After listening to the monotonous and incredible U.S. lies for four years about "we are not there for Iraq’s oil," the oil truth is now unfolding. Without a decisive military victory, the U.S. occupation of Iraq seems to be about to grab its oil prize by establishing a new sharing arrangement between a major national producer and the multi-national giants, an arrangement that Washington plans to set as the model to be followed both by the oil-rich region and the world at large.

The reason that George W. Bush insists that "victory" is achievable in Iraq is not that he is deluded or isolated or ignorant or detached from reality or ill-advised. No, it’s that his definition of "victory" is different from others.Iraq not only has the world’s second largest oil reserves; it also has the world’s most easily retrievable oil. The cost-per-barrel of extracting oil in Iraq is among the lowest in the world because the reserves are relatively close to the surface.

This contrasts starkly with the expensive and risky lengths to which the oil industry must go to find new reserves elsewhere - witness the super-deep offshore drilling and cost-intensive techniques needed to extract oil form Canada’s tar sands.This is precisely what Cheney was getting at in his 1999 talk to the Institute of Petroleum. In a world of dwindling petroleum resources, those who control large reserves of cheaply produced oil will reap unimaginable profits - and command the heights of the global economy. It’s not just about profit, of course; control of such resources would offer tremendous strategic advantages to anyone who was interested in "full spectrum domination" of world affairs.

The new "hydrocarbon law" bill will "radically redraw the Iraqi oil industry and throw open the doors to the third-largest oil reserves in the world,". "It would allow the first large-scale operation of foreign oil companies in the country since the industry was nationalized in 1972." If the government’s parliamentary majority prevails, the law should take effect in March.

The law will give Exxon Mobil, BP, Shell and other carbon cronies of the White House unprecedented sweetheart deals, allowing them to pump gargantuan profits from Iraq’s nominally state-owned oilfields for decades to come. This law has been in the works since the very beginning of the invasion - indeed, since months before the invasion, when the Bush administration brought in Phillip Carroll, former CEO of both Shell and Fluor, the politically-wired oil servicing firm, to devise "contingency plans" for divvying up Iraq’s oil after the attack.

Once the deed was done, Carroll was made head of the American "advisory committee" overseeing the oil industry of the conquered land.From those earliest days until now, throughout all the twists and turns, the blood and chaos of the occupation, the Bush administration has kept its eye on this prize.

The new law offers the barrelling buccaneers of the West a juicy set of production-sharing agreements (PSAs) that will maintain a fig leaf of Iraqi ownership of the nation’s oil industry - while letting Bush’s Big Oil buddies rake off up to 75 percent of all oil profits for an indefinite period up front, until they decide that their "infrastructure investments" have been repaid. Even then, the agreements will give the Western oil majors an unheard-of 20 percent of Iraq’s oil profits - more than twice the average of standard PSAs.

Even if the new Iraqi government maintains nominal state control of its oil industry, there are still untold billions to be made in PSAs for drilling, refining, distributing, servicing and securing oilfields and pipelines.Likewise, the new Iraqi military and police forces will require billions more in weapons, equipment and training, bought from the US arms industry - and from the fast-expanding "private security" industry, the politically hard-wired mercenary forces that are the power elite’s latest lucrative spin-off. And as with Saudi Arabia, oil money from the new Iraq will pump untold billions into American banks and investment houses.

But that’s not all. For even in the worst-case scenario, if the Americans had to pull out tomorrow, abandoning everything - their bases, their contracts, their collaborators - the Bush power factions would still come out ahead.For not only has their already-incalculable wealth been vastly augmented (with any potential losses indemnified by US taxpayers), but their deeply-entrenched sway over American society has also increased by several magnitudes.

Iraqi and Iranian oil reserves are targeted per se, but clinching these assets out of national decision-making would also give Washington control over about 60 percent of the world’s conventional oil reserves located in essentially five countries in the Arabian Gulf region (described officially by Iran as "Persian").

Iran’s close proximity to these major oil resources and her balancing power in controlling access to them have made her the second major obstacle after Iraq that could block any U.S. strategic drive to gain control over them. In 2003, about 90% of oil exported from the Gulf transited by tanker through the Strait of Hormuz, located between Oman and Iran.

The Iraqi bill would allow for the first foreign exploitation of Iraqi oil reserves since the industry was nationalized in 1972. The introduction of PSAs would also be a first in the Middle East. Washington wants the Iraqi law to be the rule that has to apply across the oil-rich region as well as worldwide.Most members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) nationally control their oil industries through state-owned companies with no appreciable foreign collaboration.

Such an arrangement was impossible to pass through during the bi-polar world order, but has become possible following the collapse of the former USSR if the American uni-polar power could rein in the remnants of the ruling national liberation movements, or could topple them.Within this context only can the invasion and occupation of Iraq as well as the U.S.-Iranian current crisis be perceived. Since 1972 and 1979 respectively the U.S. was denied the banana-republics-styled free hand over Iraqi and Iranian oil assets.

Iraq was invaded and occupied while a regime change that would secure U.S. control is still in the works. Meanwhile Iran is being pressured and threatened with more sanctions and a military U.S. strike to change the regime in Tehran.The more vulnerable regional oil producers, as well as their counterparts in central Asia, would be wiser to do their best not to allow the draft Iraqi law to pass to be the future yardstick to determine their relations with the multi-national oil giants.

This may pre-empt a political and military environment synonymous to the one prevailing now in Iraq to be copied in Iran, which would inevitably lead to a gradual erosion or abrupt end to their beneficial current arrangements.Voluntarily or grudgingly getting along with Bush’s old or "new" strategies, would never spare them. They should reconsider because Iraq was the first target and they are the next targets; Iran also should reconsider in Iraq because she is "the" next target.

Major oil consumers in China, Japan and Europe should also be alerted to avert a possible U.S. suffocating monopoly or hegemony on oil resources at a time their as well as the American demand for oil is on the rise; their economic competition or cooperation with the U.S. will only be adversely compromised by Washington’s grip on the vital mineral that is driving their industrial economies.