The Empire 84

'It's still about oil in Iraq.

A centerpiece of the Iraq Study Group's report is its advocacy for securing foreign companies' long-term access to Iraqi oil fields.

By Antonia Juhasz, ANTONIA JUHASZ is a visiting scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies and author of "The Bush Agenda: Invading the World, One Economy at a Time."

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.

This is an echo of calls made before and
immediately after the invasion of Iraq.

The U.S. State Department's Oil and Energy Working
Group, meeting between December 2002 and April
2003, also said that Iraq "should be opened to
international oil companies as quickly as possible
after the war." Its preferred method of
privatization was a form of oil contract called a
production-sharing agreement. These agreements are
preferred by the oil industry but rejected by all
the top oil producers in the Middle East because
they grant greater control and more profits to the
companies than the governments. The Heritage
Foundation also released a report in March 2003
calling for the full privatization of Iraq's oil
sector. One representative of the foundation, Edwin
Meese III, is a member of the Iraq Study Group.
Another, James J. Carafano, assisted in the study
group's work.

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.'

Lees verder: http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/asection/la-oe-juhasz8dec08,1,3013881.story