Doug Henwood wrote:
Speaking of which, I was listening the other week to Amy Goodman &
Greg Palast pitching off Palast's latest opus during the WBAI
fundraiser. They were reviewing all the standard explanations for the
war - which boiled down to getting Iraq's oil. Palast mentioned that
in his book he reports that Bush deployed a Shell alum to run Iraq's
oil industry who promptly reversed Bremer's intentions to privatize -
he wanted Iraqi oil to remain in state hands. Then they quickly moved
on to more crowd-pleasing stuff.
Does anyone know more about this? Why would a Shell oil guy want to
keep Iraqi oil in state hands? Goodman, of course, never asked Palast
to elaborate, but it seemed like the most interesting detail in their
duet.
=================================
Best I can recall is that the Iraq National Oil Company was exempted from
the
decrees issued by Paul Bremer in 2003 privatizing a series of state-owned
enterprises for two reasons: (1) the Bush administration feared it would
reinforce the widespread perception that the war was indeed a "war for oil",
and (2) the multinationals were not interested in taking out stakes until
security could be assured for their personnel and equipment against the
pipeline sabotage and attacks on foreign contractors which were already a
daily occurence. I think the multinationals also worried any holdings which
they acquired could be subject to legal challenges since the Bremer decrees
were widely believed to be in violation of international law prohibiting an
occupying power from selling or making off with the occupied country's
assets. So the decision to leave the state oil company intact was seen as a
temporary expedient until the country was secured and a new government
sympathetic to Western interests installed. The situation was already
deteriorating, but no one anticipated the level of resistance which would
develop and that a new government would be dominated by the Shias rather
than pro-Western bourgeois politicians like Chalabi and Allawi.
I didn't know Bremer had been overruled, but I imagine it would have had to
come from someone higher up in the administration, rather than an oil
company executive appointed within his sphere of authority, not that I see
this as a burning question.
