Iraq's New Fave Five

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In fact, the U.S. Trade and Development Agency notes that, in 2006 and 2007, it funded a "$2.5 million multifaceted training program for the Iraqi Ministry of Oil" to "provide critical knowledge transfer and establish long-term relationships between the U.S. and Iraqi oil and gas industry public and private sector representatives."

It's worth recalling that Iraq's oil bureaucrats, about to receive such "critical knowledge" and "expertise," were not exactly neophytes in the world of oil management. They had effectively managed the Iraqi oil industry from the time the five oil majors now slated to receive those "service contracts" were tossed out of Iraq, when its industry was nationalized in 1972, until the invasion of 2003. They had kept the country's oil infrastructure going even after the disaster of the First Gulf War of 1990-1991, even through all the desperate final years of sanctions against Saddam Hussein's regime.

The Pentagon-Petroleum Partnership

Another connection, long ignored in the mainstream, that reporters like Kramer might consider pursuing when it comes to the complex ties among Iraqi officials, the Bush administration, the Department of Defense (DoD), and Big Oil is the overt Pentagon connection. The DoD is, as national security expert Noah Shachtman notes, "the world's largest energy consumer." And, when it comes to Pentagon gas-guzzling, its post-9/11 wars and occupations, especially in Iraq, have been a boon. While the Bush administration has been working overtime to clear the path for Big Oil's return to Iraq, the Pentagon has been paying out staggering amounts of U.S. taxpayer dollars to the very oil majors now negotiating with Iraq's Ministry of Oil.

According to recent reports, the proposed Iraqi service contracts, which may be paid off in cash or crude oil, will be worth $500 million each. That is roughly what the Pentagon paid out on June 18th alone—the day before the Times broke its story about Big Oil's return to Iraq—for natural gas and aviation fuel. Over half the total amount, in excess of $268 million, was handed over to one of the oil giants set to benefit from the Iraq deal: BP (formerly British Petroleum). Only days earlier, two of the other majors from the coterie of potential no-bid contractors, Exxon Mobil and Chevron, nabbed contracts from the DoD—in Exxon Mobil's case, a $73 million deal for gasoline and fuel oil; in Chevron's, a $16 million contract for aviation fuel.

Keep in mind, however, that—although you won't learn this in your daily paper—this has long been standard operating procedure. Each of the oil giants named in the original New York Times piece—Exxon Mobil, Shell, Total, BP, and Chevron—regularly show up on the Pentagon's payroll. In fact, last year, Iraq's new fave five took home more than $4.1 billion from the DoD—with Shell leading the way with $2.1 billion.

It's no secret that the Pentagon relies on vast quantities of oil to power the ships, planes, helicopters, heavy armor, and other ground vehicles essential to its occupation of Iraq, nor that it regularly pays out vast sums of taxpayer dollars to the very companies that U.S. advisors have aided in working out oil deals with the Iraq Oil Ministry. Despite ample evidence of the Pentagon connection, this circular and mutually-reinforcing relationship has been almost totally ignored in the mainstream media. But think of it this way: Your tax dollars have given the Pentagon the opportunity to use up oil—bought from the oil majors, in prodigious quantities—in order to create a situation in Iraq in which those same majors will soon receive no-bid contracts to make money off the Iraqi oil industry and, if all goes well, get far better, longer term deals in the near future.

One Big, Happy, Oily Family

It turns out that, despite that story the Times broke as if something totally new were on the horizon, the Bush administration has been facilitating ties between the Iraqi government and foreign oil companies for years, and the same companies now likely to nab a no-bid toehold in Iraq's oilfields are intimately tied in to the Pentagon to the tune of billions of dollars annually. It's worth noting that most of these firms have also been closely connected to Vice President Dick Cheney from the early days of the Bush administration. In fact, executives from Exxon Mobil, Shell, and BP met behind closed doors with Cheney's energy task force in 2001, when the administration was pounding out its energy policies, according to a White House document obtained by the Washington Post. The Government Accountability Office also found that Chevron was just one of several companies that "gave detailed energy policy recommendations" to the task force.

It's almost impossible to tease out all the interconnections between Big Oil, the White House, the Pentagon, and the Iraqi Ministry of Oil, since they are tied together in a web of contracts and mutually supporting relationships built up over many years. However, just in case the Times wants to set its staff loose on the recent past, there is no mistaking the many ties that exist. (A small tip for Times researchers: Skip the Times archives. They will be of little help.)

Should further evidence be necessary, when it comes to those U.S. advisors at work in Iraq, mainstream reporters need look no further than the solicitations sent out by the Iraqi Ministry of Oil itself. Consider, for instance, a recent "tender" for a contractor to drill "two deep exploration wells" in the South Rumaila and Luhais oil fields in the Basra District of southern Iraq. Not only does the solicitation (the deadline for which is July 27, 2008) contain special instructions for "Companies outside Iraq," but it asks potential contractors to send their bids to the Ministry of Oil not in Arabic, but "in the English language."

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Nick Turse is the associate editor and research director of Tomdispatch.com. He has written for the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, Adbusters, the Nation, and regularly for Tomdispatch.com. His first book, The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives, an exploration of the new military-corporate complex in America, was recently published by Metropolitan Books. His website, Nick Turse.com has been newly revamped and expanded.

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