By: Greg Palast

Reporting for BBC Newsnight

03/17/05 - "BBC" - The Bush administration made plans for war and for Iraq's oil before the 9/11 attacks sparking a policy battle between neo-cons and Big Oil, BBC's Newsnight has revealed.

Two years ago today - when President George Bush announced US, British and Allied forces would begin to bomb Baghdad - protestors claimed the US had a secret plan for Iraq's oil once Saddam had been conquered.

In fact there were two conflicting plans, setting off a hidden policy war between neo-conservatives at the Pentagon, on one side, versus a combination of "Big Oil" executives and US State Department "pragmatists."

"Big Oil" appears to have won. The latest plan, obtained by Newsnight from the US State Department was, we learned, drafted with the help of American oil industry consultants.

Insiders told Newsnight that planning began "within weeks" of Bush's first taking office in 2001, long before the September 11th attack on the US.

While civilians in Fallujah, Mosul, Ramadi, Baquba, Baghdad, Haditha and other cities in Iraq continue to complain of being beaten, looted and humiliated by the members of the Iraqi Army who are members of both the Badr Organization and Kurdish Peshmerga, these militias now have the overt backing of the interim Iraqi "government."

It is also being reported that members of the Badr Organization, who are essentially running much of the "security" in southern Iraq at this point, have been instituting Sharia law. Thus, women are reporting being threatened with death or rape if they attend university, and more conservative clothing rules are being enforced.

Recently a Sunni cleric was assassinated in the south.

Harith al-Dhari, the head of the influential Sunni group the Association of Muslim Scholars (AMS), recently accused the Badr of killing members of the AMS, when he bluntly announced, "It is the Badr Brigades which is responsible for these killings."

One of my Iraqi friends here in Amman recently told me that Sunni who live in the south are being pressured by members of the Badr Organization to relocate elsewhere. It should also be noted that the Badr came back to Iraq on the heels of the invaders.

Campaigners focusing on debt relief welcomed the move. But the finance ministers' agreement contains a provision on privatization that has the potential to deliver to them more money than they wrote off.

The ministers reaffirmed in a statement at the end of their two-day meeting Saturday that "in order to make progress on social and economic development, it is essential that developing countries put in place the policies for economic growth." Among these, they must "boost private sector development, and attract investment," and ensure "the elimination of impediments to private investment, both domestic and foreign."