Whose oil is it, anyway?

That's the question Antonia Juhasz poses in her latest Op-Ed in the New York Times. She's asking, naturally, about the massive oil reserves located in Iraq - thought to be the second largest in the world. She explains:

"Iraq’s oil reserves — thought to be the second largest in the world — have always been high on [oil companies'] wish list. In 1998, Kenneth Derr, then chief executive of Chevron, told a San Francisco audience, “Iraq possesses huge reserves of oil and gas — reserves I’d love Chevron to have access to.”

A new oil law set to go before the Iraqi Parliament this month would, if passed, go a long way toward helping the oil companies achieve their goal. The Iraq hydrocarbon law would take the majority of Iraq’s oil out of the exclusive hands of the Iraqi government and open it to international oil companies for a generation or more."

She notes that, what a coincidence, the invasion and occupation of Iraq has ended up yielding the exact result the 2001 Cheney Energy Task Force wanted: Opening up Middle Eastern countries' energy sectors for foreign investment.

As Juhasz notes, the new Iraqi oil law being pushed bt the Bush administration would transform Iraq’s oil industry from a nationalized model closed to American oil companies except for limited (although highly lucrative) marketing contracts, into a commercial industry, all-but-privatized, that is fully open to all international oil companies.

But the war had nothing to do with oil, right? The fact that Iraq is being pushed to privatize their oil reserves, as opposed to allowing them to keep a nationalized energy sector while still taking advantage of the services and expertise of foreign energy companies like its neighbors Kuwait and Saudi Arabia do, is just a amazing coincidence.

Update: Christian Parenti has an interesting article in The Nation taking a more skeptical view of Iraq's oil resources being successfully privatized in the near future. He argues the country is too much of a mess for the oil giants to turn a profit, and thinks the country's political elite won't allow such a selloff to foreign interests.