Repeat after me... It was never about the oil. Yeah, Right, Whatever.

Remember we didn't go into this war for oil. Just because Bush, Cheney and half of the president's staff are oilmen had nothing to do with going to war. You know that American troops protected the Oil Ministry from chaos and looting, while the seat of government, priceless antiquties, and vast ammo dumps were left to fend for themselves. The reason was to maintain order, don't 'cha know? Why, we went to war to destroy those WMDs, er, uh, Saddam had nuclear weapons, er, ah, to spread democracy.

Remember we didn't go into this war for oil...

Simbaud at King of Zembla

On Monday, Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's cabinet in Baghdad approved the draft of the new Iraqi oil law. The government regards it as "a major national project". The key point of the law is that Iraq's immense oil wealth (115 billion barrels of proven reserves, third in the world after Saudi Arabia and Iran) will be under the iron rule of a fuzzy "Federal Oil and Gas Council" boasting "a panel of oil experts from inside and outside Iraq". That is, nothing less than predominantly US Big Oil executives.

[...]The law was in essence drafted, behind locked doors, by a US consulting firm hired by the Bush administration and then carefully retouched by Big Oil, the International Monetary Fund, former US deputy defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz' World Bank, and the United States Agency for International Development. It's virtually a US law (its original language is English, not Arabic) . . . .

Big Oil is obviously ecstatic - not only ExxonMobil, but also ConocoPhillips, Chevron, BP and Shell (which have collected invaluable info on two of Iraq's biggest oilfields), TotalFinaElf, Lukoil from Russia and the Chinese majors. Iraq has as many as 70 undeveloped fields - "small" ones hold a minimum of a billion barrels. As desert western Iraq has not even been exploited, reserves may reach 300 billion barrels - way more than Saudi Arabia. Gargantuan profits under the PSA arrangement are in a class by themselves. Iraqi oil costs only US$1 a barrel to extract. With a barrel worth $60 and up, happy days are here again.

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