Not unprecedented

Word about the Iraqi Oil Law is dashing hither and yon. Pepe Escobar weighs in with his own special brand of opprobrium; always a good read. I was checking over the article by Antonia Juhasz and Raed Jarra, who offer the more detailed look at the law and examine much of what is excluded, which by legal implication means things that are permitted. However, they make a claim in the piece with which I must take issue:

It would be unprecedented for a sovereign country to have, for instance, an executive of ExxonMobil on the board of its key oil-and-gas decision-making body.

No, it is not unprecedented at all. In fact, the precedent is this very Bush administration and specifically Cheney's energy policy board, the so-called Energy Task Force, a policy board that comprised executives from many or most Big Oil corporations, to the exclusion of everyone else. To this day, the proceedings of those policy meetings remain secret at the behest of Dick Cheney. This was not a permanent body (although who knows? these guys may still be meeting secretly for all we know), it nonetheless created the model for Iraq's own Federal Oil and Gas Council, a body that seems designed primarily to look like it will take Iraqi national interests into account when, in fact, it will do no such thing.