Jim Hightower

A bumpersticker about the Iraq war asks: "What's our oil doing under their sand?"

Of course, the Bushites hotly denied that their disastrous war is about grabbing the second largest oil reserve in the world. "It has nothing to do with oil, literally nothing to do with oil," barked Donnie Rumsfeld!

Could that be yet another of their lies? Yes!

A cabal of Kleptocrats – including the Bushites, the Iraqi cabinet, and the major oil corporations – have drafted a new oil law requiring Iraq to open up its fields to control by Western corporations. This was kept secret from both the Iraqi and American people, but the draft has now been submitted to their parliament for its approval, so details of the thievery have leaked out.

The law would transform Iraq's huge oil reserve from a nationally-owned resource to a privatization model, opening two-thirds of the known oil fields to foreign control.

Instead of parliament making the major decisions over oil, an unelected authority called the Federal Oil and Gas Council would take charge. And guess who would have seats on this council? The major oil corporations!

This autocratic group would then decide who gets the contrats to extract the nation's oil. Yes... that means Big Oil would be approving its owns bids. Also, the corporations would not have to hire Iraqis, reinvest profits in Iraq, or share new technologies. Foreign interests would even be allowed to divvy up the territory now and hold their pieces of the action until after the current civil war settles down, then move in to grab profits.

This scheme is nothing but a license for Big Oil to plunder a nation and its people. So much for Bush & Company's rhetoric about "bringing democracy to Iraq." They're using our troops to give away Iraq's oil... and its sovereignty.

This is Jim Hightower saying... To learn more about this shameful ripoff, call the watchdog group: Oil Change International: 202-518-9029