Victory is indeed at hand, and is being offered to Bush on a
plate by the Democrats, in the war appropriations bill they passed with
such
self-congratulatory fanfare
last week in a supposed slap in the face for Bush. As Behan notes,
Bush, for all his veto-threatening bluster, could well sign the bill in
the end, because it does give him what he really wants: the
enshrinement of the "oil law" as the ultimate "benchmark." In this
measure, the Democrats have joined Bush in pressuring the Iraqi
government into passing the law -- or else the Americans will stop
propping up the Maliki regime -- and find a more pliable puppet.
Excerpts:
If
passed, the law will make available to Exxon/Mobil, Chevron/Texaco,
BP/Amoco, and Royal Dutch/Shell about 4/5’s of the stupendous petroleum
reserves in Iraq. That is the wretched goal of the Bush Administration,
and in his speech setting the revenue-sharing “benchmark” Mr. Bush
consciously avoided any hint of it.
The legislation pending now
in Washington requires the President to certify to Congress by next
October that the benchmarks have been met-specifically that the Iraqi
hydrocarbon law has been passed. That’s the land mine: he will certify
the American and British oil companies have access to Iraqi oil. This
is not likely what Congress intended, but it is precisely what Mr. Bush
has sought for the better part of six years.
It is why we went to war.
We
must disagree with Mr. Behan on one point here: the enshrinement of the
oil law is very likely precisely what Congress intended. As noted often
here, America's imperial right to secure the lion's share of the
world's resources – by any means necessary – has long been a basic,
bipartisan assumption of U.S. foreign policy for decades. After all,
was it not the saintly Jimmy Carter who first openly declared that
America would go to war in the Middle East if "our" oil supplies there
were threatened? But it's true that the Bushists have taken this policy
to new heights of naked gangsterism. Behan describes it well:
Planning
for the two wars was underway almost immediately upon the Bush
Administration taking office–at least six months before September 11,
2001. The wars had nothing to do with terrorism. Terrorism was
initially rejected by the new Administration as unworthy of national
concern and public policy, but 9/11 gave them a conveniently timed and
spectacular alibi to undertake the wars. Quickly inventing a catchy
“global war on terror” theme, the Administration disguised the true
nature of the wars very cleverly, and with enduring success.
The
“global war on terror” is bogus. The prime terrorist in Afghanistan and
the architect of 9/11, Osama bin Laden, was never apprehended, and the
President’s subsequent indifference is a matter of record. And Iraq
harbored no terrorists at all. But both countries were invaded, both
countries suffer military occupation today, both are dotted with
permanent U.S. military bases protecting the hydrocarbon assets, and
both have been provided with puppet governments.
And a billion
dollar embassy in Baghdad is under construction now. It will be the
largest U.S. embassy in the world by a factor of ten. It consists of 21
buildings on 104 acres, six times larger than the United Nations
compound in New York city, larger than Vatican City. It will house a
delegation of more than five thousand people. It will have its own
water, electric, and sewage systems, and it is surrounded by a fortress
wall of concrete fifteen feet thick. For an Administration committed to
fighting terrorism with armies and bombs, that’s far more anti-terror
diplomacy than a tiny country needs. There must be another purpose for
it.
In the first two months of the Bush Administration two
significant events took place that preordained the Iraqi war. Vice
President Cheney’s Energy Task Force was created, composed of federal
officials and oil industry people. By March of 2001, half a year before
9/11, the Task Force was poring secretly over maps of the Iraqi oil
fields, pipe lines, and tanker terminals. It studied a listing of
foreign oil company “suitors” for exploration and development
contracts, to be executed with Saddam Hussein’s oil ministry. There was
not a single American or British oil company included, and to Mr.
Cheney and his cohorts that was intolerable. The final report of the
Task Force was candid: “… Middle East oil producers will remain central
to world security. The Gulf will be a primary focus of U.S.
international energy policy.” The detailed meaning of “focus” was left
blank.
The other event was the first meeting of President Bush’s
National Security Council, and it filled in the blank. The Council
abandoned abruptly the decades-long attempt to resolve the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and set a new priority for Middle East
foreign policy instead: the invasion of Iraq. This, too, was six months
before 9/11. “Focus” would mean war.
By the fall of 2002, the
White House Iraq Group-a collection not of foreign policy experts but
of media and public relations people-was cranking up the marketing
campaign for the war. A contract was signed with the Halliburton
Corporation-even before military force in Iraq had been authorized by
Congress-to organize the suppression of oil well fires, should Saddam
torch the fields as he had done in the first Gulf War. Little was left
to chance.
The oil industry is the primary client and top-ranked
beneficiary of the Bush Administration. There can be no question the
Administration intended to secure for American oil corporations the
rich petroleum resources of Iraq: 115 billion barrels of proven
reserves, twice that in probable and possible resources, potentially
far more than Saudi Arabia. The Energy Task Force spoke to this and the
National Security Council answered…
A year before the war the
State Department undertook the “Future of Iraq” project, expressly to
design the institutional contours of the postwar country. The Oil and
Energy Working Group” looked with dismay at the National Iraqi Oil
Company, the government agency that owned and operated the Iraqi oil
fields and marketed the products. 100% of the revenues went directly to
the central government, and constituted about 90% of its income. Saddam
Hussein benefited, certainly-his lavish palaces-but the Iraqi people
did so to a far greater extent, in terms of the nation’s public
services and physical infrastructure. For this reason nationalized oil
industries are the norm throughout the world.
The Oil and Energy
Working Group designed a scheme that was oblique and sophisticated,
indeed. The oil seizure would be less than total. It would be obscured
in complexity. The apparent responsibility for it would be shifted, and
it would be disguised as benefiting, even necessary to Iraq’s well
being. Their work was supremely ingenious, undeniably brilliant.
The
plan would keep the National Iraqi Oil Company in place, to continue
overseeing the currently producing fields. But those fields represent
only 19% of Iraq’s petroleum reserves. The other 81% would be flung
open to “investment” by foreign oil interests, and the companies in
favored positions today-because of the war and their political
connections-are Exxon/Mobil, Chevron/Texaco, BP/Amoco, and Royal
Dutch/Shell.
The nationalized industry would be 80% privatized…
The
Iraqi oil industry does very much need a great deal of investment
capital, to repair, replace, and upgrade its infrastructure. But it
does not need Exxon/Mobil or any other foreign company to provide it.
At a reduced level, Iraq is still producing oil and hence revenue, and
no country in the world, perhaps, has better collateral against which
to float bond issues for public investment. Privatization of any sort
and in any degree is utterly unnecessary in Iraq today.
The
features of the State Department plan were inserted by Paul Bremer’s
Provisional Coalition Authority into the developing structures of Iraqi
governance. American oil companies were omnipresent in Baghdad then and
have been since, shaping and shepherding the plan through the several
iterations of puppet governments-the “democracy” said to be taking hold
in Iraq.
The package today is in the form of draft legislation,
the hydrocarbon law. Only a handful of Iraqi officials know its
details. Virtually none of them had a hand in its construction. (It was
first written in English.) And its exclusive beneficiaries are the
American and British oil companies, whose profits will come directly
from the pockets of the Iraqi people.
This is what more than
3,000 American soldiers have died for. This is what tens of thousands
more have given their limbs, their eyes, their burned flesh, their
scarred psyches for. This is what more than 600,000 innocent Iraqis
have been murdered for. This, and only this: the vast profits that flow
from oil, and the strategic and political power that comes from
controlling that flow.
Writings 
I've been writing on the "War for Oil," piecemeal, for years (e.g., 
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