What follows below is what many of you already know - that we invaded Iraq to gain control over their oil reserves. The reason Russia, France, Germany, and China opposed the invasion of Iraq was because they all had contracts with Saddam to develop the oil fields once economic sanctions were lifted.

Cheney's recent visit to Baghdad comes really as no surprise. The Iraq Parliamnet has yet to pass the Hyrdocarbon Law which would include produciton sharing agreements giving 80% of Iraq's oil revenues to U.S. and U.K. Oil companies: Chevron, Exxon, BP, and Shell. To the victors go the spoils of war.

But Iraqis are not too keen on sharing their oil revenue. Indeed, the total profits from all of Iraq's oil is enough to make each Iraqi a millionaire. Iraqis oppose the Hyrdocarbon Law, especially those working with the oil ministry that have an incling as to what exactly is going on.

What is emerging is an Iraq Parliament propped up and protected by the U.S. Military for the sole purpsoe to pass this Hyrdrocarbon Law. Well the Iraq Parliament hasn't done it and doesn't want to. In fact they plan to vacation for nearly the entire summer without passing the law.

This made Cheney very nervous. Support for the occupation of Iraq in the U.S. is plummetting. If we were to draw down U.S. Troops before the production sharing agreements were in place, this would be a serious blow to the Bush Cheney Team.

So below you will find all the in depth information you need. If you don't have the time to peruse all the documents, you can watch the Jim Hightower cartoon below which summarizes quite nicely the planned theft of Iraq's Oil by U.S. and U.K. oil companies.

Whose oil is it, anyway?

By Antonia Juhasz

Today more than three-quarters of the world's oil is owned and controlled by governments. It wasn't always this way.

Until about 35 years ago, the world's oil was largely in the hands of seven corporations based in the United States and Europe. Those seven have since merged into four: ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell and BP.

They are among the world's largest and most powerful financial empires. But ever since they lost their exclusive control of the oil to the governments, the companies have been trying to get it back.

Iraq's oil reserves — thought to be the second largest in the world — have always been high on the corporate wish list.

A new oil law set to go before the Iraqi Parliament this month would — if passed — go a long way toward helping the oil companies achieve their goal. The law would take the majority of Iraq's oil out of the exclusive hands of the Iraqi government and open it to international oil companies for a generation or more.

Continued Here

George Bush’s Land Mine: If the Iraqi People Get Revenue Sharing, They Lose Their Oil to Exxon

by Richard Behan

The supplemental appropriation package requires the Iraqi government to meet a series of “benchmarks” President Bush established in his speech to the nation on January 10 (in which he made his case for the “surge”). Most of Mr. Bush’s benchmarks are designed to blame the victim, forcing the Iraqis to solve the problems George Bush himself created.

One of the President’s benchmarks, however, stands apart. This is how the President described it: “To give every Iraqi citizen a stake in the country’s economy, Iraq will pass legislation to share oil revenues among all Iraqis.” A seemingly decent, even noble concession. That’s all Mr. Bush said about that benchmark, but his brevity was gravely misleading, and it had to be intentional.

The Iraqi Parliament has before it today, in fact, a bill called the hydrocarbon law, and it does call for revenue sharing among Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds. For President Bush, this is a must-have law, and it is the only “benchmark” that truly matters to his Administration.

Yes, revenue sharing is there-essentially in fine print, essentially trivial. The bill is long and complex, it has been years in the making, and its primary purpose is transformational in scope: a radical and wholesale reconstruction-virtual privatization-of the currently nationalized Iraqi oil industry.

If passed, the law will make available to Exxon/Mobil, Chevron/Texaco, BP/Amoco, and Royal Dutch/Shell about 4/5’s of the stupendous petroleum reserves in Iraq. That is the wretched goal of the Bush Administration, and in his speech setting the revenue-sharing “benchmark” Mr. Bush consciously avoided any hint of it.

