The Empires Strike Back: Big Oil Is Back in Iraq

According to this article in the NYT,The Iraq Petroleum Company is back! Exxon Mobil, Shell, Total, and BP will return to Kirkuk, Mosul, and other petroleum-rich areas, starting June 30th. The British, Dutch, French, and U.S. companies are returning to what was once part of the Ottoman Empire, after 47 years of being locked out in 1961 when General Qassem nationalized Iraq's oil, a program completed by our man, Saddam Hussein in 1971. The foreign oil companies were given very nice no-bid contracts to begin extraction, almost certainly giving them a nice position to pump out a lot more when the contracts end in two years. With oil at $140 a barrel, the price of war is cheap in comparison. With the leveraged investment of 4100 dead U. S. soldiers, tens of thousands wounded, about 100K dead Iraqis, and a half trillion dollars of taxpayers' money, big oil should be poised to make some very nice profits.
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