Is it a war crime to give Iraq's OIL contracts to our oil companies?

[yurbud]

the neocons wanted to privatize it so they could steal all the profits, but the oil companies wanted a slightly subtler set up that has the benefit of being confusing.

Either way, the evidence is plain: we cancelled the Russian, French, and Chinese contracts Saddam had and replaced them with our oil companies.

Is this a war crime?

SOURCES:

http://www.globalpolicy.org/security/oil/2005/crudedesigns.htm

http://www.gregpalast.com/printerfriendly.cfm?artid=437

[htuttle]

1. It's against the Geneva Conventions

But Bushco thinks they found a technicality that gets them around it.

Details here (from 2004 about the privatization of Iraq in general):
http://www.harpers.org/BaghdadYearZero.html

[yurbud]

2. thanks for the link, here's relevant excerpt:

When Paul Bremer shredded Iraq’s Baathist constitution and replaced it with what The Economist greeted approvingly as “the wish list of foreign investors,” there was one small detail he failed to mention: It was all completely illegal. The CPA derived its legal authority from United Nations Security Council Resolution 1483, passed in May 2003, which recognized the United States and Britain as Iraq’s legitimate occupiers. It was this resolution that empowered Bremer to unilaterally make laws in Iraq. But the resolution also stated that the U.S. and Britain must “comply fully with their obligations under international law including in particular the Geneva Conventions of 1949 and the Hague Regulations of 1907.” Both conventions were born as an attempt to curtail the unfortunate historical tendency among occupying powers to rewrite the rules so that they can economically strip the nations they control. With this in mind, the conventions stipulate that an occupier must abide by a country’s existing laws unless “absolutely prevented” from doing so. They also state that an occupier does not own the “public buildings, real estate, forests and agricultural assets” of the country it is occupying but is rather their “administrator” and custodian, keeping them secure until sovereignty is reestablished. This was the true threat to the Year Zero plan: since America didn’t own Iraq’s assets, it could not legally sell them, which meant that after the occupation ended, an Iraqi government could come to power and decide that it wanted to keep the state companies in public hands, or, as is the norm in the Gulf region, to bar foreign firms from owning 100 percent of national assets. If that happened, investments made under Bremer’s rules could be expropriated, leaving firms with no recourse because their investments had violated international law from the outset.