As someone said last week on Democracy Now, if the main product of Iraq was asparagus we would never have invaded. Although this bypasses the other two key reasons for the invasion (the protection of Israel and getting Bush elected in 2004), it is substantially correct. Here's what Antonia Juhasz says:
"For more than four years, the Bush administration and its oil company cohorts have worked toward the passage of a new oil law for Iraq that would turn its nationalized oil system over to private foreign corporate control. On Thursday January 18, this dream came one step closer to reality when an Iraqi negotiating committee of "national and regional leaders" approved a new hydrocarbon law. The committee chair, Deputy Prime Minister Barham Salih, told Reuters that the draft will go to the Iraqi cabinet next week and, if approved, to the parliament immediately thereafter."
(Juhasz who is a visiting scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies, is also the author of The Bush Agenda: Invading the World, One Economy at a Time [HarperCollins, 2006]. She is also contributing author, with John Perkins and others, to A Game as Old as Empire [Berrett-Koehler, February 2007]).
What continues to surprise me - call me naive - is how little coverage this potential oil deal has gotten from the corporate-owned media.
Remember the infamous Cheney Energy Task Force meetings with the oil barons, (WP; Project Censored) to set the Bush energy agenda. Well here's the pay-off. The U.S./British oil companies will get richer. And the war will take the lives of more young U.S. men and women, not to mention countless Iraqi lives.
One of the questions that has been troubling me of late is how long will it be before Cheney goes back to Halliburton? and how many other Bush administration boys will end up in cushy energy jobs?
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