[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 155 (2009), Part 20]
[House]
[Pages 27854-27855]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                           THE SPOILS OF WAR

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentlewoman from Ohio (Ms. Kaptur) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Ms. KAPTUR. 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.

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  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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