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A Preemptive War over Oil:

By Al Burt
July 10, 2007

Anthony H. Cordesman, senior analyst at Washington's Center for Strategic and International Studies: "Regardless of whether we say so publicly, we will go to war, because Saddam sits at the center of a region with more than 60 percent of all the world's oil reserves."

There can be nothing more devastating than the loss of a loved one over what turned out to be a known lie. The convincing spin put on a falsehood by politicians in order to achieve a financial gain. I have seen it happen too many times in the years I spent in Vietnam and now I see it again in Iraq. With the total losses reaching 3,600 plus and rising one must ask why? What is the real reason so many have sacrificed so much?

We all remember the drum beat that led to the invasion of Iraq. The massive stockpiles of armed Weapons of Mass Destruction that existed and how they would not allow the United Nations inspectors in to do their job, but the truth is they did allow the inspectors in and the inspectors reported there were no Weapons of Mass Destruction. We now know this to be true since we have also failed to find any since the invasion despite our efforts and none were ever used. But this was known before the war. Bush stuck to the story that they knew where these stock piles were but would not tell the U.N. inspectors.

We were told of Iraq’s efforts to buy Yellow Cake to make nuclear bombs from Niger which Bush also knew to be a lie and when the lie was made public he not only stuck to the lie but may have had a hand in trying to defame Ambassador Wilson by exposing his wife as a covert CIA agent, an act of treason. He then used the lie concerning the Yellow Cake in a speech to the nation even though he knew it not to be true.

We were told how Iraq continuously violated the no fly zones set by the United Nations even though Iraq had no Air Force.

And then we were convinced that it would be a quick, easy war. In by 2003 and then home for Christmas by 2004. This was a lie that had been known for years. In a letter sent to President Bill Clinton on January 26, 1998 by The Project for a New American Century they clearly state, “Although we are fully aware of the dangers and difficulties in implementing this policy, we believe the dangers of failing to do so are far greater. We believe the U.S. has the authority under existing UN resolutions to take the necessary steps, including military steps, to protect our vital interests in the Gulf.” This letter was signed by Richard Armitage, John Bolton, Zalmay Khalilzad, Richard Perle, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz too name a few.

None of the reasons given the American people for the invasion were true and for this the Bush Administration must share the blame with the media that helped with the cheers for war. Not only was none of the above true but Iraq had no connection to September 11, 2001 and no ties to al Qaeda. While the Bush Administration stood in a staged setting with a hand chosen crowd night after night and plummeted the public with these lies the press did nothing that could be considered even close to journalism. Had they done their job and not given the Bush a free pass they could have found out the truth with very little effort.

So why have so many died for these lies that the press is just as guilty of spreading as is the Bush administration. The answer is very clear and was made before the invasion by Anthony H. Cordesman, senior analyst at Washington's Center for Strategic and International Studies: "Regardless of whether we say so publicly, we will go to war, because Saddam sits at the center of a region with more than 60 percent of all the world's oil reserves." The answer is oil, plain and simple.

We were told it would be a quick war which we also know to not be true but this has now changed into a long term commitment as seen in a statement made by President Bush during the last week of May 2007 and reported by Reuters. "President George W. Bush would like to see a lengthy U.S. troop presence in Iraq like the one in South Korea to provide stability but not in a frontline combat role. The United States has had thousands of U.S. troops in South Korea to guard against a North Korean invasion for 50 years."

Are we really there to provide stability to an area that has never really known and possibly never will know what stability is, or is it to use our troops, our children and tax dollars to guard the interest of large American Corporations… big money and big donors? Now you can shake your head and yell no to the last part of that question. You can say there’s no way. They wouldn’t do that to us just to protect theirs and their friends and donors personal investments. They just wouldn’t do something like that… or would they? Yes they would. In fact that was the reason for the invasion of Iraq, not our National Security as we were led to believe.

In another letter sent from the Project for a New American Century on May 28, 1998 to Newt Gingrich, then Speaker of the House of Representatives and Trent Lott the Senate Majority Leader this statement was made.

“We should use U.S. and allied military power to provide protection for liberated areas in northern and southern Iraq; and -- We should establish and maintain a strong U.S. military presence in the region, and be prepared to use that force to protect our vital interests in the Gulf.”

