The Privatisation of Iraqi Oil

President Bush hired an employee from the US consultancy firm Bearing Point Inc. over a year ago to advise the Iraq Oil Ministry on the drafting and passage of a new national oil law. As previously drafted, the law opens Iraq's nationalized oil sector to private foreign corporate investment, but stops short of full privatization

If these proposals are followed, Iraq's national oil industry will be privatized and opened to foreign firms, and in control of all of Iraq's oil wealth...

The Bush admin is invading the World one economy at a time..
"pragmatist" is the word most often used to describe Iraq Study Group co-chair James A. Baker III.


It is equally appropriate for Lawrence Eagleburger.
The term applies particularly well to each man's efforts to expand US economic engagement with Saddam Hussein throughout the 1980s and early 1990s. Not only did their efforts enrich Hussein and US corporations, particularly oil companies, it also served the interests of their own private firms.


In July, US Energy Secretary Bodman had announced in Baghdad that senior US oil company executives would not enter Iraq without passage of the new law. Petroleum Economist magazine later reported that US oil companies put passage of the oil law before security concerns as the deciding factor over their entry into Iraq.


The oil companies are trying to get what they were denied before the war or at anytime in modern Iraqi history: access to Iraq's oil under the ground.
They are also trying to get the best deal possible out of a war-ravaged and occupied nation. However, waiting for the law's passage and the need to guarantee security of US firms once they get to work, may well be a key factor driving the one proposal by the Iraq Study Group that has received great media attention: extending the presence of US troops in Iraq at least until 2008




American oil companies have been busy under the occupation, and even before the US invasion, preparing for a major exploitation of Iraq's huge oil reserves.
Chevron, ExxonMobil and others are all set to go.
Four years of preparation are coming to a head now.
Iraq's new national petroleum law -- written in a place called Washington, DC -- is about to be implemented.
It will establish agreements with foreign oil companies, privatizing much of Iraq's oil reserves under exceedingly lucrative terms.
Security will be the only problem, protecting the oil companies' investments in a lawless country. For that they need the American military close by...oh look there they are

What a strange coincidence..