Spiraling oil prices are the result of US maneuvering ahead of presidential elections, newspapers in Baghdad said Sunday, stressing that Iraqi oil will remain outside the realm of Washington's influence.
"There is more than one sign that the United States is responsible for this phenomenon (of high oil prices)," Al-Jumhuriya newspaper said, calling it an "electoral maneuver" before the US presidential elections in November.
Oil prices have spiked at record highs recently, leading the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) to announce a release of more crude into the market and forcing Washington to dip into its emergency reserves for the first time since the 1991 Gulf War to cool prices.
Iraq, which produces three million barrels per day (bpd), of which 2.4 million bpd are exported, is determined to keep its crude "safe from US influence, to create a multipolar world and not a unipolar one as Washington wants," the Babel newspaper said.
Babel, headed by the eldest son of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, Uday, also saw high oil prices as a "political maneuver with colonialist objectives, led by the complicity of oil-producing countries in the pay (of the United States)."
The goal of such a maneuver is "to weaken OPEC", the paper said, adding that Iraq, hit by 10 years of crippling sanctions, would remain an important player on the oil market.
"The world will not reach an oil self-sufficiency without oil from Iraq," home to the world's second largest reserves and on which "the United States is looking to get its hands on, like oil in the Gulf, to confirm its hegemony in the world," Babel said – BAGHDAD (AFP)
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