Kurdish oil tanker

Edit:  It appears that Iraq has threatened to sue the Kurds in a Turkish court of arbitration. Iraq threatens to retaliate against any buyer of the oil. Hence, the tanker has no port of call.

But since the Iraqi state is “over”, like a bad relationship, the assertion that the U.S. blocks a sale may not be a complete error.  Indirectly, the opposition of the U.S. to Kurdish statehood  has an effect. Speculatively,  the U.S. could grease the wheels.

My personal frustration caused this slip. It’s hard being a detached predictor when you find you really care about one of the parties.

The tanker, named “United Leadship” (really!) has been floating around the Mediterranean for a couple months already. Read backwards, the chronology is something like:

Originally, it was headed for the Gulf Coast. But the U.S. won’t let it unload anywhere. Bear in mind that, stubbornly, the Kurds actually like us. They have American-style movie movieplexes. Unlike the rest of Iraqis, they don’t consider us intruding infidels.

American foreign policy is so so bureaucratic, finely detailed, sooo…planned, that I wonder if the  experts have managed to  include a numerical  “like factor”, some kind of metric that indicates the likelihood of the various actors actualy having a cultural affinity, which means, having a drink at the bar, and saying things like “pass the salsa”, “I’ll have a little more of that”, or “What are you doing Friday night?”

It is the level of intuition, drowned out  in a school of policy papers, that distinguishes the intelligence community, which has tremendous intuition, from the policy makers and executors, who would probably do just fine if divorced from a system with all the fluidity of a pyramid construction project.

I once sat on a plane with a young woman who was part of a State Department group negotiating with Japan about whale catches. Every question was met with the response that it was impossibly complicated and incapable of explication to a mere rube like me.This was accompanied by a sourpuss facial expression indicating the crudity of my approach. That was about 25 years ago.

Keep talking, guys. It’s better than what Nero did.