Iraq: World's Number One Oil Producer? - 7

The Modern Oil Drilling Rig

An old adage was "follow the money" when an investigator wanted to get to the bottom of some perplexing behavior.

To add to the adage list, Dredd Blog, in several related series of posts, has added a new adage "follow the oil."

If you want to know why certain foreign policies stay in place forever, for no apparent reason, follow the oil.

In this series, from the beginning we said the reason for the Iraq war was oil.

As as we hypothetically looked forward, we predicted a time when Iraq was likely to become the number one oil producer, even though it did not hold the greatest reserves, in terms of billions of barrels in the ground.

That Dredd Blog hypothesis is building strength, because Iraq will be the number two producer in OPEC by the end of the year:

Iraq, seeking to more than double oil output by 2015, is poised to overtake Iran as OPEC’s second- largest producer by the end of the year as sanctions hobble crude production in its Persian Gulf neighbor.

Iraq is pumping at the highest rate since Saddam Hussein seized power in 1979, supported by foreign investors such as Exxon Mobil Corp. and BP Plc (BP/) that are developing new fields and reworking older deposits.

(Bloomberg). Notice that the usual suspects, BP and ExxonMobil, are key culprits who pull the purse strings behind the scene.

A related series is: The Peak of The Oil Wars (see also Secret Afghanistan Underground).

The next post in this series is here, the previous post in this series is here.