Iraq Opens 6 Oil Fields for International Bidding

Is there any doubt now that the reason the oil man Bush took us to war in Iraq was about the oil?

The Iraqi government says it's opened six oil fields to international bidding as the nation tries to boost production.

Oil Minister Hussain al-Shahristani says 35 oil companies qualified for bidding, including several majors from the West, such as Shell, BP, ExxonMobil and Total.

He says the oil fields are: Rumeila, Zubair, Qurna West, Maysan, Kirkuk and Bay Hassan.

All the fields are already producing oil, but al-Shahristani said Monday the new contracts would raise Iraq's production by 1.5 million barrels per day.

The deadline for the bids is the end of March 2009, and preliminary contracts will be signed next June.

Remember the Greenspan controversy?

AMERICA’s elder statesman of finance, Alan Greenspan, has shaken the White House by declaring that the prime motive for the war in Iraq was oil.

In his long-awaited memoir, to be published tomorrow, Greenspan, a Republican whose 18-year tenure as head of the US Federal Reserve was widely admired, will also deliver a stinging critique of President George W Bush’s economic policies.

However, it is his view on the motive for the 2003 Iraq invasion that is likely to provoke the most controversy. “I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil,” he says.

This article appeared in the Washington Post:

Five years after the United States invaded Iraq, plenty of people believe that the war was waged chiefly to secure U.S. petroleum supplies and to make Iraq safe -- and lucrative -- for the U.S. oil industry.

We may not know the real motivations behind the Iraq war for years, but it remains difficult to distill oil from all the possibilities. That's because our society and economy have been nursed on cheap oil, and the idea that oil security is a right as well as a necessity has become part of our foreign policy DNA, handed down from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Jimmy Carter to George H.W. Bush. And the war and its untidy aftermath have, in fact, swelled the coffers of the world's biggest oil companies.