It is uncertain how long the United States would operate Iraq's oil industry, the country's main source of revenue. U.S. officials say they want to turn over Iraqi ministries to Iraqis as quickly as possible.
"The whole purpose is to transition all these ministries to the Iraqi Interim Authority as quickly as possible. The oil ministry is one of them," said one official.
The U.N. oil-for-food program is continuing under a new U.N. resolution, using oil revenues to pay for humanitarian assistance for the Iraqi people.
The Defense Department is considering putting in place an advisory board of former U.S. oil industry executives to help run Iraq's oil industry, the head of which is likely to be Philip Carroll, a former chief executive of Shell Oil Co., sources said.
Vice President Dick Cheney said on Wednesday that Iraq's oil production could rise as much as 50 percent from 2002 levels by the end of the year if the country is given outside help in restoring its fields' capacity to pump crude.
Last year, Iraq was producing about 2 million barrels of oil per day, down from a high of about 3 million barrels in 1988, according to the U.S. Energy Department.
Even though the country will need outside help, Cheney said Iraqis will have to "make decisions on how much they want to reinvest" in their oil sector.
The country controls more than 112 billion barrels of oil, second only to Saudi Arabia in proven reserves.
Sketching out a postwar scenario now that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein appears to have lost power, Cheney, a former oil company executive, spoke of "an organization to oversee the functioning of their oil ministry."
That body, he said, "will be composed primarily of Iraqis. It may have international advisers from outside."
Does the United States want Iraq to remain in OPEC ?
"It will be up to their government to decide. Our position is we have no position. It's up to the Iraqi people," said one U.S. official.
-Does this just seem WRONG to anyone else?
It reminds me of something I learned in my American Foreign policy class about America, the CIA and United Fruit. Go ahead, enter "American Foreign Policy, United Fruit" in the Yahoo! search engine and be enlightened. If you're too lazy, I've provided a link here that you can visit that will give you a rough run down of how America works. It pisses me off.
http://www.guerrillanews.com/human_rights/doc358.html
Oh, and by the way, here's an interesting article on Dick Cheney that was run in the Chicago Tribune a while back:
Published on Thursday, August 10, 2000 in the Chicago Tribune
Cheney's Black Gold: Oil Interests May Drive US Foreign Policy by Marjorie Cohn
What do the Persian Gulf, the Caspian Sea and the Balkans have in common? U.S. domination in these areas serves the interests of corporate multimillionaires such as Dick Cheney. As George Bush's secretary of defense, Cheney was chief prosecutor of Operation Desert Storm in 1991. Humanitarian rhetoric notwithstanding, the bombing of Iraq--which continues to this day--was primarily aimed at keeping the Persian Gulf safe for U.S. oil interests. Shortly after Desert Storm, the Associated Press reported Cheney's desire to broaden the United States' military role in the region to hedge future threats to gulf oil resources.
Cheney is CEO of Dallas-based Halliburton Co., the biggest oil-services company in the world. Because of the instability in the Persian Gulf, Cheney and his fellow oilmen have zeroed in on the world's other major source of oil--the Caspian Sea. Its rich oil and gas resources are estimated at $4 trillion by U.S. News and World Report. The Washington-based American Petroleum Institute, voice of the major U.S. oil companies, called the Caspian region, "the area of greatest resource potential outside of the Middle East." Cheney told a gaggle of oil industry executives in 1998, "I can't think of a time when we've had a region emerge as suddenly to become as strategically significant as the Caspian."
But Caspian oil presents formidable obstacles. Landlocked between Russia, Iran and a group of former Soviet republics, the Caspian's "black gold" raises a transportation dilemma. Russia wants Caspian oil to run through its territory to the Black Sea. The United States, however, favors pipelines through its ally, Turkey.
Although the cheapest route would traverse Iran to the Persian Gulf, U.S. sanctions against Iran block this alternative. Cheney has lobbied long and hard, as recently as June, for the lifting of those sanctions, to lubricate the Iran-Caspian connection. This is consistent with his position, described in a 1997 article in The Oil and Gas Journal, that oil and gas companies must do business in countries with policies unpalatable to the U.S.
Cheney also favors the repeal of section 907 of the 1992 Freedom Support Act, which severely restricts U.S. aid to Azerbaijan because of its ethnic cleansing of the Armenians in Nagorno Karabakh, a mountainous enclave in Azerbaijan. Why would Cheney choose to ignore Azerbaijan's human-rights violations? Because Azerbaijan, key to the richest Caspian oil deposits, is, according to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, "in fact, the focal point of the next round in the Great Game of Nations, a dangerous, hot-headed place with a Klondike of wealth beneath it. It is Bosnia with oil."
Cheney's oily fingerprints are all over the Balkans as well. Last year, Halliburton's Brown & Root Division was awarded a $180 million a year contract to supply U.S. forces in the Balkans. Cheney also sits on the board of directors of Lockheed Martin, the world's largest defense contractor. Replacing munitions used in the Balkans could result in $1 billion in new contracts.
War is big business and Dick Cheney is right in the middle of it.
Meanwhile, our energy and gasoline prices continue to soar in many parts of the United States. OPEC controls the oil production in the Persian Gulf. Cheney, worried about a falloff in investment, spoke in favor of OPEC cutting oil production so oil and gasoline prices could rise.
Cheney is ineluctably invested in keeping the world safe for his investments.
Although he stepped down as CEO of Halliburton, he still owns shares of stock in the conglomerate and his financial interests in the Persian Gulf, the Caspian region and the Balkans will invariably continue. Chosen by George W. Bush to bring foreign-policy expertise to the GOP presidential ticket, we can expect a Republic administration to increase U.S. intervention in regions when it suits Dick Cheney's oil and other corporate concerns.
Marjorie Cohn, a professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law in San Diego. She is editor of Guild Practitioner and sits on the National Executive Committee of the National Lawyers Guild. She is also on the Roster of Experts of the Institute for Public Accuracy, a nationwide consortium of policy researchers.
-This is who is running our foreign policy. Gee, I can see why we HAD to go to war with Iraq. Again. Cost of living must have gone up. I know that gas and heating prices certainly have.
