Posted by Wymark on 11/6/2009, 2:48 pm, in reply to "Remember that 'secret' Iranian nuclear facility . . . "
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From todays BBC Online:
'Iraq has struck a deal with a consortium led by US oil giant Exxon Mobil, and including Royal Dutch Shell, to develop the West Qurna 1 oil field.
This is the second major deal the country's oil ministry has agreed with overseas oil firms this week.
The latest deal, which needs cabinet approval, is designed to boost oil production at the Qurna oil field from 280,000 to 2.1 million barrels a day'.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/8344067.stm
Other oil/gas deals have already been signed by British Petroleum and Shell.
Worth keeping in mind a couple of quotes from the past:
'While many regions of the world offer great oil opportunities, the Middle East, with two thirds of the world’s oil and the lowest cost, is still where the prize ultimately lies. Even though companies are anxious for greater access there, progress continues to be slow'.
Dick Cheney, in a speech at the Institute of Petroleum, 1999.
'The Iraq war was just the first of this century's "resource wars", in which powerful countries use force to secure valuable commodities, according to the UK government's former chief scientific adviser . . .
. . . "Future historians might look back on our particular recent past and see the Iraq war as the first of the conflicts of this kind - the first of the resource wars," he told an audience of 400 in London as he delivered the British Humanist Association's Darwin Day lecture . . .
. . . Implicitly rejecting the US and British governments' claim they went to war to remove Saddam Hussein and search for weapons of mass destruction, he said the US had in reality been very concerned about energy security and supply, because of its reliance on foreign oil from unstable states. "Casting its eye around the world - there was Iraq," he said . . .
. . . King was the UK government's chief scientific adviser in the run-up to the start of Iraq war in March 2003, but said he did not express his view of its true motivation to Tony Blair. "It was certainly the view that I held at the time, and I think it is fair to say a view that quite a few people in government held," said King, who is now director of the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment at Oxford University'.
David King, U.K. governments chief scientific advisor at the time of the invasion, in a speech made in February 2009.
