Iraq leaders agree draft oil law

BAGHDAD, Jan 17 (Reuters) - Iraq's Oil Committee has agreed a final draft of an Oil Law that sets rules for sharing revenues and boosting output and aims to bring in billions of dollars of foreign investment, an Oil Ministry spokesman said on Wednesday.

The draft, drawn up senior national and regional leaders, calls for a federal committee headed by the prime minister to oversee all future contracts. It will have the power to review existing deals signed under Saddam Hussein or by the Kurdish regional government, spokesman Asim Jihad said.

Passing an oil law to help settle potentially explosive disputes among Iraq's ethnic and sectarian communities over the division of the world's third biggest known crude oil reserves has been a key demand of the United States in providing further military support to the national unity government.

The negotiating team, headed by Deputy Prime Minister Barham Salih, had finalised the draft late on Tuesday, Jihad said, and the bill would go to the full cabinet next week for approval. After that it will go to parliament. Officials hope that the broad base of the negotiating team means it will pass easily.

more:http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/MAC743964.htm

Dollars, not just democracy, often drive U.S. foreign policy

Is an ugly chapter in American history about to repeat itself?

Last week, members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee grilled Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice about a hydrocarbon law being considered by Iraq's parliament. The bill, the contents of which have not been published, is expected to prescribe how Iraq's oil revenue will be shared among the major factions in that country. The measure also is supposed to spell out the degree to which foreign companies could invest - and profit - from Iraq's oil industry.


Despite Iraq's secrecy in drafting this law, Rice hinted to senators that she has knowledge of the bill's contents and assured them it would be a remarkable law.


Remarkable indeed. Four days before Rice went before the committee, The Independent, a British newspaper, reported that the Bush administration is heavily involved in writing Iraq's oil law, a draft of which the paper said it had obtained. The law would allow Western oil companies contracts of up to 30 years to pump oil out of Iraq, and the profits would be tax-free, the newspaper reported.


Many foreign and domestic critics of the war have charged that getting control of Iraq's oil - not getting rid of weapons of mass destruction - was the real motivation behind President Bush's decision to topple Saddam Hussein. And while the evidence to support this theory appears to be based more on conjecture than fact, at least so far, history is not on the side of those who bristle at such a claim:

more: http://news.yahoo.com/s/usatoday/20070116/cm_usatoday/dollarsnotjustdemocracyoftendriveusforeignpolicy

Blood and oil: How the West will profit from Iraq's most precious commodity
The 'IoS' today reveals a draft for a new law that would give Western oil companies a massive share in the third largest reserves in the world. To the victors, the oil? That is how some experts view this unprecedented arrangement with a major Middle East oil producer that guarantees investors huge profits for the next 30 years.

Published: 07 January 2007
So was this what the Iraq war was fought for, after all? As the number of US soldiers killed since the invasion rises past the 3,000 mark, and President George Bush gambles on sending in up to 30,000 more troops, The Independent on Sunday has learnt that the Iraqi government is about to push through a law giving Western oil companies the right to exploit the country's massive oil reserves.

And Iraq's oil reserves, the third largest in the world, with an estimated 115 billion barrels waiting to be extracted, are a prize worth having. As Vice-President Dick Cheney noted in 1999, when he was still running Halliburton, an oil services company, the Middle East is the key to preventing the world running out of oil.

Now, unnoticed by most amid the furore over civil war in Iraq and the hanging of Saddam Hussein, the new oil law has quietly been going through several drafts, and is now on the point of being presented to the cabinet and then the parliament in Baghdad. Its provisions are a radical departure from the norm for developing countries: under a system known as "production-sharing agreements", or PSAs, oil majors such as BP and Shell in Britain, and Exxon and Chevron in the US, would be able to sign deals of up to 30 years to extract Iraq's oil.

PSAs allow a country to retain legal ownership of its oil, but gives a share of profits to the international companies that invest in infrastructure and operation of the wells, pipelines and refineries. Their introduction would be a first for a major Middle Eastern oil producer. Saudi Arabia and Iran, the world's number one and two oil exporters, both tightly control their industries through state-owned companies with no appreciable foreign collaboration, as do most members of the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries, Opec.


more: http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article2132574.ece

Since this is the whole reason for the invasion.....

Let's hope Waxman continues to push the issue:

~snip~
“We’re going to go to five committees and somewhat more equalize the jurisdiction so each subcommittee is a substantial subcommittee in terms of what it has to do,” Waxman said.

Waxman and the Bush administration have tangled previously over access to sensitive White House information. Waxman has supported lawsuits filed under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to discover the interactions between industry groups and an energy task force headed by Vice President Dick Cheney before the White House unveiled its energy policy.

Waxman also pushed for the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to investigate meetings of Cheney’s task force and criticized the GAO comptroller general for failing to appeal a court decision protecting the task force from the probe.

“This is a tremendous setback for open government,” Waxman said at the time.

In the interests of government transparency, in Democrats’ view — or in the interests of political gain, from a Republican perspective — Waxman also could challenge the recent administration practice of reclassifying portions of the National Archives. The administration’s policy of responding to FOIA information requests could also come under scrutiny.

more:http://www.thehill.com/thehill/export/TheHill/News/Frontpage/010407/waxman.html

And you're considered something of a hard-liner when it comes to executive authority. What's the White House position going to be when it comes to requests for either documents or witnesses from the administration?

