Raiding Iraq's Piggy Bank (US locks up control of Iraqi oil money)

http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2004/05/17/oil/index.html

Raiding Iraq's piggy bank
If the Bush administration is truly committed to the nation's sovereignty, it should let Iraqis retake control of their own oil revenues.
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By Andrew Cockburn (Salon)

May 17, 2004  |  As the occupation of Iraq dissolves further into bloody chaos, the colonial overseers in Baghdad are keeping their eyes fixed on what is really important: Iraq's money and how to keep it. Whatever apology for a "sovereign" Iraqi government is permitted to take office after June 30 -- and U.N. envoy Lakhdar Brahimi admits in private that he "has to do" whatever the Americans tell him to do -- the United States is making sure that the Iraqis do not get their hands on their country's oil revenues.

We are talking about big money here: Iraq's oil exports are slated to top $16 billion this year alone. U.N. Security Resolution 1483, rammed through by the United States a year ago, gives total control of the money from oil sales -- currently the only source of revenue in Iraq -- to the occupying power, i.e., the United States. The actual repository for the money is an entity called the Development Fund for Iraq, which in effect functions as a private piggy bank for Paul Bremer's Coalition Provisional Authority. The DFI is directed by a Program Review Board of 11 members, just one of whom is Iraqi.

In case anyone should be moved to challenge this massive looting exercise in the courts, President Bush followed up the May 2003 resolution with Executive Order 13303, which forbids any legal challenge to the development fund or any actions by the United States affecting Iraq's oil industry. Since then, the Iraqi oil ministry, famously secured by the U.S. military during post-invasion riots and looting, has been kept under the close supervision of a senior U.S. advisor, former ExxonMobil executive Gary Vogler.

Now, whatever President Bush or his officials may spout in public about the transfer of power being a "central commitment," there is absolutely no intention in Washington of changing the arrangement concerning oil revenues. Queried on this crucial topic, the CPA has stated that it will continue to control the revenues beyond June 30 "until such time as an internationally recognized, representative government of Iraq is properly constituted." Whatever entity is unveiled for June 30, it apparently will not fit these requirements, so the hand-over date is, essentially, meaningless.

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I wrote something here along the same line.