This one may just sneak under the radar of the American people — I doubt the media will cover it extensively, as they’re too busy giving us 24-hour coverage of the floods, the election, and the death of Tim Russert (I’ve seen so much about him on the news recently, I started to wonder if he was, in fact, a Missing White Woman).
It seems that the original partners of the Iraq Petroleum Company — Exxon Mobil, Shell, Total and BP — along with a number of smaller companies… are now about to be awarded no-bid contracts to operate Iraq’s oil fields, 36 years after losing their oil concession to nationlization under Saddam Hussein.
Interesting, eh? The Iraqi Oil Ministry, which is still packed with American “advisers”, gave them these contracts — ignoring offers from over 40 other companies (including Russian, Chinese and Indian firms) in a no-bid process, which is extremely unusual for the industry.
So a brand new “democracy”, at a time when oil is at its highest prices, and could have fetched amazingly high bids from any company for the job……”just happened” to hand it’s extremely rich oil fields over to the very same companies that were driven out by Saddam.
Mission Accomplished. Heckuva job, Georgie.