The U.S. effort to control Iraqi oil continues a 100-year campaign of Western interference

juan cole...

Poor Iraq has been looted, occupied, and disrupted by the industrialized West for a century because of the curse of its oil wealth.

professor cole also offers this fascinating little tidbit...

Bush and Cheney clearly went into Iraq primarily in order to put US petroleum firms in precisely this favored position, although that is not the same thing as saying that the oil majors plumped for the war. It is more likely that smaller, hungrier concerns were eager for Iraq to be opened; Cheney was CEO of one of those firms 1995-2000, i.e. Halliburton, which might well have gone bankrupt without the no-bid contracts he was able to throw it once he arranged for the US invasion.

patrick cockburn in the independent...

Nearly four decades after the four biggest Western oil companies were expelled from Iraq by Saddam Hussein, they are negotiating their return. By the end of the month, Royal Dutch Shell, BP, Exxon Mobil and Total will sign agreements with the Baghdad government, Iraq's first with big Western oil firms since the US-led invasion in 2003.

[...]

The major oil companies have been eager to go back to Iraq, but are concerned about their own security and the long-term stability of the country. The two-year no-bid agreements are service agreements that should add another 500,000 barrels of crude a day of output to Iraq's present production of 2.5 million barrels a day (b/d).

The companies have the option of being paid in cash or crude oil for the deals, each of which will reportedly be worth $500m (£250m). For Iraq, the agreements are a way of accessing foreign expertise immediately, before the Iraqi parliament passes a controversial new hydrocarbons law.

[...]

For the four oil giants, the new agreements will bring them back to a country where they have a long history. BP, Exxon Mobil, Total and Shell were co-owners of a British, American and French consortium that kept Iraq's oil reserves in foreign control for more than 40 years.

The Iraq Petroleum Company (once the Turkish Petroleum Company) was formed in 1912 by oil companies eager to grab the resources in parts of the Ottoman Empire.

over five years after the u.s. began the illegal iraq war and well over a year after the attempt to pass the iraq oil law ground to a standstill (see my previous posts here), my country soldiers on in its quest to control iraqi oil...

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