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Planning for the two wars was underway almost immediately upon the Bush Administration taking office–at least six months before September 11, 2001. The wars had nothing to do with terrorism. Terrorism was initially rejected by the new Administration as unworthy of national concern and public policy, but 9/11 gave them a conveniently timed and spectacular alibi to undertake the wars. Quickly inventing a catchy “global war on terror” theme, the Administration disguised the true nature of the wars very cleverly, and with enduring success.

The “global war on terror” is bogus. The prime terrorist in Afghanistan and the architect of 9/11, Osama bin Laden, was never apprehended, and the President’s subsequent indifference is a matter of record. And Iraq harbored no terrorists at all. But both countries were invaded, both countries suffer military occupation today, both are dotted with permanent U.S. military bases protecting the hydrocarbon assets, and both have been provided with puppet governments.

And a billion dollar embassy in Baghdad is under construction now. It will be the largest U.S. embassy in the world by a factor of ten. (To see it, go to http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=20070124&articleId=4579 .) It consists of 21 buildings on 104 acres, six times larger than the United Nations compound in New York city, larger than Vatican City. It will house a delegation of more than five thousand people. It will have its own water, electric, and sewage systems, and it is surrounded by a fortress wall of concrete fifteen feet thick. For an Administration committed to fighting terrorism with armies and bombs, that’s far more anti-terror diplomacy than a tiny country needs. There must be another purpose for it.

In the first two months of the Bush Administration two significant events took place that preordained the Iraqi war. Vice President Cheney’s Energy Task Force was created, composed of federal officials and oil industry people. By March of 2001, half a year before 9/11, the Task Force was poring secretly over maps of the Iraqi oil fields, pipe lines, and tanker terminals. It studied a listing of foreign oil company “suitors” for exploration and development contracts, to be executed with Saddam Hussein’s oil ministry. There was not a single American or British oil company included, and to Mr. Cheney and his cohorts that was intolerable. The final report of the Task Force was candid: “… Middle East oil producers will remain central to world security. The Gulf will be a primary focus of U.S. international energy policy.” The detailed meaning of “focus” was left blank.

Much More Here

From Afghanistan to Iraq: Connecting the Dots with Oil

By Richard W. Behan, AlterNet.

In the Caspian Basin and beneath the deserts of Iraq, as many as 783 billion barrels of oil are waiting to be pumped. Anyone controlling that much oil stands a good chance of breaking OPEC's stranglehold overnight, and any nation seeking to dominate the world would have to go after it.

The long-held suspicions about George Bush's wars are well-placed. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were not prompted by the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington. They were not waged to spread democracy in the Middle East or enhance security at home. They were conceived and planned in secret long before September 11, 2001 and they were undertaken to control petroleum resources.

The "global war on terror" began as a fraud and a smokescreen and remains so today, a product of the Bush Administration's deliberate and successful distortion of public perception. The fragmented accounts in the mainstream media reflect this warping of reality, but another more accurate version of recent history is available in contemporary books and the vast information pool of the Internet. When told start to finish, the story becomes clear, the dots easier to connect.

Both appalling and masterful, the lies that led us into war and keep us there today show the people of the Bush Administration to be devious, dangerous and far from stupid.
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The Project for a New American Century, a D.C.-based political think tank funded by archconservative philanthropies and founded in 1997, is the source of the Bush Administration's imperialistic urge for the U.S. to dominate the world. Our nation should seek to achieve a "...benevolent global hegemony," according to William Kristol, PNAC's chairman. The group advocates the novel and startling concept of "pre-emptive war" as a means of doing so.
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During his second week in office, President Bush convened the first meeting of his National Security Council. It was a triumph for the PNAC. In just one hour-long meeting, the new Bush Administration turned upside down the long-standing focus of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Over Secretary of State Colin Powell's objections, the goal of reconciling the Israel-Palestine conflict was abandoned, and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein was set as the new priority. Ron Suskind's book, The Price of Loyalty, describes the meeting in detail.

The Energy Task Force wasted no time, either. Within three weeks of its creation, the group was poring over maps of the Iraqi oilfields, pipelines, tanker terminals, and oil exploration blocks. It studied an inventory of "Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield Contracts" -- dozens of oil companies from 30 different countries, in various stages of negotiations for exploring and developing Iraqi crude.

