The Spoils Of War

Floor Speech

In Iraq, after thousands upon thousands of lost lives and hundreds of thousands of disabling injuries, after a trillion dollars of U.S. treasure added to our Nation's debt, after an incalculable amount of U.S. prestige being lost, one aspect about Iraq remains defining: It's all about oil and the spoils of oil across that region.

Exxon, the largest U.S. oil company, with profits totaling $40.6 billion in 2008--a record--just got its first contract inside Iraq. Foreign oil companies like Exxon were thrown out of that country four decades ago when Saddam Hussein nationalized Iraq's oil fields.

Michael Klare, in his prescient book about resource wars, ``Blood and Oil,'' connects the dots. What a shame our world is so primitive, people brutally fight over diminishing resources as global energy extraction giants advantage themselves, far from home, in the wake of our soldiers, tapping largesse these oil giants covet.

Iraq ranks fourth in global oil reserves behind Saudi Arabia, Canada, and Iran. Iraq's central government is now picking winners in the great oil prize bonanza--the ``Iraqi Oil Contracting Rush of 2009.'' Oil has dominated Iraq's economy for generations. Oil has traditionally provided more than 90 percent of that country's exchange earnings, and that is likely to be the case for a few decades to come until it's all sucked dry.

According to the Washington Post, the oil ministry is expected to hold a new bidding round in December for undeveloped fields. Those are also for service agreements. Oil giants hope the deals could one day lead to production-sharing deals, long a goal of energy firms that have been shut out of the Middle East for years.

The oil giants, Exxon-Mobil and Royal Dutch/Shell, signed a $50 billion deal with Iraq to extract oil from the Western Qurna oil field, one of Iraq's largest oil fields located north of Rumaila field, west of Basra in southern Iraq. Western Qurna is believed to hold 11 to 15 billion barrels of recoverable reserve. This prize of a deal gives Exxon-Mobil, Shell and their partners $1.90 per barrel above the current production rate of 2.5 million barrels per day, and they hope to increase production to 7 million per day over the next 6 years, meaning a windfall of $3.1 billion per year.

Are the lives of our soldiers worth it? The giant Exxon Mobil/Shell consortium beat out the other oil giant consortiums, led by Russia's LUKOIL, France's Total and a consortium led by China's CNPC. Dictators have come and gone, foreign armies have come and gone, some still remain.

One thing remains constant about Iraq. Oil is still the big prize. That is why American and European oil company giants going all the way back to the Ottoman Empire have coveted control of their crude. Cynics would even say they have been willing to go to war over it. As we observe the continuing rush to the oil fields by a world that must transition to a greener and sustainable energy future, one must ask the tough question, Are the lives of our noble military going to be expended--for how long?--far away from home to access a resource that is diminishing globally while America's Treasury is emptied, supporting wars in foreign places to tap a resource that, by 2050, will be gone, never to return again.

Civilized people should demand more than fighting resource wars of the past for an oil giant's prizes, for limited remaining time on this planet. It's time to think hard about where we have extended our most precious assets and to say, It's time to come home.

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