A good article about Iraq's oil.
Tom

VICTORY IN IRAQ
Bush & Cheney Win War for Country’s Oil
Chris Floyd
truthout | UK Correspondent
‘Surging’ Toward the Ultimate Prize
The reason that George W. Bush insists that ‘victory’ is achievable in Iraq  
is not that he is deluded or isolated or ignorant or detached from reality or 
 ill-advised. No, it’s that his definition of ‘victory’ is different from 
those  bruited about in his own rhetoric and in the ever-earnest disquisitions 
of the  chattering classes in print and online. For Bush, victory is indeed at 
hand. It  could come at any moment now, could already have been achieved by 
the time you  read this. And the driving force behind his planned “surge” of 
American troops  is the need to preserve those fruits of victory that are now 
ripening in his  hand. At any time within the next few days, the Iraqi Council 
of Ministers is  expected to approve a new “hydrocarbon law” essentially drawn 
up by the Bush  Administration and its UK lackey, the Independent reported 
Sunday January 7. The  new bill will “radically redraw the Iraqi oil industry 
and throw open the doors  to the third-largest oil reserves in the world,” says 
the paper, whose reporters  have seen a draft of the new law. “It would allow 
the first large-scale  operation of foreign oil companies in the country since 
the industry was  nationalized in 1972.” If the government’s parliamentary 
majority prevails, the  law should take effect in March.  
As the paper notes, the law will give Exxon Mobil, BP, Shell and other carbon 
 cronies of the White House unprecedented sweetheart deals, allowing them to 
pump  gargantuan profits from Iraq’s nominally state-owned oilfields for 
decades to  come. This law has been in the works since the very beginning of the 
invasion —  indeed, since months before the invasion, when the Bush 
Administration brought  in Phillip Carroll, former CEO of both Shell and Fluor, the 
politically-wired  oil servicing firm, to devise “contingency plans” for divvying 
up Iraq’s oil  after the attack. Once the deed was done, Carroll was made head 
of the American  “advisory committee” overseeing the oil industry of the 
conquered land, as  Joshua Holland of Alternet.com has chronicled in two 
remarkable reports on the  backroom maneuvering over Iraq’s oil: “Bush’s Petro- Cartel 
Almost Has Iraq’s  Oil” and “The U.S. Takeover of Iraqi Oil.”  
From those earliest days until now, throughout all the twists and turns, the  
blood and chaos of the occupation, the Bush Administration has kept its eye 
on  this prize. The new law offers the barreling buccaneers of the West a juicy 
set  of production-sharing agreements (PSAs) that will maintain a fig leaf of 
Iraqi  ownership of the nation’s oil industry — while letting Bush’s Big Oil 
buddies  rake off up to 75 percent of all oil profits for an indefinite 
period up front,  until they decide that their “infrastructure investments” have 
been repaid. Even  then, the agreements will give the Western oil majors an 
unheard-of 20 percent  of Iraq’s oil profits — more than twice the average of 
standard PSAs, the  Independent notes.  
Of course, at the moment, the “security situation” — i.e., the living hell 
of  death and suffering that Bush’s “war of choice” has wrought in Iraq — 
prevents  the Oil Barons from setting up shop in the looted fields. Hence Bush’s  
overwhelming urge to “surge” despite the fierce opposition to his plans from 
 Congress, the Pentagon and some members of his own party. Bush and his inner 
 circle, including his chief adviser, old oilman Dick Cheney, believe that a  
bigger dose of blood and iron in Iraq will produce a sufficient level of  
stability to allow the oil majors to cash in the PSA chips that more than 3,000  
American soldiers have purchased for them with their lives.  
The American “surge” will be blended into the new draconian effort announced 
 over the weekend by Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki: an all-out war by 
the  government’s Shiite militia-riddled “security forces” on Sunni enclaves 
in  Baghdad, as the Washington Post reports. American troops will “support” 
the  “pacification effort” with what Maliki says calls “house-tohouse” sweeps 
of  Sunni areas. There is of course another phrase for this kind of 
operation:  “ethnic cleansing.”  
