An Ugly Oily Truth in Iraq

Good article in the New York Daily News about Iraq’s new oil law. “Throughout nearly four years of the daily mayhem and carnage in Iraq, President Bush and his aides in the White House have scoffed at even the slightest suggestion that the U.S. military occupation has anything to do with oil” says the paper.
“The President presumably would have us all believe that if Iraq had the world’s second-largest supply of bananas instead of petroleum, American troops would still be there. Now comes new evidence of the big prize in Iraq that rarely gets mentioned at White House briefings”.

The Daily News explaions that drafts of the proposed new Iraqi oil and gas law began circulating last week on the internet. “Under the proposed law, Iraq’s immense oil reserves would not simply be opened to foreign oil exploration, as many had expected. Amazingly, executives from those companies would actually be given seats on a new
Federal Oil and Gas Council that would control all of Iraq’s reserves.
“In other words, Chevron, ExxonMobil, British Petroleum and the other Western oil giants could end up on the board of directors of the Iraqi Federal Oil and Gas Council, while Iraq’s own national oil company would become just another competitor”.
We have known for a long time, mainly through the work of Greg Muttitt at the London-based environmental group, Platform and the Iraq Oil Unions what was being proposed, but the details of the new oil law are very shocking. It becomes harder by the day not to deny that this was a war about oil.