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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Dennis O'Bell who wrote (207080)	10/27/2006 5:11:08 AM
From: Sun Tzu	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 281500

This was a very good article. Thanks for posting it. One thing worth mentioning is that Shahristani is the most moral person in Iraqi government. Nor is he a fool or a coward. So I am willing to accept his judgement as being the best course under the circumstances...of course the circumstances are anything but ideal. So he may not have had much of a choice. Most people do not know this, as it did not get much of a coverage. But right after the invasion various US oil companies partied in Iraq as Bremer promised them fortunes. But Sistani ruined the party by pointing out that contracts awarded by an occupying force are not legally binding to the Iraqis. His assistant bluntly said that once the government is formed they will annul all those contracts. That was when suddenly US decided that formation of an elected government is an ASAP necessity. This legal necessity is hinted at in the highlighted portion: The coalition of the drilling World public opinion must switch to red alert. The real, not virtual, future of Iraq will be decided in December. The whole point is a new oil law - which is in fact a debt-for-oil program concocted and imposed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF). This is the point of the US invasion - a return on investment on the hundreds of billions of dollars of US taxpayers' money spent. It's not war as politics by other means; it's war as free-market opening by other means - full US access to the epicenter of the energy wars and the perfect geostrategic location for "taming", in the near future, both Russia and China. Very few observers have detailed what's at stake. In US corporate media the silence is stratospheric. US Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman duly landed in Baghdad this past summer, insisting that Iraqis must "pass a hydrocarbon law under which foreign companies can invest". Iraqi Oil Minister Hussein al-Shahristani was convinced, and said the law would be passed by the end of 2006, as promised to the IMF. The Bush administration needs somebody to sign the law...