It's a shame this new graphic novel, "Iraqi Oil For Beginners", isn't available yet on the intertubes, I would have ordered a copy, I think it might end up being a collectable. The graphic novel format is clever too, a good way to get complex information to spread fast these days.

http://www.dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition_id=1&categ_id=4&article_id=87204

"I take myself as a case in point," says Sack. "I had no idea of the role played by oil companies in Mesopotamia and then Iraq."

Funded by the human-rights group Voices in the Wilderness, Sack began his project by piecing together accounts of the British occupation of Iraq in the 1920s, which led to evident parallels with the situation today.

"Below the surface of the occupation there's the maggoty corporate interest," he says. "It's sort of like a mathematical formula. I felt like this lineage needed to be put down on paper and become accessible."

Sack's graphic novel begins, perhaps inevitably, with the attacks of September 11, 2001, but then it quickly moves back 90 years to 1911, when Britain's Royal Navy converted its warships from using coal to oil, a pivotal point and catalyst for a growing and ever-increasing hunger for crude.

At the time, Britain had control of one of the first oil refineries in the world in western Iran, then known as Persia. A few years later, in 1914, Britain invaded and occupied Basra in southern Iraq. Sack leads his readers through the complicated creation of oil companies, the British determination of Iraqi borders after World War I and the maneuvering of multinational oil companies to obtain concessions in Iraq. The remaining third of the comic book is dedicated to the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq and the situation today, and in particular, the impending oil law.

Sack worked double-time to finish "Iraqi Oil for Beginners" because he felt it was essential to publish it before the hydrocarbon law passes, which will effectively privatize Iraqi oil reserves, giving control of Iraqi oil to foreign interests and in particular, to US oil companies. (Hassan Jumaa and others have played a central role in thus far successfully opposing US and British moves to privatize Iraq's oil.)