Former CBS News correspondent Jerry Landay reported in The Providence Journal on May 11, 2007: “The Big Five oil companies don’t proclaim it in their self-promoting institutional advertising campaigns. Yet the so-called ‘Majors’–U.S.-based Exxon-Mobil, Chevron, and ConocoPhillips; the Dutch Shell Oil; and the British-owned British Petroleum–would be the principal beneficiaries of a new hydrocarbon law before the Iraqi Parliament that the press rarely mentions. …The law would reverse a trend in which most major petro-nations have largely nationalized their oil fields and reserves. Under the proposed Iraqi law, concessions involving 63 Iraqi oilfields, both developed and undeveloped, would go to major foreign-oil companies, assuring them of dominance over Iraqi oil for a generation or more. Only 17 already developed fields would be directly controlled by a proposed Iraqi National Oil Company (INOC). [Energy watchdog group] Oil Change International states: ‘The law is a dramatic break from the past. Foreign oil companies will have a stake in Iraq’s vast oil wealth for the first time since 1972, when Iraq nationalized the oil industry. This law would essentially open two-thirds of known–and all of [Iraq’s] as yet undiscovered–reserves open to foreign control.’ According to Oil Change International, this amounts to 115 billion barrels of known oil reserves–10 percent of the world total.”
– Jerry Landay, “Iraq War Is All About Controlling The Oil,” The Providence Journal, May 11, 2007