But about 250 guerrilla attacks have blown apart pipelines and other oil infrastructure, squandering between $7 billion and $12 billion in potential export revenue. Experts say the losses, as much as $490 for each of the 26 million Iraqis, have hamstrung Iraq's development.
The country's sputtering oil revenues have fallen far short of prewar Bush administration predictions that Iraq could finance its own reconstruction.
''The country has been deprived of badly needed revenue to rebuild infrastructure, jump-start the economy and alleviate high unemployment,'' said Jamal Qureshi, an Iraq oil sector analyst for Washington-based consultancy PFC Energy.
More than $1 billion in Iraqi oil revenues also flowed to U.S. and British firms, who landed expensive contracts from the now defunct U.S.-led occupation authority, often without competitive bidding.
Halliburton Co., the oil services company that Vice President Dick Cheney once ran, landed 60 percent of the large contracts financed by Iraqi oil funds, audits show.
But Iraq's losses don't just affect Iraqis.
They also mean U.S. taxpayers must pay a larger share of the reconstruction, starting with the $18.4 billion approved by Congress last year. The American outlay, only $1 billion of which has been spent, comes despite pre-invasion predictions of Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, who said Iraqi oil could generate $50 billion to $100 billion over two or three years.
''We're dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction, and relatively soon,'' he told a House committee in March 2003.
But 19 months after the invasion, Iraq has generated just $17 billion, according to Oil Minister Thamer al-Ghadhban. At current rates, Iraqi oil sales might not reach $25 billion by Wolfowitz's two-year mark.
Al-Ghadhban estimated emergency repairs and lost revenue had cost the country $7 billion since exports resumed after the invasion, an amount equivalent to almost a third of this year's $22.4 billion national budget.
''There is an aggressive assault on our oil installations, and some of our people have been killed,'' said Sameer Jassim, spokesman for Iraq's Southern Oil Co. ''As a country that just came out of a war, we need the income to reconstruct the country."
