"If the Iraqi Parliament refuses to pass the privatization legislation, Congress will withhold U.S. reconstruction funds that were promised to the Iraqis to rebuild what the United States has destroyed there."

So dianavan it is the US House of Representatives and the US Senate that want Iraqi oil privatised. Nothing to do with GWB then as both houses are Democrat controlled.

One thing is for certain the "big bad western oil companies" are dead set against privatisation. Check out what Philip Carroll's views on the subject were and still are. He was the former CEO of Shell Oil USA who took control of Iraq's oil production for the US Government a month after the invasion.

Current US Government thinking, or at least that dating back to 2004, are revealed in documents obtained from the State Department by Newsnight and Harper's Magazine under the US Freedom of Information Act. They called for creation of a state-owned oil company favoured by the US oil industry. It was completed in January 2004 under the guidance of Amy Jaffe of the James Baker Institute in Texas.

"Questioned by BBC Newsnight, Ms Jaffe said the oil industry prefers state control of Iraq's oil over a sell-off because it fears a repeat of Russia's energy privatisation. In the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, US oil companies were barred from bidding for the reserves.

Ms Jaffe says US oil companies are not warm to any plan that would undermine Opec and the current high oil price: "I'm not sure that if I'm the chair of an American company, and you put me on a lie detector test, I would say high oil prices are bad for me or my company."

The former Shell oil boss agrees. In Houston, he told Newsnight: "Many neo conservatives are people who have certain ideological beliefs about markets, about democracy, about this, that and the other. International oil companies, without exception, are very pragmatic commercial organizations. They don't have a theology."

So the final upshot would appear to be that International Oil Companies do not, nor ever have, favoured privatisation, the administration of GWB does not favour privatisation and in fact is pushing for Iraq's oil industry to be run on a nationalised basis and it is only the Democrat controlled US Congress that is pushing for privatisation - (Don't think so, I believe dianavan has, as she has done in the past, dug up some ancient article and resurrected it.)