Fall 2002-January 2003: US State Departments and Former Oil Executives Plan Iraq’s Post-Invasion Oil Industry

The Bush administration picks Philip Carroll, a former CEO of Royal Dutch/Shell’s US division, to advise post-Saddam Iraq’s oil ministry. [Harper's, 4/2005, pp. 74-76] He is formally appointed in January 2003 along with Gary Vogler of ExxonMobil, three employees of the US Department of Energy, and an employee of the Australian government. In the months before the invasion, they are sent to Kuwait where they “begin planning for the restructuring of the ministry of oil to improve its efficiency and effectiveness [and] begin thinking through Iraq’s strategy options for significantly increasing its production capacity,” Carroll later explains. [Muttitt, 2005]