History
The Iraqi oil industry had been completely nationalized by 1972. The government in the 1990s, under the presidency of Saddam Hussein, gave production share agreements (PSAs) to Russian and Chinese companies which gave a profit percentage of less than 10 percent.
The Bush administration hired the consulting firm BearingPoint to help write the law in 2004. The bill was approved by the Iraqi cabinet in February 2007. The Bush administration considers the passage of the law a benchmark for the government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki. One stumbling block was the unpopularity of the law, as it is perceived by the Iraqi people. An opinion poll conducted in 2007 by Oil Change International and other groups shows 63% of Iraqis surveyed would "prefer Iraq's oil to be developed and produced by Iraqi state-owned companies by foreign companies". This explains why the law had stalled in the Iraqi parliament.
Read more about this topic: Iraq Oil Law (2007)
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“A great proportion of the inhabitants of the Cape are always thus abroad about their teaming on some ocean highway or other, and the history of one of their ordinary trips would cast the Argonautic expedition into the shade.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“In history the great moment is, when the savage is just ceasing to be a savage, with all his hairy Pelasgic strength directed on his opening sense of beauty;—and you have Pericles and Phidias,—and not yet passed over into the Corinthian civility. Everything good in nature and in the world is in that moment of transition, when the swarthy juices still flow plentifully from nature, but their astrigency or acridity is got out by ethics and humanity.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“I believe that in the history of art and of thought there has always been at every living moment of culture a “will to renewal.” This is not the prerogative of the last decade only. All history is nothing but a succession of “crises”Mof rupture, repudiation and resistance.... When there is no “crisis,” there is stagnation, petrification and death. All thought, all art is aggressive.”
—Eugène Ionesco (b. 1912)