article | posted March 1, 2007 (March 19, 2007 issue)
Who Will Get the Oil?
Christian Parenti
Iraq's postwar oil bonanza remains a mirage. The country has the second- or third-largest reserves in the world, making petroleum the heart and vast bulk of its economy. Thus in March 2003 did Paul Wolfowitz assure Congress that Iraq would "finance its own reconstruction, and relatively soon." American planners predicted that Iraq's oil production would triple to a feverish 6 million barrels per day by 2010.
Instead war, corruption, sectarian slaughter and a massive crime wave have reduced the country's once mighty petroleum sector to an industrial zombie: still ambulatory, functional but essentially dead.
Despite this, oil majors and the International Monetary Fund have been pressuring Iraq to pass a thoroughly free-market hydrocarbons law that would allow foreign companies to make huge profits from Iraq's petroleum. A draft of the law has just been released; the Iraqi Cabinet has approved it and sent it on to Iraq's Parliament for debate and approval in March.
But is Big Oil really poised for total victory in Iraq? Such an outcome is hard to imagine, at least in the near term, given the likelihood of opposition from Iraqis and, more important, the spiraling chaos: Iraq is a society in meltdown with no real state to speak of. Many politicians have fled Iraq, rarely risking trips back to Baghdad, so even achieving a basic parliamentary quorum can be difficult. Controlling and profiting from Iraq's oil has been the goal of the oil majors, but they do not write history unmolested by the momentum of events and competing agendas. .....(more)
The complete piece is at:
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070319/parenti 
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