Who will benefit from a war in Iraq?
U.S. oil companies would be among the first to benefit, through priority access to Iraq’s oil reserves, the second largest in the world. This access means not only increased supply of crude oil, but also enormous power in the global oil market, undermining that of Saudi Arabia and OPEC. In the late 1990s through 2002, Iraq signed contracts that would give French and Russian oil companies privileged access to Iraqi reserves once economic sanctions were lifted. The U.S. has used these contracts to pressure France and Russia in Security Council deliberations. The threat – hinted at by U.S. officials and made explicitly by leaders of the Iraqi opposition – was that a post-Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq would void the existing contracts, and that French and Russian companies would have no access to new oil leases if their governments stood in the way of U.S. plans. (The countervailing concern is that in the short term a war-driven drop in oil production could have serious economic consequenc
