Oil tycoon T. Boone Pickens told Congress on Wednesday that U.S. energy companies are “entitled” to some of Iraq’s crude because of the large number of American troops that lost their lives fighting in the country and the U.S. taxpayer money spent in Iraq.
Boone, speaking to the newly formed Congressional Natural Gas Caucus, complained that the Iraqi government has awarded contracts to foreign companies, particularly Chinese firms, to develop Iraq’s vast reserves while American companies have mostly been shut out.
“They’re opening them (oil fields) up to other companies all over the world … We’re entitled to it,” Pickens said of Iraq’s oil. “Heck, we even lost 5,000 of our people, 65,000 injured and a trillion, five hundred billion dollars.”
Because the Iraqis asked us to invade, create a civil war, and set off a chain of events that killed somewhere between 100,000 and 1,000,000 of them, all while driving another million of so out of the country.
I’m not sure what it is about the oil bidness, but it does appear that they attract more than their share of sociopaths: T. Boone Pickens, Dick Cheney, John D. Rockefeller, the bin Laden clan, the royal families of the UAE and Kuwait, and (of course) the House of Saud, just to name a few.