Not a single U.S. oil company was among the "suitors," and that was intolerable, given a foreign policy bent on global hegemony. The National Energy Policy document, released May 17, 2001 concluded this: "By any estimation, Middle East oil producers will remain central to world security. The Gulf will be a primary focus of U.S. international energy policy."
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Capture would take the form of investment, and the vehicle for doing so would be the "production sharing agreement."

Under production sharing agreements, or PSAs, oil companies are granted ownership of a "share" of the oil produced, in exchange for investing in development costs, and the contracts are binding for up to 30 years. What would happen, though, if the companies' investments were only minimal, but their shares of the production were obscenely, disproportionately large?

This is hardwired. According to a UK Platform article titled "Crude Designs," production sharing agreements have now been drafted in Baghdad covering 75 percent of the undeveloped Iraqi fields, and the oil companies, waiting to sign the contracts, will earn as much 162 percent on their investments. And the "foreign suitors" are not quite so foreign now: The players on the inside tracks are Exxon-Mobil, Chevron, Conoco-Phillips, BP-Amoco and Royal Dutch-Shell.

There is much more in this article

The Complicity of Congress in a Criminal War

by Richard W. Behan
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The broad contours of oilfield privatization and the use of production sharing agreements (PSA’s ) were shaped five years ago in George Bush’s State Department, part of a policy-development project called “The Future of Iraq.” This was a year before the invasion. Afterward, Paul Bremer’s Coalition Provisional Authority embedded privatization and PSA’s into the emerging structures of Iraqi governance, aided by the intense lobbying in Baghdad by the four oil companies. The hydrocarbon law, written originally in English, was eventually translated into Arabic and formally confirmed by Prime Minister Maliki’s cabinet early in 2007. It awaits passage now by the Iraqi Parliament, few members of which know much of its content and virtually none of whom were involved in writing it.

President Bush, then, is commanding the Iraqi Parliament to enact a law that was drafted first in President Bush’s State Department. It requires Iraq to engineer the foreign capture of its own oil.

And Congress has agreed to this. That is complicity.

Was Congress ignorant of the consequences of the deceitful “benchmark?” No. Representative Dennis Kucinich offered an amendment to eliminate it from H.R. 1591. In a letter to his Democratic colleagues, Mr. Kucinich said, “By…requiring the enactment of this law by the Iraqi government, Democrats will be instrumental in privatizing Iraqi oil.”

And so they were. With Democratic majorities in both the House and Senate, the benchmark survived—essentially a prescription for theft.

The theft, however, is unlikely to take place. The war is at the point of stasis; privatizing the oil is in peril, because passage of the hydrocarbon law is increasingly remote. The law is a metaphor for the heinous sectarian strife which George Bush’s invasion unleashed, and is now shattering the country and its culture. If the Iraqi minorities cannot agree to stop killing each other, they are unlikely to agree on the disposition of their country’s crude oil. But the recognition of Bush’s thievery is growing in Iraq every day, and if the minorities can agree on anything at all, they will see their common advantage in assuring the hydrocarbon law is stillborn. There is talk of that now.

For Congress to abet an illegal war that cannot succeed is not only criminal, but bewildering in the extreme. There is no visible rationale for remaining in Iraq.

Much More Here

Iraq: the Struggle for Oil

By James A. Paul

Iraq possesses the world’s second largest proven oil reserves, currently estimated at 112.5 billion barrels, about 11% of the world total and its gas fields are immense as well. Many experts believe that Iraq has additional undiscovered oil reserves, which might raise the total well beyond 250 billion barrels when serious prospecting resumes, putting Iraq closer to Saudi Arabia and far above all other oil producing countries. Iraq’s oil is of high quality and it is very inexpensive to produce, making it one of the world’s most profitable oil sources. Oil companies hope to gain production rights over these rich fields of Iraqi oil, worth hundreds of billions of dollars. In the view of an industry source it is “a boom waiting to happen.”(1) As rising world demand depletes reserves in most world regions over the next 10-15 years, Iraq’s oil will gain increasing importance in global energy supplies. According to the industry expert: “There is not an oil company in the world that doesn’t have its eye on Iraq.”(2) Geopolitical rivalry among major nations throughout the past century has often turned on control of such key oil resources.(3)

