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GUEST: Antonia Juhasz, visiting scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies, author of The Bush Agenda: Invading the World, One Economy at a Time.

President Bush is expected to announce an increase in troops in Iraq tomorrow evening. Meanwhile, a proposed hydrocarbon law is quietly being introduced by the Iraqi government that would radically alter the nation’s oil industry. Iraq’s oil reserves are the third largest in the world and account for one-tenth of the world’s reserves – at an estimated 115 billion barrels. A draft of the controversial hydrocarbon law was obtained on Sunday by The Independent. The plan will allow foreign companies to profit from Iraq’s oil reserves in generous agreements binding for at least thirty years. Largely structured through so-called production-sharing agreements, or PSA’s, the law would enable foreign oil companies to gain a share of Iraq’s oil profits in return for investment in the industry’s infrastructure and operations. The leaked draft also shows plans for companies to take their profitable returns out of Iraq, tax and restriction free. If implemented, the hydrocarbon law would allow for the first large scale operations of foreign oil companies since Iraq nationalized its natural resource in 1972. Iraqi oil, long suspected of being an objective of the Bush and Blair administrations by anti-war critics, accounts for seventy percent of the nation’s economy.

Read Antonia Juhasz’s article, “Spoils of War: Oil, the U.S.-Middle East Free Trade Area and the Bush Agenda,” in the latest issue of In These Times magazine (Vol 31, Issue 01).