Oil Addiction: The World in Peril - 31

by Pierre Chomat (Universal Publishers, 2004)

translated from the French by Pamela Gilbert-Snyder


Part IV. Our Suicidal Quest for Energy

Chapter 31. Iraq for the Oil Addicts!


"Oil is much too important a commodity to be left to the Arabs".
- Henry Kissinger {49}


To put into place the final piece of its energy policy, the corpocrat government needed to associate the "evil" bin Laden with Iran and Iraq, both of which have rich petroleum reserves. To this end, the idea of an "Axis of Evil" linking these two countries was pounded into the minds of Americans, day after day, while they were still reeling from the trauma of September 11. Iraq was given top priority. The strategy for subjugating this nation had already been devised in 1998, when, with others, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle, the most outspoken hawks of the Bush administration, provided President Clinton with the following recipe: "...if Saddam does acquire the capability to deliver weapons of mass destruction, as he is almost certain to do ... a significant portion of the world's supply of oil will be put at hazard ... The only acceptable strategy is ... to undertake military action, as diplomacy is clearly failing. In the long term, it means removing Saddam Hussein and his regime from power. That now needs to become the aim of American foreign policy." {50}

It is likely that President Bush's vow to avenge the American people was uttered at the same time that he was discussing oil strategy among his fellow corpocrats. In the summer of 2002, when the Afghan situation seemed to be winding down, the White House revealed its intention to move on to the next step on its agenda: gaining control of Iraq's petroleum.

George Bush's entourage believed this step was crucial to the United States' well-being for several reasons. First: it would satisfy its egosystems' ever-growing appetite. Second: it would control the world's energy, for without this control, the "Empire" could not maintain its imperial might - and we must never forget how utterly it depends on energy for its power! And third: it would guarantee the continuation of big profits for the American oil companies by making sure that the Iraqi representative to OPEC would discretely serve American interests. Indeed, for some time, the Saudi partners had been showing signs of intractability toward the American oil companies, which feared they might lose control over OPEC's decisions.

For all these reasons, the time had come to complete the corpocratic plan: replacing Saddam Hussein with a different head of State. President or king, it did not matter, so long as he was dedicated to serving American interests and could maintain his grip on power. Once their new man was in place, it would be easy enough to have him appoint an Iraqi representative to OPEC who was sympathetic to the American cause.

From the Iraqi side, the situation obviously looked quite different Saddam and his officers would have had no trouble imagining that maps and satellite photos exposing every square inch of their country were papering the walls of the Pentagon and being scrolled across the computer screens of every operative charged with combat operations planning. They were also painfully aware of how financially vulnerable they were as a result of the strict UN sanctions that had been imposed on them following their losing battles in Iran and Kuwait.

But not everything looked bleak to the Iraqi leaders. Russia, France, and China were faithful industrial partners, chosen by Iraq for strategic as well as economic reasons: these countries occupied three of the five permanent seats on the United Nations Security Council. In 1997, Iraq had granted the Russian company Lukoil a major contract to develop the West Qur oil field (600,000 barrels per day). China was a new partner with whom Iraq could deal as an equal. The Chinese company CNPC had signed an agreement in 1997 to develop the Ahdah oil field (90,000 barrels per day). Production drilling for these two contracts was never begun because the American government considered them to be in violation of the UN embargo against Iraq. France's industrial partnership with Iraq was part of a longstanding relationship. Had the war not intervened, Total-FinaElf would probably have signed an agreement with the Iraqi oil minister to develop the Majnoon and Bin Umar oil fields, whose 700,000 barrels per day would have met a third of France's oil needs. {a} A good Franco-Iraqi egosystem!

British and American industry were practically absent from Iraq under Saddam Hussein. It did not help that these two nations' governments had been bombing Iraq's northern and southern regions almost daily since 1991, without their ever once being sanctioned for it by the UN.

