It Always Was About the Oil

The Lebanese paper, The Daily Star, speaks for a lot of the Middle East in asking why Bush invaded Iraq:

What is Bush's cause? To the people of this region, Bush's cause has long been painfully evident: to gain control of Iraq's oil resources. Indeed, ever since the US-led invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration has been aggressively pressuring the Iraqi government to pass a new oil law, ostensibly to promote "reconciliation" among the country's divided communities. In fact, Bush has made the passage of a new oil law one of his key "benchmarks" for Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's government.

Members of the Bush administration have argued that the new law will serve to "unify" the country by giving Iraqis a "shared stake in Iraq's future." In fact the bill has proven to facilitate Iraqi unity: It has drawn fierce opposition from lawmakers representing the country's divided Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish communities, as well as from all five of the country's trade unions, which represent hundreds of thousands of Iraqis.

The Iraqis are understandably concerned about the draft law because oil is Iraq's economic lifeblood: It accounts for nearly 70 percent of GDP and more than 95 percent of government revenues. But the draft oil law would take over three-fourths of Iraq's oil fields out of the hands of the Iraqi government and put them in the pockets of Western companies. These companies would not be obliged under the new law to meet minimum standards in partnering with Iraqi firms, hiring Iraqi workers or investing profits in the Iraqi economy. The law also allows for production-sharing agreements, corporate-friendly deals that have been rejected by every other country in this region, and with good reason: They grant foreign firms control of resources and profits for as long as 20 to 30 years, or an entire generation.

The Americans invaded Iraq on the basis of lies that Bush concocted about Al-Qaeda and weapons of mass destruction. Now that Bush has completely shattered the Iraqi nation, he wants to deprive the Iraqi people of one of the only means they have to repair it. The question now becomes: Is this a cause that the American people can support in good conscience?