Conspicuous by its absence from the ISG report was any mention of Iraq's oil reserves. That does not mean the US has lost interest in them.
The Iraq Study Group (ISG) notes in its report that "Ambassadors from [Iraq's] neighbouring countries told us that they fear the distinct possibility of Sunni-Shiite clashes across the Islamic world ... Such a broader sectarian conflict could open a Pandora's box of problems - including the radicalisation of problems, mass movements of populations and regime changes - that could take decades to play out."
But the ISG says nothing about the catastrophic implications of the Sunni-Shia violence on the oil supplies from the Persian Gulf containing three-fifths of the planet's reserves. The region produces two-fifths of the global output of 84m barrels per day (bpd). Most of it is exported and underpins the economies of the developed and developing countries.
While Iran and Iraq are Shia-majority states, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, accounting for nearly a third of the world's oil reserves, have Shia minorities. One out of 11 Saudi nationals is a Shia, as is every fourth Kuwaiti national.
During the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war, relations between Shias and Sunnis soured in Kuwait when its ruler, Shaikh Jaber III al Sabah, allied with Iraq. Following an unsuccessful assassination attempt on him, his government accused Iran of acting through local Shias. Tehran denied the charge.
In June 1986, Kuwait's petroleum complex at Mina Ahmadi suffered major fires. The saboteurs were almost certainly local Shias. Their action exacerbated Sunni-Shia tensions. To cool tempers, the ruler dissolved parliament, the only forum for open debate on national problems.
Saudi Shias are concentrated in the Kingdom's oil-rich eastern province, where one out of three nationals is a Shia. Many of them are employed in the oil industry which, at 11m bpd, is the largest producer in the world. The religious leaders of Wahhabis, a puritanical sect in Sunni Islam, who administer the Kingdom, hold Shias in low esteem. So Shias remain a marginalised, underprivileged minority.
Were the Sunni-Shia relations to turn hostile in Saudi Arabia, the chances of the oil industry becoming the focus of sabotage will rise sharply. With Saudi Arabia continuing to be among the top supplier of crude oil to the US, damage to the American economy would be considerable.
We have already seen how, when 15 of the 19 hijackers involved in the 9/11 attacks in the US turned out to be Saudi nationals, Washington-Riyadh relations suffered. One of the reasons for the Bush administration's invasion of Iraq was to reduce America's dependence on Saudi oil by facilitating the take-over of the Iraqi petroleum industry by US oil companies.
According to Falah al-Jibury, an Iraqi-American oil consultant, who had acted as President Ronald Reagan's back channel to Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq war, Washington began making plans for Iraq's oil industry within weeks of Bush taking office in January 2001. In an interview with the BBC's Newsnight programme on March 17 2005, he described his participation in secret meetings in California, Washington and the Middle East when, among other things, he interviewed possible successors to Saddam.
By January 2004, a plan for the Iraqi oil by the US state department and oil majors emerged under the guidance of Amy Jaffe of the James Baker Institute for Public Policy at Rice University, Houston. It recommended maintaining the present state-owned Iraq National Oil Company - to be opened up to foreign investment after its rehabilitation under US-approved Iraqi managers.
At the same time, the Pentagon planners, heavily influenced by neoconservatives, devised a secret plan which involved the sale of all Iraqi oil fields to private companies to increase output above the normal Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) quota for Iraq, in order to destroy OPEC.
The Pentagon's plan encountered resistance when Paul Bremer, the US pro-consul in occupied Iraq, faced opposition to denationalisation by Philip Carroll, appointed by Washington as the boss of the Iraqi oil industry. The White House also realised that privatising the oil industry would be a blatant violation of the Geneva conventions on war, which bar an occupying power altering the fundamental structure of the occupied territory's economy.
Then there was the vexatious problem of sorting out the 30 major oil development contracts that Saddam's regime had signed with companies based in Canada, China, France, India, Italy, Russia, Spain and Vietnam.
In Iraq, as the word about privatisation spread, there was an increase in the bombing of oil facilities and pipelines by the employees and their allies. With the insurgency taking off, such attacks surged. The pipeline from the Kirkuk oil field to the Turkish port of Ceyhan became inoperative.
The endorsement of the new Iraqi constitution by referendum in October 2005 buried the prospect of oil privatisation. Article 109 states that hydrocarbons are "national Iraqi property". That is, oil and gas will remain in the public sector.
That does not mean that Washington has lost interest in petroleum in Iraq, which has the third largest reserves in the world. Yet, by desisting from any mention of oil, the ISG is continuing the charade perpetrated by the Bush administration.
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