There might be less blood

Less than 2 years after Saddam Hussein's death, and decades of being blocked out of his country's oil empire, Exxon Mobil, Shell, Total, and BP are negotiating no-bid contracts with Iraq's Oil Ministry to once again begin servicing their fields.

While Iraqi law is pending in Parliament, these companies, who have been advising the Ministry for "free", will not be given drilling contracts, but will aid in technology and management of this poorly run operation. Their cooperation will likely lead to first dibs on contracts a few years down the road, where new fields are assumed to be immensely profitable.

Iraq's current oil output of about 2.5 million barrels a day is expected to increase to 3 million in the short term, and perhaps 6 million when new territories are tapped.

As printed by Andrew Kramer of the NYTimes:
There was suspicion among many in the Arab world and among parts of the American public that the United States had gone to war in Iraq precisely to secure the oil wealth these contracts seek to extract. The Bush administration has said that the war was necessary to combat terrorism. It is not clear what role the United States played in awarding the contracts; there are still American advisers to Iraq’s Oil Ministry.

So, now that Saddam Hussein is dead, The U.S. can "advise" Iraq's Oil Ministry to boost productivity by welcoming back Western oil companies to create a certain surplus in their GDP that they can only spend on outsourced reconstruction plans to boost the global economy, hopefully strengthen the U.S. dollar once again, and bring our gas prices down maybe a dollar by 2010, which is still more than we were spending before the war on terror.

Awesome.