Robbing the Gas Station

It's the oil, stupid.

In all of the chaos and upheaval of the Iraq war, in spite of all of the mistakes and blunders of the Bush Administration and the US military, did America ever, even for a nano-second, take our eyes off of the prize? I remember briefly, way back in the good old days of the war, (before Abu Ghraib, before the leveling of Fallujah, back when Saddam Hussein was still alive in his spider hole) when there was an attempt made to cash in on the spoils of the conflict. J. Paul Bremmer, just weeks after the invasion of Iraq attempted to sell off all of the assets of the newly liberated country. His plan to privatize Iraq was stalled on a few legal sticking points, but he quickly came up with a clever plan to put an interim government in place who would make it all legal, and put an Iraqi face on the theft of the century.

The prize was not to be had. Grand Ayatollah Ali al Sistani, (remember him?) tried to prevent the theft of Iraq's national resources, calling for direct elections and for the constitution to be written after those elections, not before. And Sistani prevailed, the elections were held, those purple fingers waved at us from our TV sets, eventually a constitution was passed, and now we are here in the middle of a war ravaged country, with one hand on the trigger, and another held out waiting for the Iraqis to open the cash register. While the citizens of Iraq are focused on killing each other, there is a bill silently making it's way to the Iraqi lawmakers that will sell off the future to oil giants like Exxon Mobile, and BP.

Did you read the Independant on Sunday?

Now, unnoticed by most amid the furor over civil war in Iraq and the hanging of Saddam Hussein, the new oil law has quietly been going through several drafts, and is now on the point of being presented to the cabinet and then the parliament in Baghdad. Its provisions are a radical departure from the norm for developing countries: under a system known as "production-sharing agreements", or PSAs, oil majors such as BP and Shell in Britain, and Exxon and Chevron in the US, would be able to sign deals of up to 30 years to extract Iraq's oil.
PSAs allow a country to retain legal ownership of its oil, but gives a share of profits to the international companies that invest in infrastructure and operation of the wells, pipelines and refineries. Their introduction would be a first for a major Middle Eastern oil producer. Saudi Arabia and Iran, the world's number one and two oil exporters, both tightly control their industries through state-owned companies with no appreciable foreign collaboration, as do most members of the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries, Opec

If you have any doubts about what this new troop "surge" is all about, get out some scratch paper, and figure out the numbers for yourself. What is truly at stake here is not democracy, but cheap oil, and if you are not cynical enough to believe it, get out your calculator and try to figure out why we are sending in more troops just now. If the situation in Iraq is so dire that even the military is saying that additional troops will not improve the military situation, then why send them in at all? Maybe just to protect the lawmakers in the Green Zone long enough to get the law passed, so that we can begin collecting the spoils of this war? Your guess is as good as mine. But any reason to send more American children to inflict more harm on these people is not good enough.

What is difficult to accept as an American, and one who still believes in those antiquated moral values such as "Thou Shall Not Steal", and "If Thou Decides To Steal, Thou Shall Not Kill To Accomplish It", "And Thou Must Never Steal From Those Who Have Nothing", is that we have committed a cold-blooded and calculated murder for monetary gain. I can understand, but never excuse, a crime committed in the heat of anger, or a killing done because of religious ideology, but when a rich guy who has plenty of food on his table right now, kills you because he might need more next year, it suggests of the worst sort of immorality. And every American shares the blame for this blood stain on our collective soul, there are not enough Mea Culpa's, even if we were to repent for a century.

Stop the escalation, I already have enough of my own sins to repent for, I don't need to spend the next ten years repenting for the illegal profits of BP and Exxon Mobile.

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