When the invasion of Iraq was complete, Bush appointed Gen. Jay Garner, who had successfully administered the Kurdish region between the wars (it's the only part of the country where the majority likes us) to run all of Iraq. He said the Bush plan to privatize and sell off everything in Iraq, especially the oil, would inflame resistance to the occupation:
He was right.
General Garner: In fact, I think you’d be hard pressed to go up north and convince the Kurds that all the… they had to be privatised. Now you can convince the Kurds that they don’t own the oil fields, but the privatisation? I don’t think you can do it, and that’s just one fight that you don’t have to take on right now....I’m a believer that you don’t want to end the day with more enemies than you started with.
VIDEO (about two minutes in) TEXT OF INTERVIEW CONTEXT
He was also fired.
Fast forward a couple of years, and Bush is pressing on the Iraqis an oil industry written Hydrocarbon Law that lets oil companies take up to 80% of Iraq's oil wealth out of the country. Iraqi scholars, oil workers, and former oil bureaucrats who have read the law strongly oppose it to the point that the oil workers are threatening to strike. The Bush picked Iraqi prime minister said Bush will fire him if the is Hydrocarbon Law isn't passed, and the Iraqi parliament has gone on vacation rather than vote on the law, knowing that if they passed it, it would earn them a bullet from the insurgents, and if they rejected it, Bush's displeasure could be at least as lethal.
When our elected officials and most of the media talk about the Hydrocarbon Law, they stick closely to how it divides oil income among the various Iraqi ethnic group and even made it a benchmark in the Iraq appropriation bill, but avoid like a spider any question of how the law divides the money between Iraqis as a whole and oil companies. A handful, like Dennis Kucinich and Jim McDermott have spoken out on this in Congress. If the rest of them were serious about ending the war, they would be talking about this every day and doing everything they could to let the Iraqis know we don't want to steal their wealth.
Iraqis know that oil is the primary and nearly only source of wealth in their country. If it is taken from them, they are essentially Bangladesh without the flooding.
Now ask yourself, what is going to make an Iraqi more likely to attack our troops: talk of a timeline for pulling out of Iraq, or a plan to rob their country for decades to come?
MORE OIL motive for IRAQ WAR resources
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