RAED JARRAR, Iraqi Blogger: Bush’s Puppet Iraqi Government Preps SECRET Law To HIJACK IRAQ’S OIL For USA Investors! - RI10

RAED JARRAR, Iraqi Blogger:

Bush’s Puppet Iraqi

Government Preps SECRET Law

To HIJACK IRAQ’S OIL For USA

Investors! - RI10

New Iraq Oil Law To Open Iraq's Oil Reserves to

Western Companies

Tuesday, February 20th, 2007
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/02/20/1523250

The Iraqi blogger Raed Jarrar has obtained a copy of the proposed oil law and has just translated it into English. He discusses the new law with Antonia Juhasz, author of "The Bush Agenda: Invading the World One Economy at a Time.” [includes rush transcript]

Tabacco: So what took us so long to poll the Iraqis? And how dumb those 57%, who didn’t select “oil”, must be! This only proves that Americans do not have a monopoly on STUPIDITY! Remember this; the Iraqis may have elected Saddam, but America “elected” Bush, and we did it twice!

Well, with the four-year mark of the Iraq war less than a month away, the answer may come into clearer view. After a long negotiation process involving US officials, the Iraqi government is considering a new oil law that would establish a framework for managing the third-largest oil reserves in the world.

What would this new law mean for Iraq? With me now from Washington DC is Raed Jarrar - He is the Iraq Project Director for Global Exchange. He has obtained a copy of the proposed oil law which he translated from Arabic and posted on his website. And Antonia Juhasz is on the phone with us -- She has written extensively about the economic side of the US occupation of Iraq and is the author of the book, “The Bush Agenda: Invading the World One Economy at a Time.” Antonia is a Tarbell Fellow at Oil Change International. We welcome you both to Democracy Now!

    * Raed Jarrar Iraq Project Director for Global Exchange. He is an Iraqi blogger and architect. He runs a popular blog called "Raed in the Middle."

    * Antonia Juhasz, author and activist. She is a Tarbell Fellow at Oil Change International. Her latest book is called "The Bush Agenda: Invading the World, One Economy at a Time."

RUSH TRANSCRIPT

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AMY GOODMAN: With me now in Washington is Raed Jarrar. He is the Iraq Project Director for Global Exchange, and he has obtained a copy of the proposed oil law, which he translated from Arabic and posted on his website, raedinthemiddle.blogspot.com. Antonia Juhasz is also with us on the telephone. She has written extensively about the economic side of the US occupation of Iraq and is author of the book, The Bush Agenda: Invading the World One Economy at a Time. Antonia is currently a Tarbell Fellow at Oil Change International. We welcome you both to Democracy Now!.

Raed Jarrar, first, how did you get this document?

RAED JARRAR: The document was leaked by Professor Fouad Al-Ameer and published on a website called al-ghad.org. And then it was leaked to other important websites like niqash.org and other places. There are different ways of -- different copies of it. Some of it is scanned, and others of the original document, but it just hit the Internet last week.

AMY GOODMAN: And explain what it says, now that you’ve finished translating it.

RAED JARRAR: It said so many things. I don’t think we can summarize it this short, because it’s a very long document, around thirty pages. But in the majority, there are three major points that I think we should talk about.

AMY GOODMAN: Antonia Juhasz, what is the significance of this for Western oil companies?

ANTONIA JUHASZ: Well, in my mind, the law certainly opens the door to US oil companies and the Bush administration winning a very large piece of their objective of going to war in Iraq, at least winning it on paper. The law does almost word

for word what was laid out in the Baker-Hamilton

recommendation, which I discussed previously on your show, which is, at the very basic level, to turn Iraq's nationalized oil system, the model

that 90% of the world’s oil is governed by, take its

nationalized oil system and turn it into a commercial

system fully open to foreign corporate investment on terms

as of yet to be decided. So it leaves vague this very

important question of what type of contracts will the Iraqi

government use. But what it leaves clear is that basically every level of the oil industry will be open to private foreign companies.

And, as Raed said, it introduces this very unique model, which is that ultimate

decision making on contracts rests with a new council to be

set up in Iraq, and sitting on that council will be

representatives -- executives, in fact -- of oil companies,

both foreign and domestic. In addition, it does maintain the

Iraq National Oil Company, but gives the Iraq National Oil

Company almost no preference. It’s almost in all cases just another oil company among lots of other companies, including US oil companies. And this council, the new oil and gas council, is going to be the decision making body to determine what kind of contract the Iraqis can sign, and all contract models are still on the table, yet to be determined. I think that’s left vague or open, so that the very necessary criticism to earlier drafts of the law, which included specifically production sharing agreements, might be quieted.

