"Big Oil poised to make triumphant return to Iraq" thanks to Cheney's Secret Energy Meetings

[leftchick]

by Linda McQuaig | July 8, 2008 - 10:34am

http://smirkingchimp.com/thread/15732

Small service contracts announced last week are a step toward major development deals

— from the Toronto Star

When Big Oil excutives and U.S. Vice-President Dick Cheney met for secret energy talks in the spring of 2001, one subject that weighed on all their minds was the potential loss of Iraq's bountiful oil reserves.

After more than a decade of hostile U.S.-Iraqi relations, Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein had negotiated deals with oil companies from a range of countries, including Russia, China and India, to develop Iraq's largely undeveloped reserves.

That meant U.S. oil companies were to be denied a stake in developing one of the last oil bonanzas left on Earth. It also meant that the U.S. risked being denied access to this vast new source of petroleum – the commodity it considers essential to its continued status as an economic and military superpower.

So it wasn't surprising that Cheney's energy task force – set up with urgency within weeks of the Bush administration taking office – took great interest in a document called "Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield Contracts." The document (eventually made public after a lengthy court battle with the Bush administration) included a detailed breakdown of Iraq's 97 oil fields, listing in each case the foreign company that was negotiating a development contract with Saddam, and the status of those negotiations.

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Of course, outside the narrow confines of the political and media establishment, most ordinary people have had little difficulty seeing through the official reasons offered up by the Bush administration to explain its insistence on invading and occupying a country that, apart from oil, consists mostly of sand.

Now there's some fresh fodder for that debate, with the announcement last week by the Iraqi government that it is signing no-bid contracts with five of the biggest multinational oil companies – the same corporate crowd that met with Cheney back in 2001 and fretted over Saddam's oil deals with "foreign suitors."