smugllamas news review
Rated • 4 reviews • politics, iraq, war, oil, corruption • smugllama.com
Vaguely Qualified Ramblings about War for Oil
An old friend was over this weekend and we were watching the combat video footage of a Cobra gun ship in Iraq that we obtained from militaryvideos.net [militaryvideos.net]
According to the logo on the intro for this video, it came from the Marine Light Attack Helicopter Squadron-269 (HML/A-269).
We had noticed that all the combat scenes contain on-screen coordinates of battle locations. I checked a few of the coordinates and confirmed that they were, indeed, in Iraq.
After a bit of discussion, we decided to transcribe every set of coordinates displayed in the video and plug them into a Google map.
While looking to see how closely we could identify combat targets in photos, we realized the coordinates are fairly course and couldn't be used to pinpoint the exact battle targets, but they were good enough to indicate a general area of combat.
Intrigued by this map and still hoping to derive something useful from it, I wondered how this map compared to the map of the Iraq oil fields and pipelines obtained by judicial Watch through a FOIA request in July of 2003.
I could see just by comparing the two maps that most of the combat seemed to be in very close proximity to what the Energy Task Force maps called "super-giant Oil fields" and "Other Oil fields". Although I could see areas of similarity, it was difficult to tell what lined up with what, so I did my best at overlaying the Energy Task Force map on top of the Google battle map.
I couldn't quite get the maps to line up perfectly, but its close enough to show that almost all battle locations are on top of or adjacent to oil fields and pipelines. I can only see two battle locations that didn't happen next to an oil field or pipeline.
Update: 12-6
Well, a little humble pie is good. The question was raised, "how do we know that the battle locations aren't simply because of higher density population near the oil?"
There is definite truth to that:
As a whole, I can no longer say that the battle locations were chosen for strictly for oil interests, however, one area, to the northwest of Samarra, does stand in stark contrast as it is in a remote area that just happens to be right at the intersection of an oil field and a pipeline.
Anyways, I did one more oil version a little easier to read, don't mistake the pushpin shadows for oil fields:
One last thing, I noticed one of the water viaducts that is dry in the video shows up on google as full:
