There Be Pirates

The Bush administration is ready to haul down the American colors and run up the Jolly Roger. Its client regime in Baghdad is about to pass a hydrocarbons law which will grant control of exploitation of the country's huge oil reserves to American, British, and Dutch petroleum giants.

Despite Washington's and Baghdad's strenuous efforts to keep it secret, copies of the law leaked onto the internet during the week of Valentine's Day.

In a series of interviews at al-Jazeera, an Iraqi blogger, architect, and Iraq's project director for Global Exchange, Raed Jarrar, talked about the law's main provisions.

"(I)t’s a very long document, around thirty pages," Jarrar says, "but...there are three major points. Financially, it legalizes very unfair types of contracts that will put Iraq in very long-term contracts that can go up to thirty-five years and cause the loss of hundreds of billions of dollars from Iraqis for no cause.

"The second point is concerning Iraq's sovereignty. Iraq will not be capable of controlling the levels -- the limits of production, which means that Iraq cannot be a part of OPEC anymore. And Iraq will have this very complicated institution called the Federal Oil and Gas Council, that will have representatives from the foreign oil companies on the board of it, so representatives from, let’s say, ExxonMobil and Shell and British Petroleum will be on the federal board of Iraq approving their own contracts."

The crux of the law itself, available in English (pdf) on Jarrar's blog Raed in the Middle, is Article 11, which states that "regarding the ownership of the oil and gas resources, the distribution of its revenues, and monitoring the federal revenue distribution, the ministers council must submit a federal law draft to the representatives council regulating these matters in adherence to the sections of this article." That means the actual numbers specifying shares of the loot will be dealt with in separate, yet-to-be-considered legislation. However, foreign oil companies are expected to take about 70 percent of the profits during the initial stages of these 30-year contracts.

Article 11 also provides for setting up an Iraqi national "oil revenues treasury," to be administered by "representatives from the federal government, regions’ governments, provinces, and a number of independent consultants..." Independent consultants means, of course, representatives of foreign oil companies.

Now that we've stripped away all the fictional motivations used to justify this war -- the weapons of mass destruction, the al-Qaida connection, the brutal dictator who murdered his own people, our idealistic desire to spread democracy, and all the rest of the entire boatload of bombastic bullshit -- the American invasion and destruction of Iraq stands revealed irrefutably and undebatably as a naked, piratical act of plunder and brigandage, no different than Cortez's gold-inspired invasion of Mexico.

There be global capitalism, or to put it another way, there be pirates.