú from whence he is publicly rescued by the overwhelmingly loyal military?

It doesn’t sound as if his Generals thought Chavez was mad, does it?

No, from where I sit, it looks rather more like a maladroit attempt to foment fear and anxiety, inciting his own people physically to remove Chavez.

Coup? I don’t think so -ú but you choose.

Joyce Paterson aljopat2@btinternet.com

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<a href=www.vheadline.com>Venezuela's Electronic News Posted: Sunday, April 13, 2003 By: Willy E. Gutman

Veteran journalist Willy E. Gutman writes: One way of erring on the side of justice is to side unerringly with the victims of injustice -- the vanquished, the dispersed, the humiliated, the persecuted, the forgotten. Behind barbed wire. In camps and gulags. In mass graves and hurriedly dug sepulchers. Wherever voices of dissent and cries for freedom have been hushed. Amid the anonymous bones scattered about the steaming earth.

War. Genocide. Ethnic cleansing ... they've all become a blur in an unceasing tempest of human agony.

In-your-face prime-time images of man's inhumanity to man don't lie. Our world, the evening news reminds us, is a sewer in which we wade, knee-deep, in the blood of martyrs. Gathered at the dinner table, we watch them die or fade away like ghosts.

"Past in prelude," we declare with scholarly condescension. We owe it to our fragile, overtaxed psyches to forget an endless stream of atrocities -- the Crusades, the "Holy" Inquisition, Shoah, the massacre of native Americans, the wholesale slaughter of Armenians, Biafra, the killing fields of Cambodia, the inter-tribal carnage between Hutus and Tutsis.

Distance, racial differences, cultural incongruities help intellectualize other peoples' suffering. We endure it by perfunctorily purging our souls after each infamy. "You can't change human nature," we philosophize, as we partake of dessert. In a pinch, a mind-numbing sitcom will put our minds at ease. We survive the truth by looking the other way.

New convulsions overshadow old ones. In one remote corner of the world, the Kurds, a people of about 30 million, wander between Iraq, Turkey, Iran and Syria in search of nationhood. Eventually, cameramen will have to aim their lenses at them. Simmering in the shadows, eclipsed if not trivialized by the current conflict, their struggle is real, their claim for sovereignty legitimate. Failure to address their grievances is another path to apocalypse. When the smoke lifts from the bloodied sands of Iraq, will the world press rush in droves to the aid of Kurdistan?

Habitual victims of Turkish and Iraqi brutality, Kurds live in the worst of all possible worlds: They are hated by their enemies, unloved by everyone else. Constantly at each other's throats, unable or unwilling to adhere to the most basic international protocols, they've never managed to elicit much sympathy. All instinct, they have no couth. Yet, their cause remains unchampioned, willfully ignored by the world, damned by official proclamations and lofty pledges.

Signed by the Turks and the Allies in 1920, and signaling the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire, the Treaty of Sèvres explicitly provides for "local autonomy in regions where Kurds predominate."

Because it is sensible ... and just ... that the Kurds have a nation to call their own, it is essential that this 83-year-old covenant be honored.

Will the United States heed the challenge, turn its back or mongrelize its policies to suit the shifting winds of global geopolitics? Eventually, the US must tell the world what matters most: erring on the side of justice or keeping its alliances intact and opening new markets for America's bulimic corporate juggernaut?

Willy E. Gutman WEGUTMAN@cs.com

• Willy E. Gutman is a veteran journalist. He lives in southern California.

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<a href=www.vheadline.com>Venezuela's Electronic News Posted: Sunday, April 13, 2003 By: The Very Reverend Roger Dawson

The English translations of the gospels make a dreadful mistake, in my opinion, with the Greek word paradidomi. This mistake is the result of church teaching over many centuries and might be considered the root cause of much anti-Semitism and the deaths of thousands and possibly millions of people. In misusing this word, we might be guilty of sustaining the charge that Jesus was betrayed ... which is what the church teaches.

However, if we read the account in the gospels in a careful manner, and forget what the church has taught we find a very different story. The word paradidomi is used no less than fifty-nine times in relation to the death of Jesus, and each and every time this word is translated as "hand over." The word is also used another thirty-two times about the relationship between Jesus and a man who has been given the name Judas. Although the word paradidomi is used in the same context as in the other fifty-nine times the translation for the Judas uses is "betray."

Why did the translators use betray and not hand over?

The answer is because the translators have been led to believe that Judas betrayed Jesus, not from the evidence of the gospels but because of church teaching. The gospels have been made to fit church teaching by the English translators of the gospels.

It is a distortion, and a dangerous distortion at that. There are perfectly good words in Greek for betray, but none of them are used in relation to Judas. The word used is paradidomi and it means "hand over" ... and in a search through hundreds of contemporary manuscripts in which paradidomi has been used, no application of it can be found in which it means to betray.

Judas did not betray Jesus, and the church is wrong in teaching that he did, because there is no evidence to support such a claim.

Why then did such a claim arise?

The answer is that, as the Jesus-faith church developed and grew, it became increasingly difficult for the various groups who worshipped the God YHWH to hold together. Their views were too far apart for them to share a single theological view and the new Jesus-faith was bringing in many gentiles ... which was resented by those who wanted to keep the Judah faith exclusive to families who had originated in the land of Judah.

• Similarly, though Roman Catholics and Southern Baptists will both claim to be Christian they do not seek each other out in order to worship together.