Thus, in the fall of 2002, despite mounting external pressure, Iraq was still holding on to its independence, even though it was being impoverished by the embargo that had been in place since 1991 and had had to accept some major foreign investments to ensure its development. Now let's trace the strategy that the White House began to implement to create the conditions for war.

George Bush convinced Tony Blair to join the United States in initiating a preventive war against Saddam. Their espionage teams had already been cooperating in the region for a long time.

If America's goal was to gain control of Iraq's petroleum, it had to find a way to exclude France and Russia from this military operation; they were already too well established in Iraq as it was. If these two countries participated in the overthrow of Saddam, the White House would have to include them in the American-Iraqi egosystems that it intended to set up and obviously America would prefer not to have to share. It was in Washington's interest to propose a strategy that could only be met with a veto by France, Russia and China, all permanent members of the UN Security Council. This would preclude these three nations from joining the war.


Thus, the British-American coalition deviated from United Nations principles from the outset! Its preventive war against Iraq was in reality no more legitimate than Saddam's invasions of Iran and Kuwait! Although the rest of the world clearly could see that the United States was involved in an act of imperialist aggression, the coalition governments attempted to legitimize it by imbuing it with the noblest of principles.

We will probably never know what labyrinthine paths were taken by the American and British diplomatic services during the six months leading up to Iraq's invasion, but nothing prevents us from using our imaginations.

To achieve its goal, first the United States government had to instill the notion that the Iraqi regime was a clear and present danger. The concept of an "Axis of Evil", which would include Iraq and constitute the source from which all terrorist evil springs, was promoted relentlessly in the United States. The nation's best public relations firms were hired to assist the White House in this endeavor. Iraq's president was depicted as a threat not only to his own people, but also to the entire world, a purely evil villain. At the same time, a climate of fear was created among the US citizenry, which began to believe that terrorists were lurking everywhere, ready to attack the smallest US town with chemical and biological weapons.

The concept of an "Axis of Evil" was also promoted beyond US borders. Before long, statements describing the existence of dangerous, prohibited weapons in Iraq were coming out of Downing Street.

Soon many countries, with United States acquiescence, requested that a United Nations team be sent to Iraq to search for prohibited weapons. However, perhaps suspecting the true intentions of the American government, Iraqi officials were reluctant to reveal the locations of any of their weapons, believing in all likelihood that this information would almost certainly be passed on to the coalition's joint chiefs of staff. The United States jumped at the chance to characterize Iraq's lack of cooperation as an indication that the "Devil of Baghdad" was hiding weapons that were hazardous to the future of the world's democracies. The existence of weapons of mass destruction was the pretext most often cited by American news organizations for the pre-emptive war against Iraq.

The European media rejected the propaganda emanating from the other side of the Atlantic. It had no trouble convincing the Old World that the justification for military intervention in Iraq was no more than a thin disguise for other interests. Media in both Europe and the Middle East exposed what it considered to be the machinations of the "Axis of Oil". As Washington hoped, China, France and Russia opposed any armed intervention not sanctioned by the UN. World leaders such as Nelson Mandela and German president Gerhard Schroeder demanded that United Nations inspectors return to Iraq to determine whether a preventive war was truly justified. Despite Washington's ostensible irritation, it is likely that the position of these permanent members of the United Nations Security Council played right into the US strategy of a break with the UN.

On November 08 2002, the fifteen members of the UN Security Council signed Resolution 1441, stipulating "that Iraq shall provide [the UN and IAEA inspectors] ... unrestricted access to any and all, including underground, areas, facilities, buildings, equipment, records, and means of transport which they wish to inspect, as well as immediate, unimpeded, unrestricted, and private access to all officials and other persons whom [they] wish to interview ... [and Iraq was] repeatedly warned that it will face serious consequences as a result of its continued violations of its obligations". The resolution's last sentence was a diplomatic coup for the United States and its British ally. This was their permission to go to war. As they saw it, the coalition was now authorized to attack without formal UN approval.

