Iraq says needs U.S. help despite big oil earnings

By Tom Doggett

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Even though Iraq is attracting more foreign investment and will earn billions of dollars this year from oil exports, the country will still have to rely on the United States to help pay for its reconstruction costs, a top Iraqi government official said on Friday.

"We never have enough (money). To reconstruct Iraq will require $200 to $300 billion," Fawzi Al-Hariri, Iraq's minister of industry and minerals, told Reuters. "We will still need assistance from the U.S., there is no doubt we will."

In an interview following a speech to the U.S.-Arab Economic Forum in Washington, Hariri said the United States is spending billions of dollars on rebuilding Iraq "based on a U.S. decision that it's for its national security."

"We can't tell the U.S. government not to. We would welcome anything that is done," Hariri said. "It would make the experiment succeed," he said, apparently referring to the Bush administration's efforts to bring democracy to Iraq.

With oil prices forecast to stay above $100 a barrel for the rest of this year, some U.S. lawmakers have called on Iraq to pay for more of its reconstruction costs.

Iraq, which is a member of OPEC and has the world's third-biggest oil reserves, earned $38 billion in oil export revenue last year. For 2008, the country has already raked in $20 billion from oil shipments just through April, according to the U.S. Energy Department.

Hariri acknowledged that Iraq was earning more money from its oil and that the country should do a better job of allocating how it is spent. "We just need to be better at managing those revenues," he said.

He said Iraq could also more effectively coordinate reconstruction efforts with the United States "to make every dollar that is spent in Iraq a greater benefit than possibly it is at the moment."

(Reporting by Tom Doggett, editing by Matthew Lewis)