Politics

It Always Was About the Oil

Browsing the blogs at Edwards’ blog site I came across an interesting post; Conservation, Oil and War are Connected. I started following some of the links contained in that post and found a couple of other interesting posts on the topic of the “Hydrocarbons Law” (see Fact Sheet: The New Way Forward in Iraq on the White House web site for the reference to this law.) About halfway down that fact sheet, in a section entitled “Key Elements Of The New Approach: Economic: Iraqi:”, there is a bullet point that reads “Enact hydrocarbons law to promote investment, national unity, and reconciliation.”

The post, It’s Still about the Oil, on TomPaine.com is also worth a look. This post was written by Antonia Juhasz who also has her own site which has her bio and credentials listed, and also houses many of her articles and other writings. One of the most interesting articles that I found on her site was the one I pulled some excerpts from below.

It’s Still About Oil In Iraq
by Antonia Juhasz, The Los Angeles Times
December 8th, 2006

While the Bush administration, the media and nearly all the Democrats still refuse to explain the war in Iraq in terms of oil, the ever-pragmatic members of the Iraq Study Group share no such reticence.

Page 1, Chapter 1 of the Iraq Study Group report lays out Iraq’s importance to its region, the U.S. and the world with this reminder: “It has the world’s second-largest known oil reserves.” The group then proceeds to give very specific and radical recommendations as to what the United States should do to secure those reserves. If the proposals are followed, Iraq’s national oil industry will be commercialized and opened to foreign firms.

The report makes visible to everyone the elephant in the room: that we are fighting, killing and dying in a war for oil. It states in plain language that the U.S. government should use every tool at its disposal to ensure that American oil interests and those of its corporations are met.

It’s spelled out in Recommendation No. 63, which calls on the U.S. to “assist Iraqi leaders to reorganize the national oil industry as a commercial enterprise” and to “encourage investment in Iraq’s oil sector by the international community and by international energy companies.” This recommendation would turn Iraq’s nationalized oil industry into a commercial entity that could be partly or fully privatized by foreign firms…

For any degree of oil privatization to take place, and for it to apply to all the country’s oil fields, Iraq has to amend its constitution and pass a new national oil law. The constitution is ambiguous as to whether control over future revenues from as-yet-undeveloped oil fields should be shared among its provinces or held and distributed by the central government.

This is a crucial issue, with trillions of dollars at stake, because only 17 of Iraq’s 80 known oil fields have been developed. Recommendation No. 26 of the Iraq Study Group calls for a review of the constitution to be “pursued on an urgent basis.” Recommendation No. 28 calls for putting control of Iraq’s oil revenues in the hands of the central government. Recommendation No. 63 also calls on the U.S. government to “provide technical assistance to the Iraqi government to prepare a draft oil law.”

This last step is already underway. The Bush administration hired the consultancy firm BearingPoint more than a year ago to advise the Iraqi Oil Ministry on drafting and passing a new national oil law…

All told, the Iraq Study Group has simply made the case for extending the war until foreign oil companies — presumably American ones — have guaranteed legal access to all of Iraq’s oil fields and until they are assured the best legal and financial terms possible.

We can thank the Iraq Study Group for making its case publicly. It is now our turn to decide if we wish to spill more blood for oil.

Read more in her book, The Bush Agenda: Invading the World, One Economy at a Time
by Antonia Juhasz, Regan Books, HarperCollins Publishers, April 25, 2006.

© 2007 Life is an Ongoing Process.