Just before Saddam nationalized it, the Western oil companies had discovered new fields which Saddam hasn't developed. The oil companies believe these fields could yield even more oil than Saudi Arabia, and it apparently has low lifting costs because it's near the surface. They believe Iraq could be producing 8 million barrels a day within 4 years, which will pay for the country to be rebuilt.
So long as Iraq benefits, does it matter who owns the country's oil company? Perhaps you're arguing that privatization is always a bad thing, but I would say experience doesn't bear that out, and that privatized companies tend to perform better than nationalized ones.
The political gain for the West would be that Saudi Arabia and OPEC would be weakened, as Iraq would probably not agree to limit production because it will need all the money it can get, and therefore the price of oil will fall. Not a good thing for the environment but that's a different argument - governments can still tax up to whatever price they choose to set for environmental reasons.
I don't agree that there's real poverty in the UK - there's social alienation in the sense that many people don't have access to things that other people take for granted, but it's relative, whereas the poverty in Iraq is absolute. I take your point that you don't need a dictator to find poverty, but the inequality in Iraq is different in kind from the inequality in the countries you mentioned - where children die for the want of clean water while Saddam Hussein builds dozens of new palaces, one of them the size of central London.
Sarah
At 11:48 PM +0100 02/18/2003, mike pritchard wrote:
So the oil either belongs to the Iraqi people or to Saddam and his family, right? Whichever way you look at it, it doesn't belong to anyone outside that territory, and certainly not to the US/West. That's what I mean(t). There are huge amounts of poverty in practically all countries, the UK, Spain, the USA, Argentina to name only a few western examples . . .
