Big oil’s grab at Iraq war spoils

Remember how hysterical Bush supporting pundits went whenever you doubted their wisdom?

Like that the Iraq war would be a ‘cakewalk’, that Iraqis would throw flowers at invading US soldiers, that it was ‘mission accomplished‘ in 2003?

Remember their hysteria whenever you doubted their certainties on ‘weapons of mass destruction‘?

And whenever you doubted their talk on the supposed 9/11-Iraq connection?

Well, the Bush administration has admitted there were no weapons of mass destruction, the only official reason for the war.

And no 9/11-Saddam Hussein connection (there were Saddam-Rumsfeld, and CIA-Al Qaeda connections, but they do not want to talk about that.)

George W Bush himself has admitted US forces are not winning the war in Iraq.

And, Bush said, yes, Iraq is comparable to Vietnam (a comparison for which not that long ago Senator Edward Kennedy and others had been attacked in McCarthyite Inquisition style).

The peace movement really touched a raw nerve of the Right when they said: No blood for oil in Iraq.

For, ‘of course’, nothing, according to Bush and Cheney’s sycophants, like Tony Blair, could be further away from the minds of oil dynasty scion George W and Dick of Halliburton than oil.

They started war for unselfish humanitarian reasons, ‘of course’ not for oil.

In reality, there is a complex of causes for the Iraq war.

The major importance of oil within that complex is by now at last admitted by Bush’s Republicans.

This video from the USA is called Cheney: I never linked Iraq with 9/11. Oh really?

From British daily The Independent of today:

Future of Iraq: The spoils of war

How the West will make a killing on Iraqi oil riches

By Danny Fortson, Andrew Murray-Watson and Tim Webb

Published: 07 January 2007

Iraq’s massive oil reserves, the third-largest in the world, are about to be thrown open for large-scale exploitation by Western oil companies under a controversial law which is expected to come before the Iraqi parliament within days.

The US government has been involved in drawing up the law, a draft of which has been seen by The Independent on Sunday.

It would give big oil companies such as BP, Shell and Exxon 30-year contracts to extract Iraqi crude and allow the first large-scale operation of foreign oil interests in the country since the industry was nationalised in 1972.

The huge potential prizes for Western firms will give ammunition to critics who say the Iraq war was fought for oil.

They point to statements such as one from Vice-President Dick Cheney, who said in 1999, while he was still chief executive of the oil services company Halliburton, that the world would need an additional 50 million barrels of oil a day by 2010.

“So where is the oil going to come from?…

The Middle East, with two-thirds of the world’s oil and the lowest cost, is still where the prize ultimately lies,” he said.