[NYTr] America and the Iraq 'oil grab'

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

sent by Dave Muller (Southnews)
http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2007%5C09%5C19%5Cstory_19-9-2007_pg3_1


Editorial

America and the Iraq oil grab

When the Administration reacted angrily, Mr Greenspan himself found it 
politically inconvenient to stick to his clear pronouncement, but his 
verdict has gone and mixed with the vortex of opinion complaining 
about the Bush Administrations oil barons falling on Iraq for its 
oil. To count just the people at the top, President George W Bush 
himself, Vice-President Dick Cheney and Secretary of State Condoleezza 
Rice, have close links to the American oil industry, also called the
Big Oil.

Mr Cheney, the most hawkish member of the Bush cabinet, had said in 
1999: By 2010 we will need [a further] 50 million barrels a day. The 
Middle East, with two-thirds of the oil and the lowest cost, is still 
where the prize lies. Iraq was invaded under false pretences only to 
have a large US army bogged down there, after more than half a trillion 
dollars spent and perhaps half a million Iraqis killed. The central 
political knot in Iraq today is the privatisation of Iraqi oil, 
recommended on the basis of the abuse of oil income by Saddam Hussein. 
In the latest poll, the Iraqi people have rejected privatisation and 
have voted for state control, clearly to prevent the American Big Oil 
from walking away with the bonanza.

This happened as the Iraqi prime minister Nuri Al-Maliki  a favourite 
of President Bush despite his deep involvement in the countrys 
anti-Sunni militia wars  passed a law in February this year about the 
control of 115 billion barrels of proven reserves, third in the world 
after Saudi Arabia and Iran, by a Federal Oil and Gas Council boasting 
a panel of oil experts from inside and outside Iraq. Observers think 
the oil experts mentioned in the law will be predominantly US Big Oil 
executives!

While it is true that oil-producing Arab states have not made the best 
use of their oil resource  and the enabling condition in this abuse was 
nationalisation  what is now on the cards could be more dangerous. The 
new oil deal to be agreed among Iraqs three communities will bring in 
the US Big Oil and help it make profits at the estimated rate of 75 
percent from 65 of the 80 known oilfields. The law that seeks to 
redistribute this privatised oil has reportedly been drafted  behind 
locked doors  by a US consulting firm hired by the Bush administration 
and then carefully retouched by Big Oil, the International Monetary 
Fund, former US Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitzs World Bank, 
and the United States Agency for International Development.

The oil deal among the three communities of Iraq  the Kurds the 
Shiites and the Sunnis  is supposed to be equitable on the basis of the 
known oilfields, but each party is free to give out contracts on new 
strikes and keep the revenue. It is here that one begins to understand 
why the US has been backing the breakaway Kurdish enclave in the north 
of Iraq. Most of the new strikes are expected to happen in the Kurdish 
region. The pro-US Kurds will have all the power to sign oil contracts 
with whatever companies they want. And the contracts will be awarded on 
the advice of the US-dominated Federal Oil and Gas Council!

The case of oil grab made out by suspicious journalists against Bush 
and Big Oil has been greatly bolstered by the sentence in the Greenspan 
book. President Bushs family has always been in the oil business, and 
it was greatly helped by Father Bushs political career when it came to 
landing contracts among the Arab sheikhs in the Middle East. Bush
Junior was not lucky in his adventures in Arab oil and the companies he
joined as an executive kept going under including one Harken Energy
Corporation which made a shipwreck in Bahrain in 1990. Junior Bush
suddenly offloaded 60 percent of his Harken stock, but was let off by
the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) which investigated the
case. The chairman of SEC had been appointed by Father Bush! Now
President George W Bush is in Iraq with troops; is the oil there for
the taking? Mr Greenspan thinks it is.