On November 22 2002, President Bush met with Russian president Vladimir Putin at the former summer residence of the czars, Catherine the Great's splendid Blue Palace near Saint Petersburg. The presidents stated their joint determination to combat terrorism. President Bush expressed confidence that his host would "resolve the Chechen problem in a peaceful manner". {51} Obviously, we do not know what trade-offs these two men made to ensure mutual forbearance in their respective spheres, Putin in Chechnya, Bush in Iraq, but it would be reasonable to conclude that Chechnya was not enough to balance the equation: it is very likely that Caspian oil was also invoked.

In December 2002, not long after this summit, Saddam Hussein seems to have learned about secret talks between the chairman of the Lukoil Company and the American authorities, for, perhaps in reprisal, he canceled the petroleum development contract that had been granted to this Russian company {52}, a gesture that could only have been welcomed by American leaders.

After that, Russia consistently maintained that the decision to go to war with Iraq should be subject to the sole approval of the United Nations. This position would have lined up nicely with the coalition strategy postulated above. We cannot know what actually took place behind the scenes, but we do know that once the Pentagon launched its attack, Russian troops refrained from interfering with the coalition armies.

The United Nations inspection teams found no prohibited weapons in Iraq. Since it "knew" these weapons existed, the White House concluded that Saddam was not complying with UN resolutions and that Iraq, therefore, could only be dealt with militarily.

From that moment on, France stood strong against the war. President Jacques Chirac and his Minister of Foreign Affairs, Dominique de Villepin, stated that only the discovery of prohibited weapons by UN inspectors could justify armed intervention. Germany, Russia, and China adopted more or less the same stance.

The repercussions of the split so desired by the United States between itself and these three countries extended well beyond the United Nations and became so great as to threaten the coalition's ability to implement its military plans.

Bush was running out of time. The White House launched an enormous smear campaign denouncing France and Germany with every communication tool at its disposal. Americans were told, in particular, that the French had turned their backs on the United States in its hour of need, despite the fact that the United States had paid with its blood to rescue France from the Germans in 1944. This campaign against "false allies" bore fruit. Although it only further exacerbated the Europeans' ire, for most Americans, the Iraqi front came clearly into focus. They became convinced that the United States really was in a state of heightened alert and that war against Iraq was inevitable if the United States was to remain safe. The "Stars and Stripes", which had become a gauge of patriotism after the attack on the World Trade Center, again appeared ubiquitously on lapels, cars, and in front yards.

The climate of war that the hawks of the American corpocracy had so determinedly sought to create was now in place. The British-American coalition took up its firing positions alone.

The first few months of 2003 will go down as among the most demoralizing in the history of the US Congress. Many American politicians must deeply regret that bin Laden had not sought refuge in Iraq in 2001; his presence there would have saved them from endorsing a policy that was based on grievous lies.

The armies that had been closing in around Saddam Hussein for many months, equipped as if preparing to do battle with the very gods, learned that their mission had suddenly become vital to the future of the free world. They received the order to attack Iraq on March 20 2003.

Against a giant oil addict, almost nothing can prevail. An empire does not follow the rules of common morality; it makes its own. Particularly when oil is at stake.


Notes

{49} Hans von Sponek and Denis Halliday, "The Hostage Nation", The Guardian, 29 November 2001. Henry Kissinger was Secretary of State under Richard Nixon from 1973 to 1977.

{50} Letter dated 26 January 1998, to W J Clinton, President of the United States, by 18 members of PNAC (Project for the New American Century), including Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and Elliot Abrams.

{a} French crude oil consumption was just over two million barrels a day in 2001, which corresponds to an annual consumption of 750 million barrels.

{51} Patrick de Saint-Exupery, "Bush et Poutine poursuivent l'entente cordiale", Le Figaro, Paris, 24 November 2002.

{52} Electronic document accessed at http:www.petroleumworld.com, MEES, Walid Khaddavi, Editor, "Middle East Economic Review", Baghdad, 28 July 2003.


Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/