Five companies dominate the world oil industry, two US-based, two primarily UK-based, and one primarily based in France.(4) US-based Exxon Mobil looms largest among the world’s oil companies and by some yardsticks measures as the world’s biggest company.(5) The United States consequently ranks first in the corporate oil sector, with the UK second and France trailing as a distant third. Considering that the US and the UK act almost alone as sanctions enforcers (and as advocates of war against Iraq), and that they are the headquarters of the world’s four largest oil companies, we cannot ignore the possible relationship of their policy with this powerful corporate interest.

US and UK companies long held a three-quarter share in Iraq’s oil production, but they lost their position with the 1972 nationalization of the Iraq Petroleum Company.(6) The nationalization, following ten years of increasingly rancorous relations between the companies and the government, rocked the international oil industry, as Iraq sought to gain greater control of its oil resources. After the nationalization, Iraq turned to French companies and the Russian (Soviet) government for funds and partnerships.(7) Today, the US and UK companies are very keen to regain their former position, which they see as critical to their future leading role in the world oil industry. The US and the UK governments also see control over Iraqi and Gulf oil as essential to their broader military, geo-strategic and economic interests. At the same time, though, other states and oil companies hope to gain a large or even dominant position in Iraq. As de-nationalization sweeps through the oil sector, international companies see Iraq as an extremely attractive potential field of expansion. France and Russia, the longstanding insiders, pose the biggest challenge to future Anglo-American domination, but serious competitors from China, Germany and Japan also play in the Iraq sweepstakes.(8)

During the 1990s, Russia’s Lukoil, China National Petroleum Corporation and France’s TotalFinaElf held contract talks with the government of Iraq over plans to develop Iraqi fields as soon as sanctions are lifted. Lukoil reached an agreement in 1997 to develop Iraq’s West Qurna field, while China National signed an agreement for the North Rumailah field in the same year (China’s oil import needs from the Persian Gulf will grow from 0.5 million barrels per day in 1997 to 5.5 million barrels per day in 2020, making China one of the region’s most important customers).(9) France’s Total at the same time held talks for future development of the fabulous Majnun field.

US and UK companies have been very concerned that their rivals might gain a major long-term advantage in the global oil business. “Iraq possesses huge reserves of oil and gas – reserves I’d love Chevron to have access to,” enthused Chevron CEO Kenneth T. Derr in a 1998 speech at the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco, in which he pronounced his strong support for sanctions.(10) Sanctions have kept the rivals at bay, a clear advantage. US-UK companies hope that the regime will eventually collapse, giving them a strong edge over their competitors with a post-Saddam government. As the embargo weakened and Saddam held onto power, however, stakes in the rivalry rose, for US-UK companies worried that they might eventually be shouldered aside. Direct military intervention by the US-UK, then, offers a tempting but dangerous gamble that might put Exxon, Shell, BP and Chevron in immediate control of the Iraqi oil boom, but at the risk of backlash from a regional political explosion.

In testimony to Congress in 1999, General Anthony C.Zinni, commander in chief of the US Central Command, testified that the Gulf Region, with its huge oil reserves, is a “vital interest” of “long standing” for the United States and that the US “must have free access to the region’s resources.”(11) “Free access,” it seems, means both military and economic control of these resources. This has been a major goal of US strategic doctrine ever since the end of World War II. Prior to 1971, Britain (the former colonial power) policed the region and its oil riches. Since then, the United States has deployed ever-larger military forces to assure “free access” through overwhelming armed might.(12)

A looming US war against Iraq is only comprehensible in this light. For all the talk about terrorism, weapons of mass destruction and human rights violations by Saddam Hussein, these are not the core issues driving US policy. Rather, it is “free access” to Iraqi oil and the ultimate control over that oil by US and UK companies that raises the stakes high enough to set US forces on the move and risk the stakes of global empire.

Continued Here - Please See The Link for All The References