But the law definitely sets up a very dangerous setup for Iraq's future economic stability, economic development, and certainly sets the stage for a tremendous amount of increased hostility and violence to US soldiers positioned on the ground, as being seen as the implementers of this oil hijack.

AMY GOODMAN: Antonia, what about the advocates’ argument for Western company involvement, that they need to come into Iraq to kick-start the oil development?

The danger is that under the different models of oil

contract that are being put on the table, that the Iraqis

would lose the vast majority of that profit to the foreign oil

companies.

Now, just really quickly, Iraqis have lost a fair amount of expertise, technical know-how, as technology has increased over the past eleven years and the Iraqis were shut out because of the sanctions. The answer to that is found in the models put forward by their neighbors, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia and Iran, which are technical service contracts that countries sign with foreign companies to bring in that expertise, but under very limited time frames and very specific economic benefits to the companies and to the country, not these 35-year contracts, as Raed said, and the potential for vast profits leaving the country.

AMY GOODMAN: Raed Jarrar, what is the response of Iraqis, of people in Iraq?

RAED JARRAR: No one in Iraq knows about the law. The

law has been kept in a very low profile, and there is a huge

propaganda campaign by the government trying to portray

the law as straight and good for Iraq, a law that will turn

Iraq into heaven on earth, because it will bring all of the

foreign investments. Even parliamentarians in the Iraqi

government, the ones who will have the final say to pass

this law, haven’t received a copy of this law yet. I sent them the copy three or four days ago, and I sent a copy to many of the other Iraqi bloggers and journalists, because I think it’s very important to raise awareness about this and make it an issue. The Iraqi government and the Bush administration are trying to keep a very low profile in Iraq on this law. I think they’re planning just to, you know, surprise the parliamentarians one morning and have them vote on it without any knowledge of what the law actually causes.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk, Raed Jarrar, about the control, the dispute over federal or regional control of oil in Iraq?

RAED JARRAR: Most of the control will be under the regional and provincial authorities. They have all of the authority of monitoring and even dealing with small disputes. Now, there is this bigger council that is very complicated, very bureaucratic. This council just has the authority to veto what the regional and provincial authorities decide. So in case the council just stayed silent, everything can go without any interruption. So, you can see that this council is kind of controlled by foreign companies, as well, so the possibilities of the council vetoing what’s happening on the regional level will be very small. So we end up having a situation where Iraqis in different provinces will start signing contracts directly with foreign companies and competing between themselves, among themselves, among different Iraqi provinces, to get the oil companies to go to there without any centralized way in controlling this and thinking of the Iraqi interest and protecting Iraq as a country.

AMY GOODMAN: This document that you’ve translated into English was originally written in Arabic?

RAED JARRAR: No, the document was originally written in

English.  Tabacco: What does that tell you about the law’s authorship! It was sent to the Iraqi oil ministry, and some parts of it were changed, and some parts were edited, some parts were added. So when I translated it, I made my translation based on a previously leaked English copy, which is the original version of this law. The English copy leaked in mid-2006. So this -- the Arabic version now is totally based on that one. There are, I think out of the twenty-nine or thirty pages, there are around six or seven totally new pages, and there are new sections here and there.

But the major differences, as I mentioned, are regarding the authorities that can control oil, and it can show very clearly what the Iraqi leaders, who are influential and can control these laws, are planning to do. It can show very clearly that there are very influential separatist Iraqi leaders who are trying to use this law to fund the separatist project and to turning Iraq into three states.

In fact, one of the things that I did while translating is I kept some traces of the original one and put a line over the -- like struck them, so that people can see the small differences, how many of the authorities that were supposed to be a given to the central government and to the ministry now were shifted to the regional authorities. Like, this is the most interesting thing that happened in the changes. But overall, it’s a law

that is promoted by the Bush administration and the IMF.

It’s not at all an urgent item on the Iraqi agenda. It’s just

an urgent item on the Bush and the IMF agenda.

AMY GOODMAN: Finally, Antonia, who has the largest oil reserves in the world, the top three?

ANTONIA JUHASZ: Saudi Arabia is one. Iraq is two. Iran is three. And I think in that list, particularly obviously Iraq and Iran, you can see pretty clearly a key focus for the Bush administration in its remaining years in office.

