Hmmm... A Coup D'Etat Gone Bad?

"Within weeks of the first inaugural, prominent Iraqi expatriates -- many with ties to U.S. industry -- were invited to secret discussions directed by Pamela Quanrud, National Security Council, now at the State Department. 'It quickly became an oil group,' one participant, Falah Aljibury. Aljibury is an advisor to Amerada Hess' oil trading arm and Goldman Sachs.

'The petroleum industry, the chemical industry, the banking industry -- they'd hoped that Iraq would go for a revolution like in the past and government was shut down for two or three days,' Aljibury told me. On this plan, Hussein would simply have been replaced by some former Baathist general.

However, by February 2003, a hundred-page blue-print for the occupied nation, favored by neo-cons, had been enshrined as official policy. 'Moving the Iraqi Economy from Recovery to Sustainable Growth' generally embodied the principles for postwar Iraq favored by Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and the Iran-Contra figure, now Deputy National Security Advisor, Elliott Abrams. The blue-print mapped out a radical makeover of Iraq as a free-market Xanadu including, on page 73, the sell-off of the nation's crown jewels: 'privatization… [of] the oil and supporting industries.'"

BAGHDAD COUP D'ETAT FOR BIG OIL