OPEC AND THE ECONOMIC CONQUEST OF IRAQ

WHY IRAQ STILL SELLS ITS OIL À LA CARTEL
TWILIGHT OF THE NEOCON GODS
Harper's
Monday Oct 24, 2005
By Greg Palast

By special arrangement with Harper's magazine, we are reproducing here for the first time the entire updated article on the US government's secret schemes for seizing control of the oil fields of Iraq.

...For months, the State Department denied the existence of this 323-page document ...


...The switch to an OPEC-friendly policy for Iraq was driven by Dick Cheney himself. "The person who is most influential in running American energy policy is the Vice President," who, said the insider, "thinks that security begins by . . . letting prices follow wherever they may."

Two and a half years and $202 billion into the war in Iraq, the United States has at least one significant new asset to show for it: effective membership, through our control of Iraq's energy policy, in the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), the Arab-dominated oil cartel.

Just what to do with this proxy power has been, almost since President Bush's first inaugural, the cause of a pitched battle between neoconservatives at the Pentagon, on the one hand, and the State Department and the oil industry, on the other. At issue is whether Iraq will remain a member in good standing of OPEC, upholding production limits and thereby high prices, or a mutinous spoiler that could topple the Arab oligopoly.