What We're Fighting for in Iraq and Why We're Not Winning Yet

Oil, it's only about oil:

Since our invasion in 2003, the US has encouraged Iraq to come up with an oil law that would turn the state-owned oil system over to foreign oil companies. Such a law would allow Production Sharing Agreements, called PSAs to be signed with Exxon, Chevron, BP and Shell to capture and control all the oil production from new fields and reap a large share of the profits for the next 15 to 30 years.

So long as a well-organized insurgency has seriously challenged foreign occupation, there has seemed little chance that the major oil companies would risk bringing their exploration, drilling and production crews into this dangerous and unstable country. The very divided government in Baghdad made little progress for three years towards such a law that would divide up future oil revenues amongst the contending factions and spell out what share of the profits could be safely handed over to foreign exploiters without getting government officials hanged in the streets. The N.Y. Times now reports (20 January 2007)[1] that a cabinet level committee in Baghdad has finally produced a draft oil law that offers up Iraq's vast oil fields for foreign exploitation. US and Iraqi officials are moving for quick approval by parliament. The draft has been prepared in secret, and has not been published or debated in parliament. While only members of a small cabinet committee have actually even seen the draft, contending factions such as the Kurdish Regional Government[2] and the Iraq Trade Unions Council[3] have already begun to denounce it.