AMY GOODMAN: Do you think that is related to this current intensification of focus on Iran, the possibility of a US strike on Iran?

ANTONIA JUHASZ: Oh, most certainly. You know, to be clear, oil is about a lot of things. Oil is about profit, and it’s about the money that the oil interests in the United States, which of course also include members of the Bush administration, can get.

But controlling the second and third largest oil reserves in the world also has a tremendous amount to do with imperial power and global power that the Bush administration wants. Controlling that oil denies it to other countries that want it, like China and India, countries that the Bush administration now sees itself in rivalry to.

And it also gets the government in control of a resource that is obviously dwindling in supply and which they want to hold onto. And they have been quite clear, meaning members of the Bush administration, but also the United States government, in its dedication to securing Middle East oil for the United States, and that agenda has hit high speed under this administration, where corporate and oil interests are part and parcel to government interest.

The four-year anniversary of the war, coming up March 19th, is a critically important opportunity to do that and in the lead-up to that anniversary to really target our attention on demanding that our members of Congress defund the war and that we direct our attention and our protest energy on revealing this oil agenda. And to that end, Oil Change International, the organization I work with, is going to be in the coming weeks working with our allies to pull together some clear lists of activities and actions that folks can do, particularly on exposing the oil law in Iraq. So I encourage folks to come to our website to check that out.

AMY GOODMAN: Antonia Juhasz, I want to thank you for being with us, Tarbell Fellow at the Oil Change International, author of The Bush Agenda: Invading the World One Economy at a Time. And Raed Jarrar in Washington, D.C., is the Iraq Project Director for Global Exchange. His blog is raedinthemiddle.blogspot.com.




http://raedinthemiddle.blogspot.com/

The Oil Law: Submitted to the Council of Ministers

My contacts in the Iraqi government, in addition to some fellow Iraqi bloggers, confirmed that the oil law draft was submitted to the Council of Ministers last week, and is expected to reach to the Council of Representatives (the Parliament) very soon after it gets approved in the Council of Ministers. The law will be considered active in case it gets approved by the parliament.

Sunday, February 18, 2007

The New Iraqi Oil: Leaked

The last few of weeks were very busy. I spent a couple of weeks in Malaysia and South Korea, and I'll share two of my pictures with you below.

But more importantly, I spent the weekend translating this leaked copy of the Iraqi oil law with niki (thank you salam for sending me the link). Translating legal documents can be really hard!

We just finished the translation, and you can download it by clicking here or here

Please feel free to widely distribute this document. It's important to start a stronger debate and to try to educate Iraqis and Americans about this catastrophic law that will facilitate the further looting of Iraqi oil, and will achieve nothing other than increasing the levels of violence and anger in Iraq.

This law legalizes PSAs (production sharing agreements) in Iraq. Iraq will be the only country in the middle east with such contracts privatizing Iraqi oil and giving foreign companies crazy rates of profit that may reach to more than three fourth of the general revenue. Iraq and Iraqis need every Dinar that comes from oil sales. In addition to the financial aspects of this law, it can be considered the funding tool for splitting Iraq into three states. It undermines the central government and distributes oil revenues directly to the three regions, which sets the foundations for what Iraq's enemies are trying to achieve in terms of establishing three independent states.

Privatizing Iraq's oil and splitting Iraq into three regions are just two negative features of this 29 pages law. I am translating some important analysis written by Iraqis and other Arabs, and am also working with British and U.S. experts to publish more analysis soon. [UPDATE: click here to download a very important analysis by Mr. Al-Ameer translated by me]

 
Raed Jarrar in Kuala Lampur

Remember: the law is bad and it’ll increase violence for two major reasons:
1- PSAs are bad because they give private companies a ridiculously huge share of profit, they’re not transparent enough, they prevent Iraq from being a part of OPEC, and they are not used around the region at all
2- Distributing oil revenue to the regions without any central control will split Iraq into three states

 

For the Oil Law’s Details, go to:
http://www.niqash.org/content.php?contentTypeID=171


Tabacco: I consider myself both a funnel and a filter. I funnel information, not readily available on the Mass Media, which is ignored and/or suppressed. I filter out the irrelevancies and trivialities to save both the time and effort of my Readers and bring consternation to the enemies of Truth & Fairness! When you read Tabacco, if you don’t learn something NEW, I’ve wasted your time.


In 1981's 'Body Heat', Kathleen Turner said, "Knowledge is power".

 

T.A.B.A.C.C.O.  (Truth About Business And Congressional Crimes Organization)

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