You are right, it's better to leave Iraq's oil industry in a decrepit state, rather than develop. The US government doesnt receive the oil revenue. Total and BP are not American.
If you have difficulty reading, here's the key word: non-bidding contract. BP and Total? Who's the ally's in the Iraq war again?
It's called a no-bid contract and do you know what that means? It doesnt mean they take all the money or oil.
If you still think wars today are about direct grabbing then I don't know what to say. Do you know how much it is worth of rights to oil fields with non-market price, for as long as they can control the Iraq government?
Screw this sideways motion, just tell Iraq that we are going to take a percentage off the top until our debt for managing their country for them is clear. DD
That would be like me purposefully driving a Mack truck into your living room and then making you pay me to arrange for the contractors to fix the damage to your house so I could pay off the damage to my Mack truck.
There's a reporter whose work is pretty spot-on. I mention him a lot, but WTF can I say? Check out Greg Palast's Armed Madhouse. I always wondered how we're all getting a$$-raped by the oil majors, the price of gas, all that stuff. Iraq has about, what?, 11% of the world's proven reserves, and virtually none of it is being tapped. If you opened that vein you'd relieve a lot of the pain that speculators are causing. And hidden in newspapers recently (page 2 of a Chronicle Sunday business section) was how a huge amount of almost pure methane was found deep underground of North Dakota and Canada. Not easy to reach; you kinda have to take a long straw into the earth and suck it out ("I drink your milkshake! I drink it up!"). But the amount of it is huge, and could easily make us forget drilling in Alaska; and yet it isn't worth front page news? I'm not trying to get too "Three Days of the Condor" here, but good Lord, who's controlling what we get to read in the papers?
What I would want to know is this: If the companies that are taking it over were the original partners in the Iraq partnership, were they compensated in any way 36 years ago when Saddam nationalized it or were they just booted out? If they were just booted out and lost their investment in the venture, then upon Saddam's removal, their interest should have been restored to them.
They never asked us to go in there...genocide was happening then...and its happening now. Close to 2 million Iraqis and 5000 of our soldiers i think have lost their lives due to the result of the war. I don't know if you can fathom a caskets row by row like that. Tbh the world, iraq and we were safer before we ever went in there.
And it was such a nice living room, wasn't it? Point is, the Iraqis will actually benefit from this. The companies that received these contracts are best in the world at doing it. They have the expertise and the technology. The Iraqis themselves dont have the know-how to get the oil out efficiently,cleanly, and profitably. They are simply hiring these guys to help them out. If I was an Iraqi minister, I'd do the same thing.
It really wasn't about oil - not at least directly. It was about a vision of a democratic middle east. A very naive and misguided one. The thought that if we could make Iraq into a democracy it would result in a transformation of the whole region and bring peace and prosperit to America forever. Hopefully these kinds of thoughts will never again be part of any nations foreign policy.....i don't have much hope though.
This part I agree with completely. National oil companies are an exercise in futility. Since Hugo Chavez fired the business people in PDVSA, production has dropped 30%. Mexico, despite having huge oil reserves and plenty of incentive to drill, will begin importing oil in 2011 if production continues to fall at the current rate. Lukoil (a public/private partnership) is one of the worst-run companies in the world. Aramco does well, but they've got the cheapest oil to produce, and they have set up a pseudo-capitalistic system to run the company. (Besides, I'd argue that Aramco is really more like a private company owned by the Royal Family.) Iraqis will make more money from royalties from the big companies than they ever could pumping it themselves.
