Oil and blood: the corporate reign

The Iraq oil partition being ballyhooed in the US media is a nightmare culminated. It is, as Mr. Escobar says, a "done deal".

The law was in essence drafted, behind locked doors, by a US consulting firm hired by the Bush administration and then carefully retouched by Big Oil, the International Monetary Fund, former US deputy defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz' World Bank, and the United States Agency for International Development. It's virtually a US law (its original language is English, not Arabic).

But wait! didn't they try this earlier this year, and large fusses occurred?

The US government has been involved in drawing up the law, a draft of which has been seen by The Independent on Sunday. It would give big oil companies such as BP, Shell and Exxon 30-year contracts to extract Iraqi crude and allow the first large-scale operation of foreign oil interests in the country since the industry was nationalised in 1972.

Apparently the fuss just wasn't enough...

But I can't see the reaction to this on the ground in Iraq being good.