The “surged” troops — mostly longserving, overstrained units dragooned into  
extended duty — are to be thrown into this maelstrom of urban warfare and 
ethnic  murder, temporarily taking sides with one faction in Iraq’s hydra-headed, 
 multi-sided civil war. As the conflict goes on — and it will go on and on — 
the  Bush Administration will continue to side with whatever faction promises 
to  uphold the “hydrocarbon law” and those profitable PSAs. If “Al-Qaida in 
Iraq”  vowed to open the nation’s oil spigots for Exxon, Fluor and 
Halliburton, they  would suddenly find themselves transformed from “terrorists” into “
moderates” —  as indeed has Maliki and his violent, sectarian Dawa Party, 
which once killed  Americans in terrorist actions but are now hailed as freedom’s 
champions.  
So Bush will surge with Maliki and his ethnic cleansing for now. If the  
effort flames out in a disastrous crash that makes the situation worse — as it  
almost certainly will — Bush will simply back another horse. What he seeks in  
Iraq is not freedom or democracy but “stability” — a government of any shape 
or  form that will deliver the goods. As the Independent wryly noted in its 
Sunday  story, Dick Cheney himself revealed the true goal of the war back in 
1999, in a  speech he gave when he was still CEO of Halliburton. “Where is the oil 
going to  come from” to slake the world’s ever-growing thirst, asked Cheney, 
who then  answered his own question: “The Middle East, with two-thirds of the 
world’s oil  and the lowest cost, is still where the prize ultimately lies.” 
 
And therein lies another hidden layer of the war. For Iraq not only has the  
world’s second largest oil reserves; it also has the world’s most easily  
retrievable oil. As the Independent succinctly notes: “The cost-per-barrel of  
extracting oil in Iraq is among the lowest in the world because the reserves are 
 relatively close to the surface. This contrasts starkly with the expensive 
and  risky lengths to which the oil industry must go to find new reserves 
elsewhere —  witness the super-deep offshore drilling and cost-intensive techniques 
needed to  extract oil form Canada’s tar sands.”  
This is precisely what Cheney was getting at in his 1999 talk to the  
Institute of Petroleum. In a world of dwindling petroleum resources, those who  
control large reserves of cheaply produced oil will reap unimaginable profits —  
and command the heights of the global economy. It’s not just about profit, of  
course; control of such resources would offer tremendous strategic advantages 
to  anyone who was interested in “full spectrum domination” of world affairs, 
which  the Bush/Cheney faction and their outriders among the neo-cons and the “
national  greatness” fanatics have openly sought for years. With its twin 
engines of  corporate greed and military empire, the war in Iraq is a marriage 
made in  Valhalla.  
The Win-Win Scenario 
And this unholy union is what Bush is really talking about when he talks  
about “victory.” This is the reason for so much of the drift and dithering and  
chaos and incompetence of the occupation: Bush and his cohorts don’t really 
care  what happens on the ground in Iraq — they care about what comes out of the 
 ground. The end — profit and dominion — justifies any means. What happens 
to the  human beings caught up in the war is of no ultimate importance; the 
game is  worth any number of broken candles.  
And in plain point of fact, the Bush-Cheney faction — and the elite interests 
 they represent — has already won the war in Iraq. I’ve touched on this 
theme  before elsewhere, but it is a reality of the war that is very often 
overlooked,  and is worth examining again. This ultimate victory was clear as long 
ago as  June 2004, when I first set down the original version of some of the 
updated  observations below.  
Put simply, the Bush Family and their allies and cronies represent the  
confluence of three long-established power factions in the American elite: oil,  
arms and investments. These groups equate their own interests, their own wealth  
and privilege, with the interests of the nation — indeed, the world — as a  
whole. And they pursue these interests with every weapon at their command,  
including war, torture, deceit and corruption. Democracy means nothing to them — 
 not even in their own country, as we saw in the 2000 election. Laws are just 
 whips to keep the common herd in line; they don’t apply to the elite, as Bush
’s  own lawyers and minions have openly asserted in the memos, signing 
statements,  court cases and presidential decrees asserting the “inherent power” of 
the  “unitary executive” to override any law he pleases.  
The Iraq war has been immensely profitable for these Bush-linked power  
factions (and their tributary industries, such as construction); billions of  
dollars in public money have already poured into their coffers. Halliburton has  
been catapulted from the edge of bankruptcy to the heights of no-bid,  
open-ended, guaranteed profit. The Carlyle Group is gorging on war contracts.  
Individual Bush family members are making out like bandits from war-related  
investments, while dozens of Bush minions — like Richard Perle, James Woolsey,  and Joe 
Allbaugh — have cashed in their insider chips for blood money.  
