- Sep 27, 2005
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Who will get Iraq?s oil? One of the Bush administration?s ?benchmarks? for the Iraqi government is the passage of a law to distribute oil revenues. The draft law that the US has written for the Iraqi congress would cede nearly all the oil to Western companies. The Iraq National Oil Company would retain control of 17 of Iraq?s 80 existing oilfields, leaving the rest ? including all yet to be discovered oil ? under foreign corporate control for 30 years. ?The foreign companies would not have to invest their earnings in the Iraqi economy,? the analyst Antonia Juhasz wrote in the New York Times in March, after the draft law was leaked. ?They could even ride out Iraq?s current ?instability? by signing contracts now, while the Iraqi government is at its weakest, and then wait at least two years before even setting foot in the country.? As negotiations over the oil law stalled in September, the provincial government in Kurdistan simply signed a separate deal with the Dallas-based Hunt Oil Company, headed by a close political ally of President Bush.
How will the US maintain hegemony over Iraqi oil? By establishing permanent military bases in Iraq. Five self-sufficient ?super-bases? are in various stages of completion. All are well away from the urban areas where most casualties have occurred. There has been precious little reporting on these bases in the American press, whose dwindling corps of correspondents in Iraq cannot move around freely because of the dangerous conditions. (It takes a brave reporter to leave the Green Zone without a military escort.) In February last year, the Washington Post reporter Thomas Ricks described one such facility, the Balad Air Base, forty miles north of Baghdad. A piece of (well-fortified) American suburbia in the middle of the Iraqi desert, Balad has fast-food joints, a miniature golf course, a football field, a cinema and distinct neighbourhoods ? among them, ?KBR-land?, named after the Halliburton subsidiary that has done most of the construction work at the base. Although few of the 20,000 American troops stationed there have ever had any contact with an Iraqi, the runway at the base is one of the world?s busiest. ?We are behind only Heathrow right now,? an air force commander told Ricks.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article18598.htm
How will the US maintain hegemony over Iraqi oil? By establishing permanent military bases in Iraq. Five self-sufficient ?super-bases? are in various stages of completion. All are well away from the urban areas where most casualties have occurred. There has been precious little reporting on these bases in the American press, whose dwindling corps of correspondents in Iraq cannot move around freely because of the dangerous conditions. (It takes a brave reporter to leave the Green Zone without a military escort.) In February last year, the Washington Post reporter Thomas Ricks described one such facility, the Balad Air Base, forty miles north of Baghdad. A piece of (well-fortified) American suburbia in the middle of the Iraqi desert, Balad has fast-food joints, a miniature golf course, a football field, a cinema and distinct neighbourhoods ? among them, ?KBR-land?, named after the Halliburton subsidiary that has done most of the construction work at the base. Although few of the 20,000 American troops stationed there have ever had any contact with an Iraqi, the runway at the base is one of the world?s busiest. ?We are behind only Heathrow right now,? an air force commander told Ricks.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article18598.htm
