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Abstract
'It has nothing to do with oil, literally nothing to do with oil', said US Defense Secretary Rumsfeld in 2002, of the planned attack on Iraq. Politicians and conservative commentators in the United States and United Kingdom were insistent on this point, even while it felt obvious to many in their countries, and in Iraq itself, that oil objectives were central. This article will review what we now know about discussions of oil that took place during the war planning and execution, based on documents that have been released in the fifteen years since. It will examine the nature of the strategic objectives, how the US and UK governments planned to achieve them and how they decided to talk about them in public. Reflecting on this evidence will allow us to revisit the question: was oil a major reason for the war?

This article analyses the problems inherent in the long-term oil production contracts proposed by Iraq's draft oil law. The article examines means by which oil companies attempt to avoid risk: price risk, security risk and political risk. Meanwhile, the same companies insist on securing
the corresponding upside: the chance of ever-higher profits. As these risks are externalized to the host state, respectively they impact on revenues, the human rights of the state's citizens and the state's sovereignty to manage its natural resources, or even to pass legislation. The article
examines the use of such contracts in a number of countries, focusing especially on the Middle East, and on the contracts signed by former Soviet republics in the 1990s during their own period of rapid change. The article proposes some contractual mechanisms with precedents which might limit
these problems. However, the current draft oil law is a permissive one, which empowers the executive branch of government to sign away as much as it chooses, with few restrictions to protect the public interest, nor any requirement for further parliamentary approval. The conclusion is that
the prospects for contracts signed in the current circumstances in particular, the occupation, the security situation and political fragmentation do not look good.