How an American disaster paved the way for the oil industry's rise--and possible fall--in Iraq

[dixiegrrrrl]

Excellent update on the oil situation in post-Bush "Get your war on" Iraq.
(remember when we said this would happen?)

Here, as a start, is a little scorecard of what’s gone on in Iraq since Big Oil arrived two and a half years ago:

corruption’s skyrocketed;
two Western oil companies are being investigated for either giving or receiving bribes;
the Iraqi government is paying oil companies a per-barrel fee according to wildly unrealistic production targets they’ve set, whether or not they deliver that number of barrels;
contractors are heavily over-charging for drilling wells, which the companies don’t mind since the Iraqi government picks up the tab.

Meanwhile, to protect the oil giants from dissent and protest, trade union offices have been raided, computers seized and equipment smashed, leaders arrested and prosecuted. And that’s just in the oil-rich southern part of the country.
Iraqis still have an average of just five hours of electricity a day, which in 130-degree heat causes tempers to boil over regularly.
The country’s two great rivers, the Tigris and Euphrates, which watered the cradle of civilization 5,000 years ago, are drying up. This is largely due to the inability of the government to engage in effective regional diplomacy that would control upstream dam-building by Turkey.

The article goes on to tell how the Bush Admin. planned, PRE WAR, to destroy Iraq's oil infrastructure so that Big Oil could make more money post war.

http://www.salon.com/2012/08/23/mission_accomplished_for_big_oil/

[Live and Learn]

1. As I recall, the PNAC laid out the plans quite clearly

so I have to disagree with this excerpt claiming that these documents laid out the plans for the first time ever. We were notified much in advance but most ignored it.

In the period before and around the invasion, the Bush administration barely mentioned Iraqi oil, describing it reverently only as that country’s “patrimony.” As for the reasons for war, the administration insisted that it had barely noticed Iraq had one-tenth of the world’s oil reserves. But my new book reveals documents I received, marked SECRET/NOFORN, that laid out for the first time pre-war oil plans hatched in the Pentagon by arch-neoconservative Douglas Feith’s Energy Infrastructure Planning Group (EIPG).

Still glad to see their plan is failing. Not that it wouldn't be the expected outcome. Thievery rarely succeeds for long.