Cartoon link here, below reporting here.
British and US companies win Iraq oil contracts
Matthew Weaver - guardian.co.uk - Monday June 30, 2008
The Iraqi government is to award a series of key oil contracts to British and US companies later today, fuelling criticism that the Iraq war was largely about oil.
The successful companies are expected to include Shell, BP, Exxon Mobil, Chevron and Total.
Non-Western companies, notably those in Russia, are expected to lose out.
The technical support contracts will give the companies access to Iraq's vast untapped oil fields. Oil production in Iraq is at its highest level since the invasion in 2003. The Iraqi government wants to increase production by 20%, as the country has an estimated 115bn barrels of crude reserves.
The US state department was involved in drawing up the contracts, the New York Times reported today.
It provided template contracts and suggestions on drafting but were not involved in the decisions, US officials said.
Democratic senators last week lobbied that the awarding of the contracts should be delayed until after the Iraqi parliament passes laws on the distribution of oil revenues.
Frederick Barton, senior adviser at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, told the paper: "We pretend it [oil] is not a centerpiece of our motivation, yet we keep confirming that it is."
Last year Alan Greenspan, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve said: "Everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil."
It sure looks like the Coalition of the Willing is willing to divide spoils. I have not seen any French or German petroleum interests having a plate at the table. Given relative scale of involvement, the Poles probably got one oil well, as willing to accept it after being willing earlier.
You'd have to think that Schlumberger is established and capable of helping this former Ottoman colonial region that transited to British control as part of the post World War I breakup of the Ottoman Empire, gaining at that point the ethnically mixed national boundaries holding at present, with the British, as in India, siding with a minority population given control and in need of British troop bolstering to hold control.
Perhaps Schlumberger's skills simply were at some point surpassed by Halliburton, with that as the sole determinant of relative roles in things. Perhaps not. It would not be so crass a thing as exclusion for not having bought a ticket, would it?
The prominent role, since abandoned, of the British in the Coalition of the Willing has its historical context, see, e.g., Wikipedia, here and here.
"In 1927, huge oil fields were discovered near Kirkuk and brought economic improvement," is one of the more major sentences in those sources, and they also give some history on the independence of Kuwait from the remainder of the Arab state, due mainly to British will. Without the oil, we do not see US worry over political developments in, say Chad, which has equal amounts of sand to offer as Iraq.