Look who's back in charge of Iraqi oil

Crisis mounts while large refinery remains shut; cuts in fuel subsidies in the wake of policy-making demanded by IMF


US and US-puppet control of Iraq's oil industry has resulted in a failure to regain pre-invasion production levels. Meanwhile, Iraq's domestic fuel prices triple overnight.

According to a BBC report:

Iraqi Oil Minister Ibrahim Bahr al-Uloum has been temporarily released from his post amid a dispute over the government's petrol pricing policy. He is to be replaced for 30 days by Deputy Prime Minister Ahmed Chalabi.

Chalabi is the quintessential fraudster (see this Guardian story from April 2003 for full details, though Jordan has apparently forgiven Chalabi). Furthermore, no single human being is more responsible for generating the phony intelligence that led to war than Chalabi. There are plenty of stories on this, start here and here.

Corruption has been off the charts since the US took over international guardianship of Iraq's oil accounts in May 2003 with the passage of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1483. Billions of dollars literally have disappeared unaccounted since. This largely unreported scandal dwarfs in size and level of official corruption the much-ballyhooed irregularities of the Saddam-era Oil-for-Food program.

Deep Blade Journal has in the past covered aspects of this corruption here, here and here.

Now the whole Iraqi oil industry threatens to come apart over policies being insisted upon by the international financial class. Crime upon crime continue to be committed under the auspices of the US-Iraq regime.