CHENEY: Well, we've been, I think, very responsible in that regard. And when there is a legitimate need for those documents to be presented to the Congress, and they have a legitimate constitutional or statutory reason to have access to them, we try to accommodate them.

Sometimes requests have been made that clearly fall outside the boundaries, clearly trying to get into an area, for example, that is preserved and protected for the president — the president's ability to consult, for example, with people in private without having to publicize or tell the Congress who he's talking to.

We took that case on my energy task force, for example, all the way to the Supreme Court and won on a 7-2 decision. So it depends. We'll do everything we can to cooperate and work with the Congress. We want good relations with the Congress.

But if they come down and seek something that we don't think is appropriate, we'll defend our constitutional obligations and responsibilities. We take an oath just like they do to protect, preserve and defend the Constitution of the United States. And so we have strong feelings about it, and we've operated accordingly.

more:http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,243632,00.html

in light of the Iraq War? Especially now that they are admitting that oil is a motive for this use of our blood and treasure? Would that be legitimate enough for him?

"And when there is a legitimate need for those documents to be presented to the Congress, and they have a legitimate constitutional or statutory reason to have access to them, we try to accommodate them."

<snip>

Passing an oil law to help settle potentially explosive disputes among Iraq's ethnic and sectarian communities over the division of the world's third biggest known crude oil reserves has been a key demand of the United States in providing further military support to the national unity government.

<snip>

Does anyone but me think that the Iraqi people might not go along silently and meekly with this fiat?

By the way, does this qualify as the biggest theft in history?

Some will go along but surely so many will die.
The lust of oil.

trying to extract that crude in the middle of a civil war.

I wonder if we will ever get the hint(the gov, that is) that we need alternative fuels?

THIS was the whole point of every drop of blood since 9-11.

I saw in the hearings last week when they were talking about this potential oil law, I believe it was Senator Obama even who just let it pass when Rice made mention of this potential new law as a good thing. No one wants to challenge our right to take their oil. This is a disgrace and immoral, and if it is not, it should be illegal.

I hope we lose big time in making this happen. I hope the Iraqi people finally stand up against our abuses in their country. It makes me sad to say this, but I believe that as a country we need a slap in the face as to what we can and cannot do in the world. The way we are conducting ourselves in the world right now, we are going to all suffer the consequences of our abuses and the fact that we are no longer king of the world. I believe we will soon learn this the hard way, since this administration doesn't want to listen. If this new Congress isn't strong enough to stop the insanity we are perpetuating in the Middle East, in fact, the whole world is going to suffer from our monstrous abuses.

I try to hold out hope, but when I saw that no one challenged them in the hearings on the passing of this oil law and the looming theft we are trying to institute, it made me want to scream and cry at the same time. I stand with the Iraqi people on this one, the oil industry unions who are aware of this potential theft, and I believe are not going to let it happen. I am more ashamed to be American at this moment than I have felt in a long time.

.....between the dems and the repukes.

as through this takeaway of Iraq's natural wealth, then there is truly not a fundamental bit of difference. Who cares of Dems support universal health care and such if they are complicit in adding another building block of economic hegemony leading to blowback that will increase the chances of another war or continuing war and thus continued huge wasteful, corrupt spending on "defense", and greater war profiteering, that is then channeled into Republican party coffers? When is this cycle going to end?

Add this to the things like the Dems support of the Bush/Condi blank check for Israel to bomb Lebanon to their hearts content, just to name another recent source of future hatred of the U.S.

Read this.

Before any assessment of the balance of forces in Iraq can be undertaken from a purely military perspective (never possible, since military success is always measured against political objectives), it is essential to survey the major Iraqi military and political actors on where they stand with regard to the proposed Iraqi “oil law.” If the top priority is to salvage U.S. access to future hydrocarbon mining in Iraq, then the fundamental requirement is a comparatively “stable” Iraqi government that supports this access. The fundamental show-stopper is any leader or set of leaders who reject this plan.

The catch for the U.S. is that, as we shall see, the Iraqi leaders who support the hydrocarbon law have no legitimacy upon which to establish stability, and the leaders who have the popular legitimacy to establish stability support neither the occupation nor the hydrocarbon law.

<snip>

The Shiite leader who has most vehemently opposed this law, and the U.S. occupation, has been Muqtada al-Sadr. The press has frequently portrayed Sadr as pro-Iranian, and nothing could be further from the truth. The SCIRI has been most aggressive in the demand to divide Iraq into a very loose federation and transform southeastern Iraq into an Iranian rump state. Sadr has called for Iraqi unification, left the door open to Sunnis for an anti-occupation alliance, denounced the hydrocarbon law, and modeled his political and military leadership on Hezbollah.

Here is where we come to the nub of The Surge, and why it is probably the political death knell of Nouri al-Maliki. The principle aim of The Surge is to break the power of Muqtada al-Sadr. Sadr not only has the seats in the Potemkin parliament of Iraq that put Maliki (a leader in a relatively small Shiite party, the Dawa) into power against the SCIRI (the largest parliamentary faction); he commands the ferocious loyalty of two and a half million people and has an 80,000-strong militia concentrated a stone’s throw from the U.S.-protected Green Zone in Baghdad. Baghdad has about 6 million people; New York City has 8 million, just by way of comparison. The population of Sadr City, the “neighborhood” under the leadership of Sadr, is approximately that of Brooklyn.
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20070112_petraeus_is_baghdad_burning/