There's been a lot of well-justified outrage among antiwar folks in the wake of George W. Bush's Jan. 10 announcement of his plan to send 21,500 additional US troops into the erstwhile Mesopotamia to secure that land for Western corporate hegemony. For the antiwar community, strategy will be crucial in the coming weeks as we begin our own escalation in the streets and in the offices, mailboxes and fax machines of our elected officials. Specifically, it's going to be crucial to remember, and make profoundly public, the Bush cabal's true motivations for the invasion and occupation of Iraq--as well as their proposed escalation of the occupation. We've always known The War was all about The Oil--and there's now fresh legal evidence in solid support of that theory.

This month, under the radar of the expected lofty rhetoric regarding Iraq, the Bush Bunch has quietly achieved a clever legal and economic victory in that country, even as they lose politically in the sphere of US public opinion and militarily in the streets of Baghdad. As reported on Jan. 7 by the London-based Independent, the US proxy government in Iraq is expected this month to approve a new "hydrocarbon law" heavily influenced and promoted by the Bush administration along with oil companies from the US and the UK. The new law, according to The Independent, will "radically redraw the Iraqi oil industry and throw open the doors to the third-largest oil reserves in the world" and "would allow the first large-scale operation of foreign oil companies in the country since the industry was nationalized in 1972."

Crucially, the proposed Iraqi hydrocarbon law, currently circulating as a 33-page draft, would give exploration and development rights to foreign oil companies such as Exxon Mobil, Chevron, BP and Shell--possibly for up to 30 years. And in the early stages of such exploitation (in every sense of the word), these companies would, under the proposed law, be allowed to take up to 75 percent of resulting oil profits, until they decide that their infrastructure investments have been repaid. Even afterwards, these companies could still take oil profits as high as 20 percent from Iraqi revenues. All of which casts such memorable Bush Bunch claims as "We did not do it [i.e., invade Iraq] for oil" (Colin Powell, July 10, 2003) in an ironic new light.

Bush himself did make brief mention of the proposed law in his Jan. 10 speech--but he shrewdly described it in feel-good terms as "legislation to share oil revenues among all Iraqis," rather than as legislation to essentially de-nationalize the Iraqi oil industry--thus finally eradicating one key reason for the Bush cabal's longtime vilification of Saddam Hussein's regime--and open it up to foreign investment and development.

A key element of the hydrocarbon law is a provision creating "production-sharing agreements," or PSAs--essentially arrangements between the Iraqi government and foreign companies that would maintain nominal state ownership of the Iraqi oil industry while giving a share of the profits to foreign companies that invest in the creation and operation of new infrastructure for oil production--something the Iraqi oil industry desperately needs after years of sanctions and war. All of which sounds almost benevolent, until one learns that much of the legislation was negotiated behind closed doors, with minimal input from "the Iraqi people," feel-good White House rhetoric notwithstanding.

(It's worth noting in passing that such PSAs are unprecedented in the Middle East. Saudi Arabia and Iran, respectively the world's number one and number two oil producers, still retain total and genuine state control of their oil industries. All of which emphasizes what a coup, so to speak, the proposed Iraqi hydrocarbon law would be for neoliberal capitalism and its advocates' ambitions in the Middle East. But I digress!)

So how does Bush's "surge" proposal relate to the proposed Iraqi hydrocarbon law? Apparently, the uncanny timing of the two proposals amounts to a mad dash by Big Oil to secure access to Iraqi oil resources before the US military is finally forced to leave Iraq by either the US Congress or the Iraqi resistance. One of the benefits of a "surge" unmentioned by Bush on Jan. 10 would seem to be the buying of time for Big Oil's negotiators on the ground in Iraq. James Paul, executive director of Global Policy Forum, a New York-based international peace and justice watchdog group, as quoted in The Independent, described the legislation, and the situation, bluntly:

"It's a mad rush to get something there. The [oil] companies are saying, 'Before any troops are withdrawn, we have to have these contracts.' "

Right now, there's a lot indeed that the antiwar community needs to pay critical attention to in the wake of Bush's Jan. 10 address--not the least of which is Bush's backdoor proclamation, cleverly buried in that speech, of war on Iran and Syria [see Geov Parrish's lead article in this issue for details--ed]. But let's not forget how the bottom line continues to figure into George W. Bush's insistence on pouring gasoline on the fire he's begun in the Middle East. He's said before that US troops won't leave Iraq "until the job is done."

Well, let's see: We got rid of the WMDs that were never there in the first place, and we've planted the seeds of democracy in Iraq--at least inside the Green Zone, I suppose. So how will we finally know when "the job is done"? My humble suggestion: Follow the money--and the legislation.