Let's Make an Oil Deal

A Bush family friend may be undermining Iraqi peace.

By Richard Wolffe and Gretel C. Kovach
Newsweek
Oct. 1, 2007 issue - Ray Hunt isn't your typical Texas tycoon. Unlike other billionaire oilmen who hype their legends in the press, Hunt tries hard to keep his name out of the newspapers. The son of wildcatter H. L. Hunt, who lived his life in the spotlight, Ray Hunt rarely gives interviews and refuses to provide even mundane details about the workings of his private oil and real-estate ventures. He's given big sums to his alma mater, Southern Methodist University, in Dallas, but he will not allow his name to be affixed to any of the buildings his money helped pay for. Hunt's discretion may be one reason he has developed a close relationship with the Bush family, who greatly value privacy.

Hunt's money could also have something to do with it. Over the years, the oilman raised hundreds of thousands of dollars to elect both George W. Bush and his father. The son rewarded Hunt with a seat on the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, a panel of outside elders who oversee whether the commander in chief is getting good advice from the intel community. More recently Hunt has been especially generous about helping to plan—and pay for—Bush's postpresidential ambitions. He lobbied the president to build the Bush 43 presidential library at SMU—which is where Laura Bush studied—and since then he's given $35 million to the school to buy some of the land where part of the library complex could sit.
Hunt's generosity may help explain why the White House has been seemingly reluctant to question another of the oilman's projects—this one in Iraq. To the apparent surprise, and irritation, of officials in Washington and in Baghdad, Hunt Oil announced this month that, after secret negotiations, it had struck a deal with leaders in the country's Kurdish-controlled north to explore for oil in the Dahuk region near the Turkish border. News of the deal angered Iraqi Arab leaders, who saw it as a Kurdish power play for the country's oil resources, one that appeared to disrupt already fragile talks over a critical benchmark for peace: an agreement among the Sunni, Shiites and Kurds to share profits from the country's bountiful oil supply. The hope is that a national revenue-sharing law will help defuse tensions—and curtail violence—by getting the three groups to work toward a vital common goal. But the negotiations have stalled, largely because of a lack of trust. The Iraqi Oil minister denounced the Hunt agreement as illegal—though without a law in place it's hard to argue the Kurds have violated it. The Kurds refused to disclose the terms of the deal but insisted they will share the profits.

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