Six key questions for the future of Iraq - and its oil

In a week, the new Iraqi government takes charge of the world's second largest pool of oil. That's important not only to the Iraqis, but to motorists and other oil consumers around the world.

It is sometimes alleged that the real reason the United States invaded Iraq was to control that nation's petroleum. But if that was a hope of some neo- conservatives and US oil industry executives, the war has so far failed to achieve that objective.

Indeed, Iraq's new oil minister, Samir Ghadban, talks of taking back full sovereignty over the oil wealth July 1, of reestablishing the Iraqi National Oil Co.'s vital role in production as it used to be before Saddam Hussein, and of dismissing all US and other outside advisers, according to an interview in the London-based Financial Times.

Such words don't seem to disturb Washington. Officials there speak of "a lot of respect" for Mr. Ghadban, a British-educated technocrat who is a Shiite, and they call him "a man who knows how to get things done."

Ghadban has been talking for months to many people about how to manage his nation's oil resources, and of making some structural reforms to improve the oil industry's efficiency.

Despite a new round of sabotage, Ghadban figures that oil will still produce $16 billion in revenues this year. Today's high price of oil has meant the Coalition Provisional Authority, the US-led occupation body, has had an extra $2.5 billion on top of its original budget to spend on security and development.

Up to now, the Iraqis have striven to bring their oil industry back to its pre-war production levels. Now the oil ministry faces major questions about the long-term future of Iraq's oil industry. The actual decisions are expected to await the government to be elected seven months from now. Here are the big questions.

1. Will the oil ministry invite foreign oil companies, with their capital and technical expertise, to search for and develop new oil fields and build infrastructure, thereby opening the door for US firms? Or will it leave that work to the Iraqi National Oil Co. with its skilled workers? Or will it be a mixture of both?

2. How will the oil revenues be used? At the moment, Iraq's oil revenues go into a development fund created under a United Nations resolution. Next week the Iraqis, not the occupation regime, decide how to use that fund to pay for repairs of power grids, schools, and other needs.

3. How much of the oil revenues will be used to pay off Iraq's massive debts? Already, 5 percent of that development fund is allotted to pay reparations for damage and casualties from Iraq's 1990 invasion of Kuwait. Some $48 billion in claims have been accepted, and $18 billion paid on them. Another $80 billion in claims have yet to be adjudicated by a UN compensation commission.

When that's finished, perhaps by the end of this year, Iraq will owe about $46 billion in compensation, calculates Bathsheba Crocker, an expert at the Center for International and Strategic Studies in Washington.

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