The Oil Drum

52 comments on New Iraqi oil law: some facts on PSAs

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Marty on January 8, 2007 - 1:16pm

The US is building 14 permanent military bases and the largest US 'embassy' in the world in Iraq and shows every sign of intending to stay for a long time. The US is currently spending 3-5 times as much per year occupying Iraq as it spends for all biomedical research.

It helps to see the bias in this piece by imagining the situation reversed. Say, for example, that the US (or more appropriately for this author, France) had been bombed, invaded, and occupied by a foreign power, and that this foreign power was building permanent military bases with a giant headquarters in Paris. The French population rises up in resistance but is unable to throw the invaders out. Then the invaders start to 'negotiate' profit sharing agreements with the Vichy government about the exploitation of France's natural resources. For example, France has a lot of farmland, but the invader knows that current French farming techniques are inefficient because they refuse to use enough pesticides and allow genetically altered organisms.

It's just a normal tool of business. It's not a bad thing because the economy of occupied France is having trouble raising money to exploit its own farmland. And besides, the agreement will probably never be implemented because of the short-sightedness of the invaders.

Bien sur!

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BrianT on January 8, 2007 - 1:23pm

Marty: You left out the part about all the incredible expenses of the invasion being paid for by the taxpayers of the invading country, with little of the profits returned to these same funders of the entire enterprise.

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Jerome a Paris on January 8, 2007 - 2:43pm

There are three separate points:

- one is about whether it is sensible for the US to take over Iraqi oil
- one is whether PSAs are bad or not
- the last one is whether any law today has any chance of being applied

1. Of course not - and the Iraqis are right to be outraged
2. Not necessarily. PSAs are not necessarily a bad thing - that's what annoyed me about tht article, in that it flagged PSAs as the evil item there, and not the fact that the USA is deciding what Iraq should do with its oil
3. Not a chance in hell (amongst other reasons, because of item 1 above), which makes the discussion under 2 irrelevant anyway.

But one point I do insist on is that PSAs are not a bad thing per se. How they are put (forced) in place, and what terms are used (issues related to the sovereignty of Iraq, not to the oil industry) are what matters.