Boone, speaking to the newly formed Congressional Natural Gas Caucus, complained that the Iraqi government has awarded contracts to foreign companies, particularly Chinese firms, to develop Iraq’s vast reserves while American companies have mostly been shut out.<\/font><\/p>\n "They’re opening them (oil fields) up to other companies all over the world … We’re entitled to it," Pickens said of Iraq’s oil. "Heck, we even lost 5,000 of our people, 65,000 injured and a trillion, five hundred billion dollars<\/strong>."<\/font><\/p>\n President Barack Obama has pledged to withdraw U.S. troops in Iraq.<\/font><\/p>\n "We leave there with the Chinese getting the oil," Pickens said.<\/font><\/p>\n Iraq’s Oil Minister Hussain al-Shahristani told a Washington conference on Wednesday that his government was happy with the energy auction it held earlier this year. The auction was the first chance for foreign oil firms to compete for Iraqi oil since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003.<\/font><\/p>\n "We’re pleased with scale and participation of the IOC (International Oil Companies) and the transparent and public competition," Shahristani said at a U.S.-Iraq business and investment conference.<\/font><\/p>\n BP and the Chinese oil company CNPC were the only firms to win a contract in Iraq’s bid round this summer, the first chance for foreign oil firms to compete for Iraqi oil since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003. Seven other oil and gas fields failed to attract bidders on the terms Iraq offered… [emphasis added<\/em>]<\/font><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Inserted from <Common Dreams<\/a>><\/p>\n I cannot fathom why invading a nation, destroying their infrastructure, wrecking their economy, and killing hundreds of thousands of their citizens on the basis of lies formulated by the Crawford ChickenHawk and the GOP entitles US oil companies to oil contracts that they could not win competitively in the free market. Furthermore, Pickens\u2019 statement constitutes a de facto confirmation that the Bush\/GOP war for oil and conquest was really about oil, not freedom. For Pickens shames himself by invoking the losses suffered by our troops. They were used as cannon fodder by Bush and the GOP. And had we gotten oil contracts there, not a penny of the profits would have gone to compensate the wounded or families of the dead. Instead, Bush\/GOP cronies would have pocketed it all. How shameful!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When he was calling for clean energy, I was highly supportive of T. Boone Pickens, but I feel outrage over his latest statement. Oil tycoon T. Boone Pickens told Congress on Wednesday that U.S. energy companies are "entitled" to some of Iraq’s crude because of the large number of American troops that lost their lives […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-172","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","category-5-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/172","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=172"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/172\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=172"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=172"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=172"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"bigoil2\"](\"http:\/\/s217.photobucket.com\/albums\/cc83\/TomCat1948or2\/Blog%202009\/USFirmsEntitledtoIraqiOil_1824\/bigoil2.jpg\" "\\"bigoil2\\"")
<\/a> Oil tycoon T. Boone Pickens told Congress on Wednesday that U.S. energy companies are "entitled" to some of Iraq’s crude because of the large number of American troops that lost their lives fighting in the country and the U.S. taxpayer money spent in Iraq<\/strong>.<\/font><\/p>\n