[Osx-nutters] Future of Iraq: The Spoils of War

[Kevin Callahan]

<http://www.commondreams.org/headlines07/0107-02.htm>


Future of Iraq: The Spoils of War
Blood and oil: How the West will profit from Iraq's most precious  
commodity
by Danny Fortson, Andrew Murray-Watson and Tim Webb

So was this what the Iraq war was fought for, after all? As the  
number of US soldiers killed since the invasion rises past the 3,000  
mark, and President George Bush gambles on sending in up to 30,000  
more troops, The Independent on Sunday has learnt that the Iraqi  
government is about to push through a law giving Western oil  
companies the right to exploit the country's massive oil reserves.

And Iraq's oil reserves, the third largest in the world, with an  
estimated 115 billion barrels waiting to be extracted, are a prize  
worth having. As Vice-President Dick Cheney noted in 1999, when he  
was still running Halliburton, an oil services company, the Middle  
East is the key to preventing the world running out of oil.

Now, unnoticed by most amid the furore over civil war in Iraq and the  
hanging of Saddam Hussein, the new oil law has quietly been going  
through several drafts, and is now on the point of being presented to  
the cabinet and then the parliament in Baghdad. Its provisions are a  
radical departure from the norm for developing countries: under a  
system known as "production-sharing agreements", or PSAs, oil majors  
such as BP and Shell in Britain, and Exxon and Chevron in the US,  
would be able to sign deals of up to 30 years to extract Iraq's oil.