An Irresponsible Plan

The Congresscritters are finally beginning to notice the hoi polloi who sent/are sending/will continue to send them to Washington, and several good people have come up with A Very Serious Plan [PDF] to end the war in Iraq.

It looks like a good one: humanitarian and economic help for Iraq [and lots of it], no permanent bases there, promote peace and unity amongst the warring factions, restore a bunch of our Constitutional rights here at home, health care for veterans, fix the GI bill, go after the war profiteers, and break up the media conglomerates while we're at it.

Then I read this: Iraq Study Group Recommendation 23:

The President should restate that the United States does not seek to control Iraq’s oil.

Uh oh. Why do we need to reassure everyone on this point? Because we're leaving in this little bit:

Assist the Iraqi government in achieving certain security, political, and economic milestones, including better performance on issues such as national reconciliation, equitable distribution of oil revenues, and the dismantling of militias.

"Equitable distribution of oil revenues" is code for "Y'all decide among yourselves how you're going to split up what little oil revenue you'll have left after we take the bulk of it."

The US wrote a new Constitution for Iraq and an Oil Law too, both of which go into great detail on how Iraq is supposed to handle our their oil riches. Of course, we rigged it so that the four biggest oil companies in the world, two of them American, the other two of them British, would likely get the bulk of the contracts for extracting that oil and the bulk of the revenues from selling that oil. The remaining revenues are to be split equitably based on the population distribution in the country instead of where the oil fields are, because a large expanse, controlled primarily by the Sunnis, has no oil to speak of.

Also, in that same section of The Plan [page 13] are Support the unity and territorial integrity of Iraq and Help Iraq reach a mutually acceptable agreement on Kirkuk because the Kurds in the North want to go off and contract their oil drilling to some companies that aren't among The Approved Big Four Anglo-Americans, and the Shiites in the West will probably want to team up with Iran to sell their oil to China. Lord knows we can't have that.

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