In any event, this isn’t considered an unlucky day in the Middle East. But that probably won’t stop the superstitious among the foreigners here from feeling a few extra twinges of anxiety as they go about their dangerous business. Nor will it stop the continuing buzz of conspiracy theories about Western motives in Iraq. The idea that Washington’s real reason for toppling Saddam had more to do with oil than weapons of mass destruction is hardly new. But with this week’s release of an interim White House report on the Maliki government’s failure to reach 18 U.S.-imposed benchmarks-including its inability to agree on how to share the country’s oil revenues-the topic has again been pushed higher up the agenda.
One coalition, the British-based British-based Hands Off Iraqi Oil, is trying to rally resistance to the draft oil and gas law recently submitted to Iraq’s Parliament. The group’s Web site suggests the proposed law was secretly prepared and co-written by parties close to American and British petroleum companies, to give them carte blanche access to Iraq’s oil fields-and that oil-producing nations don’t need foreign investment. So was this bill the end game of the invasion? Here’s how Ali Baban, the Iraq minister for planning and a key architect of the oil and gas bill, responds: “The U.S. and their officials in Baghdad urged us to write and finalize the law in a short time, but they didn’t interfere,” Baban told me during an interview this week. He added that the U.S. ambassador at the time, Zalmay Khalilzad, told the Iraqis that they needed to show progress by meeting the benchmarks, but never suggested that the legislation should have language guaranteeing foreign investment into Iraq’s oil sector.
Cynics may say that Baban’s comments are not surprising-and that Washington hardly needed to interfere in the writing of the draft law when the need for foreign involvement was so obvious. Does the draft law allow foreign oil companies to sign production-sharing agreements with the Baghdad government? Yes. The reason, according to independent oil analysts, is that Iraq’s oil industry infrastructure is dilapidated, the capabilities of its national oil company are severely limited, and some of its prime oil fields are geologically difficult to access. Iraq produces about 2.2 million barrels of crude a day, and without foreign expertise, these experts say, Iraq has no chance of pushing production levels back to the 3.75 million barrels a day it enjoyed in the late 1970s. Indeed, opposition to the draft by some Sunni and Shiite groups is mostly about how much authority Iraq’s autonomous regions should have in signing contracts with foreign companies—not about banning them outright from working in Iraq. But that’s not likely to stop the conspiracy theories extending well beyond Friday the 13th.
