'Mission Accomplished'

Despite being immensely unpopular, the Iraqi Government is throwing open the nation's oil fields to foreign investors. As we have seen, oil was the last thing to be economically 'liberalised' by the occupiers and Vichy Government:

Domestic firms, including SOC, are furious, however, that contracts are being awarded to their foreign counterparts.

Jaber Khalifa Jaber, head of the Iraqi parliament's oil and gas committee and a Fadhila MP, said Iraq is under threat from an "economic occupation".

"The companies will just share the oil between the Americans, the French, the British and the Japanese ... just like the Sykes-Picot agreement," he told AFP, referring to the Anglo-French accord that divided up influence in the Middle East in 1916.