Shell Games and the Pottery Barn Rule

With all eyes on the Nasdaq and the DOW industrial average while we await the next Tina Fey impression of Sarah Palin, little attention is being paid to happenings in Iraq. Day before last coordinated suicide bombers targeted Shi'ite worshipers killing 50 and injuring dozens more at Baghdad mosques. The attacks took place as Iraqi Shi'ites marked the first day of Eid, a three-day celebration that follows Ramadan, Islam's month of fasting. The previous day three women and two children were killed and a minibus driver and another woman were injured when gunmen in a speeding car opened fire on a minibus. Today we learn that eleven Iraqis including three women and three children were killed by U.S. troops during a raid in Mosul.
The U.S. military claims the men were terrorists.

There is a comforting narrative regressed to the background that says if Barack Obama becomes President we will see the end of the disastrous Iraq occupation. Not, mind you, that we can look forward to seeing our troops finally start to come home-- apparently Senator Obama believes at least two of those brigades are needed in Afghanistan. Yet if one looks at what is taking place between Basra and Kurdistan despite the ongoing violence and political stalemate it is hard to foresee us leaving the Iraqis to govern themselves anytime soon.

As we learned back in June the original partners in the Iraq Petroleum Company-- Exxon, BP, Shell and Total along with Chevron and a number of smaller oil companies-- were negotiating a deal with Al-Maliki's puppet government to secure no-bid contracts to service Iraq’s largest oil-fields. The highly unusual agreements won out despite better offers from more than 40 other companies, including oil firms in Russia, China and India. The New York Times would later report that "a group of American advisers led by a small State Department team" had played an integral part in brokering the sell out.

But as AlterNet's Nick Nurse explains, in reality, there had long been ample evidence that the Bush administration had been engaged, along with those same European firms, in pressuring the Iraqis to accept what amounted to a daylight robbery. In their usual obsequious fashion the Times and other major media outlets also failed to expose the financial ties between our military occupation and the major oil giants who all regularly show up on the Pentagon's payroll. In the last year alone, those five aforementioned firms took home more than $4.1 billion from U.S. taxpayers with Shell leading the way with $2.1 billion.

But while the Times' piece did not cover the symbiotic relationship between the oil companies and the Pentagon and a cabal in the U.S. State Department, its expose on the no-bid deal drew an immediate international outcry. Foiled in their attempt at a "stick-up" in daylight, the oil giants withdrew to their boardrooms and fashioned a Shell game as they normally would, quietly out of sight.

First they pacified the Chinese by offering them the rights for Iraq oil "development", then, instead of insisting on keeping six separate inside deals, had Royal Dutch Shell openly offer its bid (no doubt packaged with help from their co-conspirators) of $4 billion "to establish a joint venture with [Iraq's] South Gas Company in the Basra district of southern Iraq to process and market natural gas."

Time will tell how this sits with the average Iraqi but opponents of the Maliki government see the deal as having been pushed through U.S. military blackmail.



However,the engorgement of Iraq is not limited to its oil and gas resources. Now that there is relative stability major corporations are being wooed to carve out their stakes. Consider this sales pitch from the IFP's "Project Iraq" set to take place at Erbil International Fair Ground, Erbil – Kurdistan this November:

Launched in Silicon Valley California, Iraq Project is Marketplace and Business Development firm dedicated to the reconstruction and economic development in Iraq. We bring in together corporations, lending institutions, entrepreneurs, suppliers, and contractors from inside and outside Iraq.

Our services include Consulting, Project Management, and Investment Promotion in Iraq. We provide customized studies and forecasts on different segments of Iraq economy.

Iraq Project is non-political organization for all companies interested in the new democratic Iraq. We are dedicated to transform Iraq to an active member of the world economy.

Iraq Construction Drive Offers Billions of Dollars in Business Development Prospects

That was genius of the neocon plan: tear up a country completely, foment anarchy then rebuild it from scratch. When Colin Powell warned before the invasion that once we broke Iraq-- we would "own it" Cheney must have chuckled. Did Powell not know that was the plan all along? The problem that Powell and the rest of us in the reality-based world understood was that even if Iraq might be "worth it" how the devil were we going to "keep it"?

When John McCain talks about victory what he means is making Iraq a safe enough place to earn fortunes for his friends who dine on yachts and fly their own jets. It matters not to him that to create the Iraq that he dreams of will sink the United States and the remains of our democracy along with it. And yet how is Obama going to risk Iraq regressing into another Somalia when General Electric and Verizon are chafing to do business in Tikrit and Kirkuk?

The Iraq Investment and Reconstruction Task Force

This was the first U.S. government trade mission to Iraq in 20 years and the first official mission to the Kurdistan Region.

Investing in Iraq’s Industrial Sectors

The Government of Iraq, led by the Iraqi Ministry of Industry and Minerals (MIM) is currently in the process of evaluating investor proposals to enter into joint venture partnerships between many of Iraq’s lucrative State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs) and international companies. These partnerships will permit investors to acquire production output from Iraq’s productive factories in exchange for investment of expertise and capital to improve and rehabilitate these assets.

The problem a President Obama will face is that after five years of chaos and sectarian strife even as the violence subsides Iraqis are left struggling without any viable income. As McClatchy Papers report, for almost two years the Pentagon was paying Sunni militiamen at least $300 a month each to fight al Qaida and other Sunni extremist groups. Up to now the only secure commercial centers are next to U.S. military bases and even there it is dangerous for local entrepreneurs to operate.

The outcome of all this is as one would expect. Iraq's oil revenues are being doled out to pacify its citizens and the few decent jobs there are can only be had through bribery, cronyism or official corruption. That makes for a volatile mix in and of itself without the added complication of foreign occupiers handing out sweetheart deals to vulture capitalists grown fat on what many Muslims perceive to be a corporate Western 'crusade' against Islam.