"...the real players are the major service companies - guess who they are Bobert - they are Halliburton; Schlumberger; Fluor and Bechtel - all American..."
A little late to set the record straight, but Schlumberger is a French company.
BTW, NPR ran an interview with an expert on privatizing military matters last week. I was shocked to hear of another case in which Brown and Root, a subsidiary of Haliiburton, had received a contract worth over a $1 billion that did not go through normal procurement procedures. It seems that the Clinton administration couldn't support the peacekeeping mission in Bosnia without calling up reservists, difficult with the mission so unpopular in the US. So they awarded Brown and Root the contract sole source to get it done quickly and keep it under Congress's radar. Shocking. I didn't know Cheney and Clinton were that close.
Finding a map of Iraqi reserves on their papers is news, but hardly a smoking gun. You can't evaluate world wide production if you don't have the information. They had similar maps for Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Have we invaded them and someone forgot to tell me? From the AP story:
Tom Fitton, the group's (Judicial Watch) president, said he had no way to guess what interest the task force had in the information, but "it shows why it is important that we learn what was going on in the task force."
"Opponents of the war are going to point to the documents as evidence that oil was on the minds of the Bush administration in the run-up to the war in Iraq," said Fitton. "Supporters will say they were only evaluating oil reserves in the Mideast, and the likelihood of future oil production."
The task force report was released in May 2001. In it, a chapter titled "Strengthening Global Alliances" calls the Middle East "central to world oil security" and urges support for initiatives by the region's oil producers to open their energy sectors to foreign investment. The chapter does not mention Iraq, which has the world's second largest oil reserves after Saudi Arabia.