Bush’s Other Iraq Invasion
Oil is, of course, at the heart of the agenda. In 2004, U.S.-appointed interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi submitted guidelines to Iraq’s Supreme Council for Oil Policy suggesting that the “Iraqi government disengage from running the oil sector … and that the [Iraq National Oil Company] be partly privatized in the future” and opened to international foreign investment, according to International Oil Daily. (U.S oil imports from Iraq increased by more than 86 percent between 2003 and 2004 alone.)
Plans for a new Iraqi oil law were made public last December at a news conference in Washington hosted by the U.S. government. The U.S.-appointed interim Finance Minister Adel Abdul Mehdi explained that the new law would be “very promising to the American investors and to American enterprise, certainly to oil companies.”
A few weeks later, Mehdi became one of Iraq’s two vice presidents and Allawi was elected to the National Assembly. Iraq’s new oil law is on track for implementation in 2006.
Antonia Juhasz | AlterNet (read more. . .)