Friday, June 20, 2014
Iraqi hydrocarbon prize of U.S. invasion in danger
By Nicola Nasser*
Excluding
“boots on the ground” and leaving combat missions to local and regional
“partners,” President Barak Obama and his administration
say the United States keeps “all options on the table” to respond militarily to
the terrorists’ threat to “American interests” in Iraq, which are now in
“danger.”
Similarly, former UK Prime Minister, Tony Blair, on
TV screens and in print has recently urged western governments to “put aside
the differences of the past and act now” and to intervene militarily in Iraq
Both men refrained from indicating what are exactly the
“American” and “western” interests in Iraq
that need military intervention to defend, but the major prize of their
invasion of Iraq
On June 13 however, Obama hinted to a possible major “disruption” in Iraqi oil output and urged “other
producers in the Gulf” to be “able to pick up the slack.”
The United States has already moved the aircraft
carrier USS George H.W. Bush, escorted by the guided-missile
cruiser USS Philippine Sea and the guided-missile destroyer USS Truxtun, from
the northern Arabian Sea into the Arabian Gulf (Persian according to Iran) “to
protect American lives, citizens and interests in Iraq,” according to Rear
Admiral John Kirby, the Pentagon spokesman, on June 14. Media is reporting that
U.S. intelligence units and
air reconnaissance are already operating in Iraq
The
unfolding collapse of the U.S.
proxy government in Baghdad has cut short a
process of legalizing the
de-nationalization of the hydrocarbon industry in Iraq
Anti-American
armed resistance to the U.S.
proxy ruling regime in Baghdad
De-nationalization and privatization of the Iraqi oil and gas industry
began with the U.S.-led invasion of the country in 2003. Al-Maliki for eight
years could not pass a hydrocarbons law through the parliament. Popular
opposition and a political system based on sectarian distribution of power and
“federal” distribution of oil revenues blocked its adoption. Ruling by
political majority instead by sectarian consensus was al-Maliki’s declared hope
to enact the law.
Al-Maliki’s plans towards this end together with his
political ambitions for a third term were cut short by the fall to armed
opposition on this June 10 of Mosul, the capital of the northern Ninawa
governorate and second only to Baghdad as Iraq’s largest metropolitan area.
Three days on, with the fighting moving on to the
gates of Baghdad , “the most
important priority for Baghdad
The raging war in Iraq U.S. military support to the regime it installed
in Baghdad
Al-Maliki is not now preoccupied even with
maintaining Iraq as OPEC’s No. 2 oil producer, but with maintaining a level of
oil output sufficient to bring in enough revenues to finance a defensive war
that left his capital besieged and his government with southern Iraq only to
rule, may be not for too long.
Even this modest goal is in doubt. Al-Maliki is left with oil exports from the south only, the
disruption of which is highly possible any time now.
Worries that fighting would spread to the southern city
of Basra or Baghdad
Legalizing
the de-nationalization of Iraqi hydrocarbon
industry has thus become more elusive than it has ever been since 2003.
On June 1 forty two years ago the process of the
nationalization of the hydrocarbon industry kicked off in Iraq Iraq
On April 15 last year the CNN, reviewing “The Iraq war, 10 years on,”
reported: “Yes, the Iraq War was a war for oil, and
it was a war with winners: Big Oil.”
“Before
the 2003 invasion, Iraq Iraq
The international rush for the Iraqi “black gold” by trans-national oil
and gas corporations is at its height with no national law or competent central
authority to regulate it.
Nothing changed since except
that the “rush” was accelerating and the de-nationalization process was taking
roots, squandering the bloody sacrifices of the Iraqis over eighty two years to
uproot the foreign hold on their major strategic asset. The ongoing fighting is
threatening to cut this process short.
Tip of iceberg
Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) in Iraq has been awarding hydrocarbon contracts to
foreign firms independently without reference to the central government in Baghdad
Since early 2014, it has been pumping crude to Turkey Turkey
and the KRG announced the signing of a 50-year deal to export Iraqi oil from
Kurdistan via Turkey
Hussein al-Shahristani, Iraq 's
deputy prime minister, threatened legal action against firms that purchased
"smuggled oil" via the Turkish-KRG arrangements; he accused Turkey
The dispute between Baghdad
on the one hand and Turkey
and the KRG on the other is only the surfacing tip of the iceberg of the “gold rush–style” looting of Iraq
One of the main priorities of al-Maliki all along has
been to legalize the de-nationalization and privatization process.
Muttitt, author of Fuel
on the Fire: Oil and Politics in Occupied Iraq, wrote a few
months before al-Maliki assumed his first premiership that American and British governments made sure the
candidates for prime minister knew what their first priority had to be: To pass
a law legalizing the return of the foreign multinationals. This would be the vital biggest prize of the U.S.
Al-Maliki is the right man to secure a
pro-privatization government in Baghdad U.S. occupation “left behind in Iraq
Various drafts of hydrocarbon privatization laws
failed to gain consensus among the proxy sectarian parties to the
U.S.-engineered “political process” and the “federal” entities of Iraq
Al-Maliki’s government endorsed the first draft of
a privatization law in February 2007 and on August 28, 2011 endorsed an amended
draft which the parliament has yet to adopt.
Iraqi trade unions, amid popular protests, opposed
and fought the privatization draft laws. Their offices were raided, computers
confiscated, equipment smashed and their leaders arrested and prosecuted. Nonetheless,
the parliament could not pass the law.
Al-Maliki government began awarding contracts to
international oil and gas giants without a law in place. They are illegal
contracts, but valid as long as there is a pro-privatization government in Baghdad
Former British and U.S.
leaders of the invasion of Iraq
On last May 16, Obama signed an Executive Order to
extend the national emergency with respect to Iraq United States posed by obstacles to the continued
reconstruction of Iraq
Details
of Bush’s Executive Order (EO) No. 13303 are
still kept out of media spotlight. It declared that future
legal claims on Iraq ’s oil
wealth constitute “an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security
and foreign policy of the United
States
Section 1(b) eliminates all judicial process for “all Iraqi
petroleum and petroleum products, and interests therein, and proceeds,
obligations or any financial instruments of any nature whatsoever arising from
or related to the sale or marketing thereof, and interests therein, in which
any foreign country or a national thereof has any interest, that are in the
United States, that hereafter come within the United
States , or that are or hereafter come within the
possession or control of United
States
EO 13303 was
rubber-stamped by the UN Security Council Resolution No. 1483, which protected
the U.S.-controlled governmental institutions in Iraq
Muttitt wrote in August 2012: “In 2011, after nearly nine years of war and
occupation, U.S. troops
finally left Iraq
“Big Oil” is now the only guarantor of the survival of the U.S. proxy government in Baghdad
Obama
said the “threats” and “obstacles” to U.S,
interests in Iraq have not
changed eleven years after the invasion; Iraq
The developments of the last week in Iraq U.S. war
on Iraq Iraq
Since Great Britain
granted Iraq
* Nicola Nasser is a veteran Arab journalist based
in Birzeit, West Bank of the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories. nassernicola@ymail.com.
