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Who will ask him?

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Outside View: Petraeus' promise to Big Oil
Published: April 8, 2008 at 2:35 PM

~SNIP~

The general needs to be asked which companies he talked to and what military information he may have imparted when he made these extraordinary calls, which may well violate military regulations, trying to clinch the deal that U.S. troops staked out when they chased looters out of the Oil Ministry five years ago and surrounded it with barbed wire.

Petraeus also needs to be asked whether his apparent security assurances to the oil majors had anything to do with the disastrous attempt by Maliki's troops starting in late March to try to get control of the oil center of Basra in southern Iraq. This military fiasco and human-rights atrocity was launched only a few days after Cheney "held one-on-one meetings with Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish leaders in Iraq to speed passage of a law opening Iraq's enormous petroleum reserves to more efficient production by global oil companies," according to the Wall Street Journal.

Petraeus should also be questioned on whether he has endangered his troops by being so willing to work publicly with the oil companies, given the resistance of the Iraqi people to losing practical control of their oil to the oil firms. This is the goal of the oil law that Cheney was pushing in Baghdad, and many Iraqis, including the oil workers in Basra, know this very well and have condemned the proposed law.

With Iraqis refusing to fight each other to capture Basra for Maliki and his U.S. sponsors, U.S. airstrikes and British troops have had to be used to save Maliki's bacon. This may portend the United States setting up oil protection zones for drilling, production, pipelines and shipment of oil out of Iraq, assuring oil flow -- and big oil profits -- regardless of how much violence may be wracking the country.

http://www.upi.com/International_Security/... /

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