by Keith Richmond
At the end of this month, on June 29, Iraq’s oil minister Hussain al-Shahristani will reveal which multinationals have got their hands on his country’s black gold in the first of two televised licensing auctions (the other will be held in December). Thirty-five companies are bidding for contracts to develop oil and gas fields.
Iraq has vast oil and gas reserves and Baghdad wants to increase production to 4 million barrels a day by 2013.
In his speech at Cairo University on June 4, President Barack Obama said the US pursues “no claim on their [Iraqi] territory or resources.” And during the George W Bush years Donald Rumsfeld was unequivocal. Suggestions, he said, that America was after Iraqi oil were nonsense. “We don’t go around the world and try to take other people’s resources, their oil. That’s just not what the United States does.”