Although the emerging Jews and Jesus-faith Christians both had their origins in Eretz Israel, they were becoming increasingly alienated because of their beliefs. The result was that the Christians left the synagogue and founded their own church buildings, and they blamed the people from whom they had parted for what happened to their leader. In other words they were resentful of the other Jewish group and they didn't mind taking it out on them by shifting the blame of Jesus death from the Romans ... with whom they were developing a new relationship ... to the new Jews who were evicting Christians from their synagogues.

What they did not realize was that it would have a profound effect upon history.

The stories of Judas' suicide are concocted and faintly ridiculous. To start with, the various accounts do not agree and they have Judas' guts spilling out on the floor in one version, and him hanging himself in another. Maybe I will talk about this another time, but in the meantime, I would encourage you to read the story of the handing over of Joseph to the traders who took Joseph to Egypt and also the "value of a man" story in Zechariah 11: 12-13.

Who was Judas? The answer is we don't know. He could have been any one of a number of people or even an imaginary person created for the occasion. His name: Judas is Yehudah in its original form and means a person from Judah. It was a popular name at the time of Jesus and for some considerable while afterwards.

What we now understand, from the Dead Sea Scrolls, is that anyone leaving the Essene community was totally rejected and considered to be dead by them. They opened the door, pushed him out and forgot him.

If there was a disciple or close follower of Jesus who left the group, they would, more than likely, have treated him in a similar way as the Essenes treated their deserters. Or was it that there wasn't a single deserter, but that Judah as a nation was represented by Judas as being the ones to leave the faith of Jesus, and so, for the Christians, they were as good as dead for they had handed him over to his fate when they might have saved him if they had believed him and his message of good news?

Also, if paradidomi does or can mean "betray" we are presented with another problem.

It would mean that the death of Jesus would not have been a sacrifice but something beyond Jesus' control ... as others would have betrayed him.

If Judas betrayed him, then the crucifixion was a hideous accident and not a deliberate act on behalf of Jesus, and it places Christian theology on very shaky grounds.

It is an issue that the Christian Church has not properly dealt with, and every time we blame Judas, we blame a people for a crime they could not have committed.

So anxious was the early Christian Church to turn attention away from the Romans over the death of Jesus, that it offered their main rivals, the Jewish people, as a sacrifice in the person of Judas.

Christology became defined in Jesus as the Messiah who, they said, the whole world wanted and waited for, and who would have lived had it not been for a nation who killed him.

So the guilt came to rest on them and Judas who was their agent and one of their number, who left him and betrayed him. Yet this story goes against every part of Jesus' message of love and caring and forgiving one's neighbor and enemies.

Confining the blame to that generation of people in Judah is no good either, because any one who does a study of that period of history, soon discovers that the people were not waiting for or expecting an anointed one, a messiah, to come and save them and even less to redeem them and be their savior.

If they had been. they would have responded better to Jesus and his forerunner John the Baptist. No, the saving and redeeming was a Christian hope that became so important to them that they made the assumption it must have been everyone else's hope as well.

Why should I tell you about Judas?

For a number of reasons ... we should not blame others for our own predicament, nor should we presume that what are our goals and hopes, must be the aims and aspirations of others, no matter how closely we are or were once related.

Finally, we should not retell our history in such a way as to distort the truth so that we look better and others look worse. Christians, in their anxiety to make themselves appear badly treated, have brought about the deaths of countless Jews.

It is time we owned up to the deception.

We are not as lovely perhaps, as we thought we were ... we are a people in need of redemption.

St. Mary's Cathedral "News from the pews" -- Parish Notes The Very Reverend Roger Dawson, Dean of St. Mary's Cathedral (Caracas) -- telephone: +58 / (212) 991.4727, telefax: +58 / (212) 993.8170

<a href=www.vheadline.com>Venezuela's Electronic News Posted: Sunday, April 13, 2003 By: Letters to the Editor

Reader Kayla Markert writes: On Thursday night (April 10, 2003), my friend's dad was politically assassinated. His name was Gustavo Arismendi ... who worked for the government and was in opposition to the Chavez unit.

As he entered his driveway, he was approached by 2 vehicles, 3 people in each one. He was then kidnapped and driven 20 miles from his home. He managed to shoot the three people who were in the car with him, killing two, and wounding the third. The SUV carrying Gustavo, then opened fire on him, shooting him nine times.

Gustavo recognized he was being taken to a place where those who oppose President Chavez are murdered, so he fought back.

Gustavo worked for the Governor of Miranda State and was vocal in his opposition to President Chavez. In fact, the Governor he worked for is the choice of the people, to assume the position of President, once Chavez is removed from office. That Governor himself was shot exactly one year ago, but thankfully survived. Gustavo, unfortunately, was not that lucky. The Governor has vowed to everything in his power to find out who is responsible for the death of  Gustavo.

Gustavo Adolfo Arismendi, his son, has now assumed responsibility for his 2 younger brothers and mourning mother ... he is scheduled to return to the Houston, Texas on April 27.

A Trust Fund will be set up this Monday by Mike John McGhan who has sponsored Gustavo as a foreign exchange student. Houston Christian High School will be notified if anything changes. I hope each person will contribute to this unfortunate loss.

I have had to deal with losing a father just one year ago and the pain is still there.

Gustavo and I share the same meaning is losing someone who has been to dear to us ... the only thing that is different is how they both passed on to the same place, but in very different ways.

You don't really know what it feels like until is happens to you. In my mind, Gustavo Adolfo will tilt his head high and carry on his father's name with pride.

Please continue to keep his family in your prayers.

Thank you, Kayla L. Markert Celine0626@hotmail.com Houston, Texas

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