What are these vital interests they are speaking of…oil.

This was made clear in a report from AlterNet. (Bush's Petro-Cartel Almost Has Iraq's Oil By Joshua Holland, AlterNet. Posted October 16, 2006.) It's clear that the U.S.-led invasion had little to do with national security or the events of Sept. 11. Former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill revealed that just 11 days after Bush's inauguration in early 2001, regime change in Iraq was "Topic A" among the administration's national security staff, and former Terrorism Tsar Richard Clarke told 60 Minutes that the day after the attacks in New York and Washington occurred, "[Secretary of Defense Donald] Rumsfeld was saying that we needed to bomb Iraq." He added: "We all said … no, no. Al-Qaeda is in Afghanistan."

In February of 2001, just weeks after Bush was sworn in, the same energy executives that had been lobbying for Saddam's ouster gathered at the White House to participate in Dick Cheney's now infamous Energy Task Force. Although Cheney would go all the way to the Supreme Court to keep what happened at those meetings a secret, we do know a few things, thanks to documents obtained by the conservative legal group JudicialWatch.

According to the New Yorker, at the same time, a top-secret National Security Council memo directed NSC staff to "cooperate fully with the Energy Task Force as it considered melding two seemingly unrelated areas of policy." The administration's national security team was to join "the review of operational policies towards rogue states such as Iraq and actions regarding the capture of new and existing oil and gas fields."

But the decisions and the redrawing of the maps went on for several years. On 1/16/03 The Wall Street Journal reported that officials from the White House, State Department, and Department of Defense have been meeting informally and in secret with executives from Halliburton, Schlumberger, Exxon-Mobil, Chevron-Texaco and Conoco-Phillips to plan the post-war expansion of oil production from Iraq (whose oilfields were largely held by US companies prior to their nationalization). This would indicate the intent to invade had already been decided.

It was reported in an article titled “New Oil Law Means Victory in Iraq for Bush” By Chris Floyd published in truthout-UK on January 8, 2007 that “The reason that George W. Bush insists that "victory" is achievable in Iraq is not that he is deluded or isolated or ignorant or detached from reality or ill-advised. No, it's that his definition of "victory" is different from those bruited about in his own rhetoric and in the ever-earnest disquisitions of the chattering classes in print and online. For Bush, victory is indeed at hand. It could come at any moment now, could already have been achieved by the time you read this. And the driving force behind his planned "surge" of American troops is the need to preserve those fruits of victory that are now ripening in his hand.

At any time within the next few days, the Iraqi Council of Ministers is expected to approve a new "hydrocarbon law" essentially drawn up by the Bush administration and its UK lackey, The Independent on Sunday July 8, 2007 reported. The new bill will "radically redraw the Iraqi oil industry and throw open the doors to the third-largest oil reserves in the world," says the paper, whose reporters have seen a draft of the new law. "It would allow the first large-scale operation of foreign oil companies in the country since the industry was nationalized in 1972." If the government's parliamentary majority prevails, the law should take effect in March.

As the paper notes, the law will give Exxon Mobil, BP, Shell and other carbon cronies of the White House unprecedented sweetheart deals, allowing them to pump gargantuan profits from Iraq's nominally state-owned oilfields for decades to come. This law has been in the works since the very beginning of the invasion - indeed, since months before the invasion, when the Bush administration brought in Phillip Carroll, former CEO of both Shell and Fluor, the politically-wired oil servicing firm, to devise "contingency plans" for divvying up Iraq's oil after the attack. Once the deed was done, Carroll was made head of the American "advisory committee" overseeing the oil industry of the conquered land, as Joshua Holland of Alternet.com has chronicled in two remarkable reports on the backroom maneuvering over Iraq's oil: "Bush's Petro-Cartel Almost Has Iraq's Oil and "The US Takeover of Iraqi Oil."

While it may seem as this is a strictly Republican conspiracy it is not but is also backed by Democrats as is reported in a story by Matt Taibbi from RollingStone.com on May 9, 2007. The story is titled Pelosi’s New Iraq Supplemental Is Outright Colonial Robbery.

In the story Matt Taibbi reports “(2) whether the Government of Iraq is making substantial progress in meeting its commitment to pursue reconciliation initiatives, including a hydro-carbon law...

