MB Civic

http://www.commondreams.org/views06/1208-26.htm

While the Bush administration, the media and nearly all the Democrats still refuse to explain the war in Iraq in terms of oil, the ever-pragmatic members of the Iraq Study Group share no such reticence.

Page 1, Chapter 1 of the Iraq Study Group report lays out Iraq’s importance to its region, the U.S. and the world with this reminder: “It has the world’s second-largest known oil reserves.”
The group then proceeds to give very specific and radical recommendations as to what the United States should do to secure those reserves. If the proposals are followed, Iraq’s national oil industry will be commercialized and opened to foreign firms.

The U.S. State Department’s Oil and Energy Working Group… said that Iraq “should be opened to international oil companies as quickly as possible after the war.” Its preferred method of privatization was a form of oil contract called a production-sharing agreement. These agreements are preferred by the oil industry but rejected by all the top oil producers in the Middle East because they grant greater control and more profits to the companies than the governments.

For any degree of oil privatization to take place, and for it to apply to all the country’s oil fields, Iraq has to amend its constitution and pass a new national oil law…Much to the deep frustration of the U.S. government and American oil companies, that law has still not been passed.

How ’bout the media shining a spotlight on this … [crickets]…
-MAB