The aftermath of the war promises equal if not greater riches. Even if the  
new Iraqi government maintains nominal state control of its oil industry, there 
 are still untold billions to be made in PSAs for drilling, refining,  
distributing, servicing and securing oilfields and pipelines. Likewise, the new  
Iraqi military and police forces will require billions more in weapons,  
equipment and training, bought from the U.S. arms industry — and from the  
fast-expanding “private security” industry, the politically hard-wired mercenary  forces 
that are the power elite’s latest lucrative spin-off. And as with Saudi  
Arabia, oil money from the new Iraq will pump untold billions into American  banks 
and investment houses.  
But that’s not all. For even in the worstcase scenario, if the Americans had  
to pull out tomorrow, abandoning everything — their bases, their contracts,  
their collaborators — the Bush power factions would still come out ahead. For  
not only has their already incalculable wealth been vastly augmented (with 
any  potential losses indemnified by U.S. taxpayers), but their deeply 
entrenched  sway over American society has also increased by several magnitudes. No 
matter  which party controls the government, the militarization of America is so 
far  gone now it’s impossible to imagine any major rollback in the gargantuan 
U.S.  war machine — 725 bases in 132 countries, annual military budgets 
topping $500  billion, a planned $1 trillion in new weapons systems already moving 
through the  pipeline. Indeed, the Democratic ‘opposition’ has promised to 
expand the  military.  
Nor will either party conceivably challenge the dominance of the energy  
behemoths — or stand against the American public’s demand for cheap gas, big  
vehicles, and unlimited consumption of a vast disproportion of the world’s oil.  
As for Wall Street — both parties have long been the eager courtesans of the  
investment elite, dispatching armies all over the world to protect their  
financial interests. The power factions whose influence has been so magnified by  
Bush’s war will maintain their supremacy regardless of the electoral outcome.  
[By the way, to think that all of this has happened because a small band of  
extremist ideologues — the neo-cons — somehow “hijacked” U.S. foreign policy 
to  push their radical dreams of “liberating” the Middle East by force and  
destroying Israel’s enemies is absurd. The Bush power factions were already  
determined to pursue an aggressive foreign policy; they used the neo-cons and  
their bag of tricks — their inflated rhetoric, their conspiratorial zeal, 
their  murky Middle East contacts, their ideology of brute force in the name of  ‘
higher’ causes — as tools (and PR cover) to help bring about a long-planned 
war  that had nothing to do with democracy or security or any coherent ideology 
 whatsoever beyond the remorseless pursuit of wealth and power, the blind 
urge to  be top dog.]  
So Bush and his cohorts have won even if the surge fails and Iraq lapses into 
 perpetual anarchy, or becomes an extremist religious state; they’ve won even 
if  the whole region goes up in flames, and terrorism flares to unprecedented 
 heights — because this will just mean more war-profiteering, more  
fearprofiteering. And yes, they’ve won even though they’ve lost their  congressional 
majority and could well lose the presidency in 2008, because war  and fear will 
continue to fill their coffers, buying them continuing influence  and power 
as they bide their time through another interregnum of a Democratic  ‘centrist’
 — who will, at best, only nibble at the edges of the militarist state  — 
until they are back in the saddle again. The only way they can lose the Iraq  
War is if they are actually arrested and imprisoned for their war crimes. And we 
 all know that’s not going to happen.  
So Bush’s confident strut, his incessant upbeat pronouncements about the war, 
 his complacent smirks, his callous indifference to the unspeakable horror he 
has  unleashed in Iraq — these are not the hallmarks of selfdelusion, or 
willful  ignorance, or a disassociation from reality. He and his accomplices know 
full  well what the reality is — and they like it.  
Chris Floyd is an American journalist. His work has  appeared in print and 
online in venues all over the world, including The Nation,  Counterpunch, 
Columbia Journalism Review, the Christian Science Monitor, Il  Manifesto and many 
others. His story on Pentagon plans to foment terrorism won a  “Project Censored”
 award in 2003. He is the author of Empire Burlesque: High  Crimes and Low 
Comedy in the Bush Imperium, and is co-founder and editor of the  “Empire 
Burlesque” political blog. The above article was published on Truthout  January 8, 
2007.
<BR><BR><BR>**************************************<BR> AOL now offers free 
email to everyone.  Find out more about what's free from AOL at 
http://www.aol.com.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
To unsubscribe from the IOWA-TOPICS list, send any message to:
[log in to unmask]

Check out our Listserv Lists support site for more information:
http://www.sierraclub.org/lists/faq.asp