Irak: Mission Accomplished!
Geplaatst door yvespernet op 19 juni 2008
We kunnen allemaal gerust op onze twee oren slapen. Na tienduizenden doden in Irak, zijn de resultaten eindelijk daar!
BAGHDAD — Four Western oil companies are in the final stages of negotiations this month on contracts that will return them to Iraq, 36 years after losing their oil concession to nationalization as Saddam Hussein rose to power. [...]
While small, the deals hold great promise for the companies.
“The bigger prize everybody is waiting for is development of the giant new fields,” Leila Benali, an authority on Middle East oil at Cambridge Energy Research Associates, said in a telephone interview from the firm’s Paris office. The current contracts, she said, are a “foothold” in Iraq for companies striving for these longer-term deals.[...]
But the company is clearly aware of the history. In an interview with Newsweek last fall, the former chief executive of Exxon, Lee Raymond, praised Iraq’s potential as an oil-producing country and added that Exxon was in a position to know. “There is an enormous amount of oil in Iraq,” Mr. Raymond said. “We were part of the consortium, the four companies that were there when Saddam Hussein threw us out, and we basically had the whole country.”
Saddam Hussein was uiteraard geen voorbeeld van een goede heerser. Maar hij hield wel de invloeden van het buitenlandse grootkapitaal buiten. Met deze contracten, waarvoor zelfs geen openbare aanbesteding is gehouden, nemen de bedrijven steeds meer controle over de Iraakse economie. Nu ja, in de mate dat Irak nog niet onder buitenlandse controle van allerlei dubieuze “contractors“ stond natuurlijk…
