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No Blood for... er... um...
The Oil Majors Take a Little Sip of the Ol' Patrimony
by Tom Engelhardt
 More than five years after the invasion of Iraq -- just in case you were still waiting -- the oil giants finally hit the front page…
Last Thursday, the New York Times led with this headline: "Deals with Iraq Are Set to Bring Oil Giants Back." (Subhead: "Rare No-bid Contracts, A Foothold for Western Companies Seeking Future Rewards.")
And who were these four giants?
ExxonMobil, Shell, the French company Total and BP (formerly British Petroleum). What these firms got were mere "service contracts" -- as in servicing Iraq's oil fields -- not the sort of "production sharing agreements" that President Bush's representatives in Baghdad once dreamed of, and that would have left them in charge of those fields. Still, it was clearly a start.
Tomgram: Finally, the Oil...
[Note for TomDispatch
readers: It's worth mentioning that the missing Iraqi oil story -- see
below -- wasn't missing online, and certainly not at TomDispatch. This
site's newest book, The World According to TomDispatch: America in the
New Age of Empire, has a section labeled "The Petro-Industrial Complex
and its Discontents," including striking pieces by Michael Klare and
Michael Schwartz on our gasoholic Pentagon and the prize of Iraqi oil.
Again, I urge readers to consider supporting TomDispatch and its
efforts by picking up a book that should, I think, be in any serious
library of our mad age of Bush the Younger. Tom]
The Times reporter, Andrew E. Kramer, added this little detail:
"[The contracts] include a provision that could allow the companies to
reap large profits at today's prices: the [Iraqi oil] ministry and
companies are negotiating payment in oil rather than cash." And here's
the curious thing, exactly these four giants "lost their concessions in
Iraq" back in 1972 when that country's oil was nationalized. Hmmm.
You'd
think the Times might have slapped some kind of "we wuz wrong" label on
the piece. I mean, remember when the mainstream media, the Times
included, seconded the idea that Bush's invasion, whatever it was about
-- weapons of mass destruction or terrorism or liberation or democracy
or bad dictators or… well, no matter -- you could be sure of one thing:
it wasn't about oil. "Oil" wasn't a word worth including in serious
reporting on the invasion and its aftermath, not even after it turned
out that American troops entering Baghdad guarded only the Oil and
Interior Ministries, while the rest of the city was looted. Even then
-- and ever after -- the idea that the Bush administration might have
the slightest urge to control Iraqi oil (or the flow of Middle Eastern
oil via a well-garrisoned Iraq) wasn't worth spending a few paragraphs
of valuable newsprint on.
I always thought that, if Iraq's
main product had been video games, sometime in the last five years the
Times (and other major papers) would have had really tough, thoughtful
pieces, asking really tough, thoughtful questions, about the effects of
the invasion and ensuing chaos on our children's lives and the like.
But oil, well... After all, with global demand for energy on the rise,
why would anybody want to invade, conquer, occupy, and garrison a
country that, as Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz once
observed, "floats on a sea of oil"?
And let's be fair. At the
time of the impending invasion, reasonable people couldn't possibly
have imagined that it had anything to do with oil, not while George W.
Bush was politely ignoring the subject, except when referring obliquely
to Iraq's "patrimony" of "natural resources." Forget that our President
had had an 11-year career in the energy business (and had been
Arbusto-ed); or that his Vice President had been the CEO of a giant
energy services corporation, Halliburton -- retiring during the
presidential campaign of 2000 with a $34 million severance package; or
that, back in those distant years, he had not hesitated to talk about
the necessity of getting a tad more oil into the international
pipeline. (As he told an oil industry crowd back in 1999, "By some
estimates there will be an average of two percent annual growth in
global oil demand over the years ahead along with conservatively a
three percent natural decline in production from existing reserves.
That means by 2010 we will need on the order of an additional fifty
million barrels a day. So where is the oil going to come from?" Where
indeed? He then answered his own question: "While many regions of the
world offer great oil opportunities, the Middle East, with two-thirds
of the world's oil and the lowest cost, is still where the prize
ultimately lies.")
Or how about the President's national
security advisor, who was on the board of Chevron and had a
double-hulled oil tanker, the Condoleezza Rice, named after her in the
oh-so-innocent 1990s. Forget as well the Veep's secret energy task
force of 2000 (also starring ExxonMobil and pals) which recommended
that the new administration turn its good offices to convincing Middle
Eastern countries "to open up areas of their energy sectors to foreign
investment." Forget it all and be fair.
After all, the only
people who thought that oil might have something to do with the
invasion of Iraq weren't on the Times staff. They weren't, in fact, in
the mainstream at all. And, to put things into context, depending on
your estimates, there were only somewhere between 11 million and 30
million of them marching around in the streets of cities and towns all
over the planet before the invasion, carrying signs that said
ludicrous, easily dismissible things like: "No Blood for Oil," "How did
USA's oil get under Iraq's sand?" and "Don't trade lives for oil!"
