Is It Game Over for U.S. Control of Iraqi Oil?
By Jack Miles, Tomdispatch.com. Posted October 25, 2007.
The oil game in Iraq may be almost up as the Iraqi government is
trying to oust the U.S.
The oil game in Iraq may be almost up. On September 29th, like a
landlord serving notice, the government of Iraq announced that the
next annual renewal of the United Nations Security Council mandate for
a multinational force in Iraq -- the only legal basis for a
continuation of the American occupation -- will be the last. That was,
it seems, the first shoe to fall. The second may be an announcement
terminating the little-noticed, but crucial companion Security Council
mandate governing the disposition of Iraq's oil revenues.
By December 31, 2008, according to Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari,
the government of Iraq intends to have replaced the existing mandate
for a multinational security force with a conventional bilateral
security agreement with the United States, an agreement of the sort
that Wa****ngton has with Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and several other
countries in the Middle East. The Security Council has always paired
the annual renewal of its mandate for the multinational force with the
renewal of a second mandate for the management of Iraqi oil revenues.
This happens through the "Development Fund for Iraq," a kind of escrow
account set up by the occupying powers after the overthrow of the
Saddam Hussein regime and recognized in 2003 by U.N. Security Council
Resolution 1483. The oil game will be up if and when Iraq announces
that this mandate, too, will be terminated at a date certain in favor
of resource-development agreements that -- like the envisioned
security agreement -- match those of other states in the region.
The game will be up because, as Antonia Juhasz pointed out last March
in a New York Times op-ed, "Whose Oil Is It, Anyway?":
"Iraq's neighbors Iran, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.... have outlawed
foreign control over oil development. They all hire international oil
companies as contractors to provide specific services as needed, for a
limited duration, and without giving the foreign company any direct
interest in the oil produced."
See: http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/66076/
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