oilslick.jpgSpeaking of slick and oily lobbying interests, look which bad pennies turned up:

Two top Kurdish leaders are a long way from the mountains of northern Iraq this week.

On Monday night, Omer Fattah Hussain was the toast of a dinner held at the 10,000-square-foot McLean mansion of Ed Rogers, a Reagan White House political director and current chairman of the lobbying firm Barbour Griffith & Rogers. In an opulent living room just off an art-filled entryway with a curved double stairway, the deputy prime minister of the Iraqi Kurds’ autonomous region mingled with such luminaries as former assistant secretary of defense Richard Perle, former White House aide I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby and former White House press secretary Tony Snow.

Today, Hussain travels to Houston with Ashti Abdullah Hawrami, the Kurdish regional oil minister, to woo an even more important audience: U.S. oil companies.

After more than a year of political deadlock in Iraq over a national petroleum law, the Kurdistan Regional Government unanimously adopted its own petroleum legislation in August. In the past month, it has signed a dozen oil exploration contracts and hopes that foreign firms will ultimately invest $10 billion in the oil sector and bring 1 million barrels a day of new oil production from the Kurdish region over the next five years.

“Everyone is lining up . . . saying ‘I want a piece of this action,’ ” said Hawrami, who hopes to complete negotiations on two more deals in Houston.

Hawrami said the contracts posed no conflict with Iraq’s federal constitution. The Iraqi central government, however, is irate over the Kurdish contracts — and the State Department isn’t happy either. The Bush administration has been striving mightily over the past year to get a national petroleum law approved before international firms jump in….

Some of the recent signing activity may have begun when Dallas-based Hunt Oil, whose chief executive Ray L. Hunt is a member of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board and a major contributor to Bush’s campaigns, signed a contract in September. Smaller U.S. companies have followed suit….

Nope, no conflicts of interest here.  What a cozy soiree laden with George Bush and Dick Cheney’s pals and confidentes attempting to sway policy interests in the most oil-rich portion of Iraq:  Richard Perle and Scooter Libby, along with erstwhile Karl and Scooter talking head defender guy, Ed Rogers.  Wow, those wingnut welfare gigs sure do pay off in cocktail weenies, don’t they?  Ethics abound…talk about grooming the hands that cover your flanks, eh?

Tell me the one again where it isn’t all about the benjamins.  Or the oil.

(Photo via My Sideways World.)

UPDATE:  From John Anderson in the comments:

Yes, and guess who’s representing the Hunt Oil interests in the Kurdish autonomous region? Why, Baker Botts, of course.   Hey, you don’t even have to follow the benjamins on this one, you just have to follow the Baker Botts flag.   My old magazine, The American Lawyer, reports the story today in its December issue.  (emphasis mine)

Yes, as in James Baker.  Everyone sing, “it’s a small world after all…”  (If you haven’t read John’s book “Follow the Money,” you really should.)

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