As you read this, remember what Alan Greenspan once said:
"I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil."
NYT:
A group of American advisers led by a small State Department team played an integral part in drawing up contracts between the Iraqi government and five major Western oil companies to develop some of the largest fields in Iraq, American officials say.
The disclosure, coming on the eve of the contracts' announcement, is the first confirmation of direct involvement by the Bush administration in deals to open Iraq's oil to commercial development and is likely to stoke criticism.In their role as advisers to the Iraqi Oil Ministry, American government lawyers and private-sector consultants provided template contracts and detailed suggestions on drafting the contracts, advisers and a senior State Department official said.
It is unclear how much influence their work had on the ministry's decisions.
The advisers -- who, along with the diplomatic official, spoke on condition of anonymity -- say that their involvement was only to help an understaffed Iraqi ministry with technical and legal details of the contracts and that they in no way helped choose which companies got the deals.
Repeated calls to the Oil Ministry's press office for comment were not returned.
At a time of spiraling oil prices, the no-bid contracts, in a country with some of the world's largest untapped fields and potential for vast profits, are a rare prize to the industry. The contracts are expected to be awarded Monday to Exxon Mobil, Shell, BP, Total and Chevron, as well as to several smaller oil companies.
Why anyone has ever bothered to deny what was the obvious truth still baffles me. One need look no further than Afghanistan to see how the existence of oil changes this administration's strategic calculation. Osama was and still is in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region, but we left the fight there to others so that we could focus on Iraq. But no, of course the existence of oil in Iraq had nothing to do with anything. Of course.
