Iraq: Future Strategic Relationship

The Iraqi Government will decide for themselves what they want to do with their oil industry, and quite properly so. If they need the expertise which, in my view, they do need in order to start tapping great oilfields such as the north and south Rumaylah fields, which are some of the most benign oil-bearing structures in the world, and if they are to repair the appalling damage done by the racketeers of Saddam Hussein and Jacques Chirac to those structures in order to rip easy money out of them, they will need the BPs of this world. They will need Esso. They will need companies that know how to do those things. The fact that the oilfields happen to be owned by a state Government does not mean that the necessary expertise is in place, and it is doctrinaire madness to say that the expertise of those companies should not be brought in. That is not the way in which to rebuild the oil and gas industries in Iraq; and they need to be rebuilt, because that is how we will get people back to work in cities such as Basra. It is clear to me that the people of Basra themselves understand that, after the sacrifice of many lives—the lives of British soldiers, American soldiers and, most, important, Iraqi soldiers—they now have within their grasp the opportunity to express themselves as entrepreneurs, as they have done in the past. Basra was always regarded as one of the places to which people wanted to go in the Gulf, and it will become that again. All the small businesses that are springing up in Basra will grow and sustain the economy of Basra and its great surrounding region. I am confident that Basra will again become the great entrepôt of the whole region, not just Iraq, and that the communication spine that runs through Iraq up to Irbil and the cities of the Kurdish-administered area will become the gateway to that part of the middle east. That, I believe, will bring prosperity and peace to the region—and God knows, it needs them.