real reason for Iraq

The Hunt Oil deal with the Kurds(Ray Hunt of Hunt Oil, one of George W. Bush's Texas chums), one of several pending oil contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars, may have put the last nail in the coffin of the US effort to force Iraq to rewrite its oil laws.

Like the Biden resolution and the Blackwater shooting, the Hunt deal unleashed pent-up anger among Iraqi Arab leaders, who called the deal illegal, since under current Iraqi law only the central government in Baghdad, not the Kurds, can approve oil deals.

The nationalization of Iraq's oil in 1972 by Saddam Hussein, after a decades-long struggle between Iraq and the Anglo-American oil cartel, was a landmark event, the first major oil nationalization in the region since the Iranian government of Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh took over the British oil interests there and, for his efforts, was toppled in 1953 by a CIA-engineered coup inspired by that cartel.

In Arab Iraq, if not in Kurdistan, the national oil industry is sacrosanct. If the United States intended to confirm Iraqis' belief that the invasion was about grabbing their country's oil, the US effort to open up the industry to foreign investors is perfectly designed to do so.

The real reason the US is in Iraq is about getting the republican oil barons to control and benefit from Iraq's oil, pure and simple.