"The Bush Administration today seems to have written off the Afghanistan adventure as a failure: we hear virtually nothing about it, and the pipeline project appears to be dead. (Osama bin Laden meanwhile remains at large, of no apparent interest to the Bush Administration. "I truly am not that concerned about him," Mr. Bush has said.)
"The far larger prize is in Iraq, where the war's objective is to claim for American and British oil companies the rich crude resources of the country-some 115 billion barrels of oil, enough to dent seriously OPEC's dominance of world markets. Though the war is tenuous and increasingly bloody, capturing the oil is not yet irretrievably out of reach. (Exxon/Mobil, Chevron/Texaco, Conoco/Phillips, BP/Amoco, and Royal Dutch Shell are the visibly dominant companies in Baghdad today, according to Joshua Holland's recent AlterNet article.)
"The strategy for capturing the oil was cleverly designed and purposefully deceitful. First, the nationalized structure of Iraq's oil industry would be abolished, and the oil fields privatized instead. International oil companies (e.g., the five named above) would be invited to "invest" in the oil fields. They would do so by signing Production Sharing Agreements (PSA's), which grant the companies a share of the oil produced, in exchange for their investing in infrastructure. But the prospective "shares" for the oil companies by any standards are unfairly, obscenely large, and the PSA's are irrevocable for 30 years. (The OPEC countries have nationalized their industries-Iraq did so in 1972- but not a single one relies on PSA's; they are tantamount to legalized theft.)
"The privatization scheme and the provision for PSA's were worked out in the Bush State Department long before the Iraqi war was launched, and they were inserted into the emerging Iraqi government's tentative procedures by Paul Bremer's Coalition Provisional Authority.
"In typical Bush Administration fashion, a smokescreen obscured a repulsive reality. American and British oil companies could capture the bulk of the oil without Iraq technically relinquishing ownership. Then a "war on terror" was launched to make all this happen.
From Counterpunch.org
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