Let's
face it: Among those who counted, they -- with their simpleminded
slogans on hand-lettered placards -- just didn't count at all. Not when
everyone who was anyone knew that the world was a much, much, much
subtler and much, much more complicated place. No blood for oil? Sure,
it was short and snappy and easy enough to get on a sign, but also
about as absurdly reductionist, as unsubtle, as uncomplicated as
possible.
I mean, really! And, worse yet, that thoughtless
crew of demonstrators had the nerve to suspect -- prospectively, not
retrospectively -- the worst of the Bush administration, even when
their betters, men (and a few women) with so many years of experience
in the ways of Washington and the world, were ready to give its top
officials the benefit of the doubt. Waving those silly signs, they
actually expected bad things to happen. It didn't seem to matter to
them that the President, Vice President, National Security Advisor, and
Secretary of Defense assured them no such thing was possible; assured
them, in fact, that not to invade would lead to mushroom clouds over
American cities and Iraqi unmanned aerial vehicles spraying bio- or
chemical weaponry along the east coast of the United States.
No
wonder those masses of naïve demonstrators have been erased from the
blackboard of history. No wonder, since the invasion, the Times hasn't
bothered to attend to them seriously again. No wonder, on the fifth
anniversary of the Bush administration's "cakewalk" to victory in
Baghdad, the newspaper's op-ed page turned to L. Paul Bremer III,
Richard Perle, and others from the crew that got us into Iraq, or
cheered the administration on, to comment on what had gone wrong, while
skipping the crew in the streets that got it right in the first place.
Now,
with a barrel of crude selling at more than quadruple its prewar price,
more than double its price a mere year ago, the oil majors are finally
moving in for the… well, let's not say "kill," let's just say that
tasty little sip of the ol' patrimony.
And, by the way, here's
how Times reporter Kramer, in a single paragraph, managed to (barely)
reintroduce those missing prewar demonstrators, while sidling up to
reality and history: "There was suspicion," he wrote, "among many in
the Arab world [notoriously suspicious types, of course] and among
parts of the American public that the United States had gone to war in
Iraq precisely to secure the oil wealth these contracts seek to
extract. The Bush administration has said that the war was necessary to
combat terrorism. It is not clear what role the United States played in
awarding the contracts; there are still American advisors to Iraq's Oil
Ministry."
Arabs with suspicions and unidentified "parts" of
the American public, all in the same sentence. Still sounds dismissible
to me. Well, you know those types. They deserve no less. They're the
sorts who might even be suspicious of "American advisors to Iraq's Oil
Ministry," or, yet more absurdly, of those "no-bid" contracts for the
oil majors -- and just because it was in the DNA of the Bush
administration to award similar no-bid contracts to corporate cronies
like… uh… Halliburton. But the odds are that "the Iraqis" who awarded
those contracts probably just knew a good idea when they saw one up
close and personal over so many years.
And now, here we are.
Sure, it's kinda thoughtless, kinda embarrassing, and yet so typical of
ExxonMobil and Co. not to care about making all those pundits and
knowledgeable observers look really, really bad. What an unfortunate
coincidence, this story breaking just now, don't you think? I mean,
after all that blood, American and Iraqi, has been spilled, here comes
the oil.
It's the sort of thing that could make suspicious
Arabs even more so and give a new life to some really dumb slogans in
the U.S. But you know, sometimes, if you're an oil giant, you just have
to bite the bullet. After all, there's still one heck of a lot of that
patrimonial oil in Iraq's ground. At more than $130 a barrel, someone
has to get it out -- and why not, as Kramer puts it, "western companies
with experience managing large projects"? I mean, after all these
years, why not?
Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American
Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. The World
According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire (Verso,
2008), a collection of some of the best pieces from his site, has just
been published. Focusing on what the mainstream media hasn't covered,
it is an alternative history of the mad Bush years. A brief video in
which Engelhardt discusses American mega-bases in Iraq can be viewed by
clicking here.
[Note on further reading: In its follow-up
piece on the "no-bid" contracts, the Washington Post added a fifth oil
giant, Chevron, to the list and managed, as well, to include this
already familiar paragraph: "A higher-profile role for Western
companies in Iraq's oil industry is likely to revive speculation that
the Iraq war was motivated by a desire to tap into reserves that were
controlled by foreigners until the 1960s, when the industry was
nationalized. The belief is widespread in the Arab world." Like some
cameo role in a film, this cameo paragraph is evidently all that's now
left of the largest prewar antiwar movement in history. For some good
background on the history of Western exploitation of Iraqi oil and its
subsequent nationalization, check out Juan Cole's "They're Baaack…" at
his Informed Comment blog. (And, while you're at it, don't miss his
recent devastating description of "the real state of Iraq.") A good
source to consult for regular Iraqi oil news is Ben Lando's Iraq Oil
Report.]
Copyright 2008 Tom Engelhardt
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