"The Iraq war is largely about oil." If any more confirmation were needed of Alan Greenspan's admission, the Iraqi government is preparing to hand out oil deals to American and British firms in contracts drafted by US officials.
The contracts make it harder to make the argument that the war was not about oil, the Guardian's Seamus Milne claims.
He reminds us that Tony Blair dismissed talk of war for oil as a "conspiracy theory". Now the New York Times has discovered that new oil contracts were drawn up with the help of the US state department.
The contracts are expected to go to Exxon Mobil, Shell, BP, Total and Chevron.
The NYT might have slapped some kind of "'we wuz wrong" label on such stories says blogger Tom Engelhardt. "Remember when the mainstream media, the Times included, seconded the idea that Bush's invasion, whatever it was about, wasn't about oil," he writes.
He adds: "After all that blood, American and Iraqi, has been spilled, here comes the oil."
It all echoes the film There Will Be Blood and its depiction of the oil tycoon, Daniel Plainview, who will stop at nothing to get at the stuff, according to Bill Moyers and Michale Winship on Truthout.
The specialist oil blogger Greg Muttit also smells a rat. He says such technical service contracts, of the kind being awarded, usually go to specialist contractors. "In no other country are the likes of BP or ExxonMobil carrying out such TSCs."
US vice-president Dick Cheney once pledged that Iraq's oil resources belonged to the Iraqi people . Does that promise still hold?