It is notable that the hydrocarbon law comes in first place in this clause, ahead of "legislation necessary for the conduct of provincial and local elections," reform of de-Baathification laws, amendments to the constitution and allocation of revenues for reconstruction projects. For whether or not it really was "all about oil" at the beginning of the war, the fate of the occupation really does hinge almost entirely upon oil initiatives now, as the continued presence of U.S. troops in the region may depend on whether or not the Iraqi government bites the bullet and decides to eat the proposed hydrocarbon law in question.

The law, endorsed here by the Democrats, is an unusually vicious piece of legislation, an open blueprint for colonial robbery of the Iraqi nation. It is worth pointing out that if you go back far enough in the history of this business, the law actually makes the U.S. an accomplice in the repression of Saddam Hussein, the very thing we claim to be rescuing the country from.

The proposed Hydrocarbon Law is a result of pressure from the American government on the Iraqis to draft an oil policy that would adhere to the IMF guidelines. It allows foreign companies to take advantage of Iraqi oil fields by allowing regions to pair up with foreigners using what are known as "production-sharing agreements" or PSAs, which guarantee investing companies large shares of the profits for decades into the future. The law also makes it impossible for the Iraqi state to regulate levels of oil production (seriously undermining OPEC), allows oil companies to repatriate profits, and would also allow companies to hire foreign workers to man facilities. Add all the measures up and the Hydrocarbon law not only takes control of the oil industry away from the Iraqi state, but virtually guarantees that the state will profit very little from future oil exploitation.

Amy Goodman, writing for Democracy Now and posting an article on AlterNet on July 9, 2007 titled Iraqi Oil Workers’ Union Founder: U.S. Backed Oil Law Is “Robbery” Details the inequity and greed of American Corporations contained in the law. “The proposed oil law facing the Iraqi cabinet would allow Western oil companies to take about 50% of all production as their share, an "obvious robbery of the Iraqi oil," says oil workers union heavy.

Umara: [translated] According to Article 111 of the Iraqi Constitution, which states that the oil and gas of Iraq are owned by the Iraqi people and they have the right to control it. But when you look into the details of the law, many of the articles of the law actually conflict with this preamble of the law, the most important point of which is the issue of the production-sharing agreements, which allows the international oil companies, especially the American ones, to exploit the oil fields without our knowledge of what they are actually doing with it. And they take about 50% of the production as their share, which we think it's an obvious robbery of the Iraqi oil.

We also object to the procedure by which these companies are given the contracts for exploiting the oil, because it allows the granting of the contracts with the aid of foreign advisers. We demanded that it's actually the Iraqi experts that need to be consulted with regards to the granting of the contracts.

In brief, there is hardly an article in the law that actually benefits the Iraqi people. But they all serve American interests in Iraq. And we know well that the law was actually written here in the United States, with the help of James Baker and Ms. Rice and the experts from the IMF. And it serves the interests of the American government and not the Iraqi people.

But what of Dick Cheney’s darling, Halliburton, it’s no bid contracts and the Billions wasted in Iraq? There have been hearing but as goes with all the other hearings there is little more than a waste of time and money so little change can be expected. And Dick Cheney as reported in Salon: To the cronies go the spoils by Farhad Manjoo on Oct. 9, 2003.

“Moreover, Cheney's insistence that he has no financial stake in the company is dubious. Since he became vice president, Cheney has continued to receive checks in deferred compensation from the company -- he got almost $150,000 in 2001 and $162,000 in 2002, and he will keep getting money until 2006. The White House denies that this represents a financial interest in the company; because he purchased an insurance policy on the compensation, Cheney will get the money regardless of Halliburton's fortunes. In addition, he has agreed to donate the money to charity. In late September, however, the Congressional Research Service concluded that despite these measures, the paychecks represented an actual stake in Halliburton.

It was well documented months ago in The New York Times, The Washington Post, A.P. and the other major news media that Halliburton was moving its headquarters to Dubai.

I believe it is best said in the opening statement from Bush's Petro-Cartel Almost Has Iraq's Oil By Joshua Holland, AlterNet. Posted October 16, 2006.

“Even as Iraq verges on splintering into a sectarian civil war, four big oil companies are on the verge of locking up its massive, profitable reserves, known to everyone in the petroleum industry as the prize."

The End