U.S. companies already preparing to sell and eventually export Iraqi oil. U.S. government working on plan to privatize Iraq's oil for American and British companies:

A business once headed by Vice President Dick Cheney has gone from fixing Iraq's oil wells to actually running them, parlaying a no-bid federal contract into an increasingly lucrative deal to supply Iraq's emergency energy needs. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers on Wednesday disclosed this wider role for a subsidiary of Halliburton Co., Cheney's old company. This prompted criticism from some congressional critics who were under the impression that the company's job would be limited to putting out fires and repairing damage to Iraq's rich petroleum fields.

The agency said the subsidiary, KBR (Kellogg, Brown & Root), actually had been authorized under the original contract to operate and distribute oil produced in Iraq, but the Corps of Engineers played down that aspect of the deal in its initial communications with Congress and the media. For pumping oil from Iraq's oil fields and importing gasoline and propane from Turkey and other countries, Halliburton will receive $24 million, raising to $76.8 million the amount it will have received since being awarded the contract in March, said Scott Saunders, a spokesman for the Corps of Engineers.

Saunders said the Halliburton subsidiary now is pumping 125,000 barrels of oil a day, far short of the demand that is expected to reach 400,000 barrels a day this summer.

Asked if Cheney had anything to do with the awarding of the Halliburton no-bid contract, his press secretary, Jennifer Millerwise, said, "Nope." Halliburton spokeswoman Wendy Hall also said Cheney played no role. The Cheney-Halliburton connection has been a point of controversy almost from the day the Bush administration took office. Democrats said the Houston oil services company influenced the writing of the administration's energy plan in 2001 by a task force headed by the vice president. Attempts to obtain the records of the task force were rebuffed by the vice president, prompting a suit by the General Accounting Office that is still pending.

Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), ranking Democrat on the House Government Reform Committee, triggered the latest controversy when he questioned Halliburton's role as an operator and distributor of oil in Iraq in a letter to Lt. Gen. Robert Flowers, head of the Corps of Engineers. "The contract actually has a much broader scope than simply extinguishing oil well fires and repairing broken oil well infrastructure," Waxman wrote. The White House dismissed the criticism and added that Cheney has nothing to do with federal contracting. ...

Saunders said Halliburton will not export any Iraqi oil under its contract. But he added that when a second, competitive contract is awarded within the next four to nine months, the winning American bidder may be allowed to export Iraqi oil for a limited time. The Iraqis might be able to do their own exporting "if they can reconstitute their oil industry and bureaucracy quickly enough," said Saunders. But if not, the U.S. contractor could well be permitted to export Iraqi oil so that the country could generate revenues to help in the rebuilding process, he said.

Waxman questioned the wisdom of awarding a second, longer-term oil contract to an American corporation, saying that it "raised significant questions about the administration's intentions regarding Iraqi oil." He quoted presidential spokesman Ari Fleischer as saying: "The oil fields belong to the people of Iraq, the government of Iraq, all of Iraq. All the resources of Iraq need to be administered by the Iraqi people."

The United States is developing a plan to privatize Iraqi oil fields, according to administration officials, but progress on that initiative may be slow until Iraq gets a government in place and order is restored. At least in the short run, Halliburton will be doing the administering until the oil fields are ready to be turned over to the Iraqi government, said Saunders. He said it's not clear when this transfer will happen. ...

Chicago Tribune, "U.S. Pumped Up Halliburton Deal" by William Neikirk, May 8, 2003

It's Ironic that Halliburton gets such a great deal in the wake of our war against terror given its history of getting great deals with "terrorist" regimes themselves, including Iraq while Hussein was still in power.

In this article is the first explicit mention of the U.S. government making plans to privatize Iraq's oil that I've run across so far. Privatization of Iraq's nationalized oil fields was one of the primary motivations for the invasion.