Oh, the Irony! Bush Wins, After All

It seems as if Bush will get almost everything he wanted to get out of going to war in Iraq.

1. He got Saddam Hussein -- he's totally dead.

2. He did not get any of the bogus objectives he waved in front of our noses, but he knew they were bogus and he did not really give a hoot about them.

3. But he is coming ever closer to achieving his hidden objective, the unspoken one. And what was that? To get his oil industry buddies into Iraq with sweetheart contracts to develop and upgrade the decaying Iraq oil industry. That is worth many billions of dollars to the Bush family, their cronies and of course George W. Bush himself. They will be wealthier than Bill Gates and Warren Buffet combined.

All this has been reported by various blogs but rarely even hinted at in the Main Stream Media. The only news I have seen about this in the NYTimes is a virtually meaningless little notice in today's paper to the effect that a new law is about to be approved, without any explanation of what it means.

A small amount of Google research on: "new oil law in Iraq" brings up the truth about this new law really quickly. Here are a few juicy paragraphs from one of the blogs:

The reason that George W. Bush insists that "victory" is achievable in Iraq is not that he is deluded or isolated or ignorant or detached from reality or ill-advised. No, it's that his definition of "victory" is different from those bruited about in his own rhetoric and in the ever-earnest disquisitions of the chattering classes in print and online. For Bush, victory is indeed at hand. It could come at any moment now, could already have been achieved by the time you read this. And the driving force behind his planned "surge" of American troops is the need to preserve those fruits of victory that are now ripening in his hand.

At any time within the next few days, the Iraqi Council of Ministers is expected to approve a new "hydrocarbon law" essentially drawn up by the Bush administration and its UK lackey, the Independent on Sunday reported. The new bill will "radically redraw the Iraqi oil industry and throw open the doors to the third-largest oil reserves in the world," says the paper, whose reporters have seen a draft of the new law. "It would allow the first large-scale operation of foreign oil companies in the country since the industry was nationalized in 1972." If the government's parliamentary majority prevails, the law should take effect in March.

As the paper notes, the law will give Exxon Mobil, BP, Shell and other carbon cronies of the White House unprecedented sweetheart deals, allowing them to pump gargantuan profits from Iraq's nominally state-owned oilfields for decades to come. This law has been in the works since the very beginning of the invasion - indeed, since months before the invasion, when the Bush administration brought in Phillip Carroll, former CEO of both Shell and Fluor, the politically-wired oil servicing firm, to devise "contingency plans" for divvying up Iraq's oil after the attack. Once the deed was done, Carroll was made head of the American "advisory committee" overseeing the oil industry of the conquered land, as Joshua Holland of Alternet.com has chronicled in two remarkable reports on the backroom maneuvering over Iraq's oil: "Bush's Petro-Cartel Almost Has Iraq's Oil and "The US Takeover of Iraqi Oil."