BY ROHAN PEARCE
On September 12, US President George Bush addressed the United Nations General Assembly to set out the US regime's case for a bloody war on Iraq. Bush declared that the regime of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein since 1998 had continued to make chemical and biological weapons, and was close to building a nuclear weapon. This threat was so dire that, if the UN Security Council did not militarily enforce its resolutions passed against Hussein's regime, the US would.
These wild assertions — cynically made to exploit the US people's post 9/11 fears — were designed to justify Washington's long-term goal of "regime change" in Iraq as being part of its "war on terror". In reality, its purpose was to provide cover for achieving strategic US aims in the Middle East.
In an article published in the latest Spokesman, the journal of the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation, Peter Gowan described how on September 12, 2001, a meeting of the US National Security Council was held with Bush in attendance.
"The main topic of debate was a rather surprising one, namely the danger that once the US had completed its campaign to crush al Qaeda (and presumably Afghanistan) the whole international coalition might fall apart. [According to Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Dan Balz], US vice-president Dick Cheney insisted that the campaign should not just be against terrorism; it should also be against states that sponsor terrorism. Rumsfeld had already demanded a war against Iraq on the morning of the 12th and he raised it again at the National Security Council... he wanted to make Iraq 'a principal target of the first round in the war on terrorism'."
Since the end of the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, Iraq's status as a "rogue state" — a nation not controlled by a "reliable" regime, unlike the equally anti-democratic and repressive governments in Saudi Arabia and Israel, which pursues a political course independent of US political and economic interests — has ensured that it has remained a target for the US ruling class. That Iraq is ruled by a former "favourite son" of Washington has added insult to injury.
Prize
Iraq possesses the world's second largest oil reserves (at least 112 billion barrels or almost 17,920 billion litres). This makes it a valuable prize in itself, even if Washington's broader imperialist goals in the Middle East are not taken into account.
According to a US ABC News report in July 2001, "An authoritative Iraqi source says that as much as 90% of the actual amount of Iraq's estimated 1.8 million barrels per day (bpd) are going to US Gulf coast refineries. 'Most of Iraq's oil exports in July are destined to the US, with a few going to Europe', reported the authoritative oil journal Middle East Economic Survey (MEES)."
The quantity was so great, according to MEES, that "Saddam is banking on it to mitigate the Bush administration's enmity toward his dictatorship in Iraq, and therefore, any attempts to oust him", reported ABC News. Between 1998 and 2000, the amount of Iraqi crude oil imported into the US doubled to around 750,000 bpd, most of it refined by Chevron, Exxon-Mobil, Bayoil and Koch Petroleum. Before the 1991 Gulf War, Iraq was the second biggest OPEC oil exporter.
Thomas Ferguson and Robert Johnson noted in the October 13 Los Angeles Times that a "glance backward is the easiest way to see why oil and the dollar inevitably loom so large in any resolution of the Iraq crisis... the current configuration of the Middle East has its roots in treaties and understandings that grew out of the post-World War I settlement of the broken Ottoman Empire. That settlement was based on an assumption that the Russian Revolution had removed both Russia and Central Asia from the world oil market." Indeed, the borders between Iraq, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia were drawn up in 1921 and 1923 — by the British Colonial Office.
In particular, the creation of Kuwait from part of south-eastern Iraq (described as "less a country than a family-owned oil company with a flag" by the August 5, 1990 New York Times) was designed to prevent a strong, independent Iraq by denying it direct access to the Persian Gulf.
Iraq's oil was divided five ways: Royal Dutch-Shell received 23.75%; British Petroleum 23.75%; the US-owned Near East Development Corporation 23.75%; French-owned Compagnie Francaise des Petroles 23.75%; and Calouste Sarkis Gulbenkian (an extremely rich Armenian oil magnate) 5%. The Western oil corporations lost control of Iraq's oil when it was nationalised by Baghdad in 1972.
With the disintegration of the Soviet Union, beginning in 1989, the world was left with just one superpower: the United States. With the removal of the Soviet Union as a counter-balance to US military power and the elimination of Moscow's material support to liberation movements in the Third World, Washington was able to resume its post-1945 quest for an "American Century" — unrivalled military, political and economic domination of the globe.
A 1990 paper by the US Army chief of staff General Carl Vuono stated that, instead of the "defensive" strategy of the Cold War, Washington's new mission was to "maintain the capability of protecting vital interests wherever they are threatened".
This not-so-new "global cop" posture of the US reached its peak after the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center, and was elaborated in the White House's "National Security Strategy of the United States", released in September. Not only did the NSS spell out Bush's commitment to "pre-emptive" military action, but it also elaborated the superpower's continuing commitment to protecting its political and economic interests by violent means.
'Hussein factor'
A report released in 2001 by the Institute for National Strategic Studies (INNS), Strategic Challenges for the Bush Administration, stated that "dual containment [of Iraq and Iran] as an effective and enforceable policy has run its course". It noted that "support for sanctions", which were designed to weaken the Hussein regime in Iraq in the hope that a military coup would install a pro-US dictator, "is evaporating".
(Interestingly, the report also preempts Bush's "pre-emptive" military doctrine, stating: "All the options on Iraq are difficult, including sanctioning, accepting, eliminating or ignoring him. To pursue the first three options is risky enough, and we may be forced eventually to do so unilaterally. To ignore Saddam, however, would be far more perilous for the West and the United States.")
As long as Hussein survived, UN sanctions only fuelled anti-US sentiment in the region, adding to the hatred generated by the slaughter of Palestinians by Washington's senior ally in the region, Israel.
Another INSS study, Beyond Containment: Defending US Interests in the Persian Gulf, stated that following the replacement of Hussein, "the United States will need to diversify its dependence on regional basing and forward presence, as well as reduce the visibility of its forward-deployed troops". "In the long term, eliminating Iraq's ability to threaten its neighbors and destabilize the region is the sine qua non for success in guaranteeing the security of the Gulf while reducing the political costs that the US military presence imposes on other American interests and Gulf partners", the report argues.
By eliminating the "Hussein factor" in Middle Eastern politics, the US hopes it will have a freer hand to maintain its military presence in the strategic, oil-rich Middle East and ensure that business gets back to "normal" — with the interests of US corporations dominating, naturally.
Roger Trilling noted in the November 13-19 US Village Voice that "by getting rid of Saddam, the US not only puts Iraqi oil in play but gains leverage over Iran. We could stop bombing Saddam from the bases in Saudi Arabia, and thus lighten if not erase our military presence in the kingdom. Further, we get a more open field in Iraq, with the possibility of remaking not only that country but the region in our image."
On May 17, 2001, a team headed by US vice president Dick Cheney released Reliable, Affordable and Environmentally Sound Energy for America's Future, the Bush government's national energy policy. The Cheney report, as it was dubbed, argued that in the future the US will face "increased dependency on foreign powers that do not always have America's interests at heart" and that "Middle East oil producers will remain central to world oil security". It argued that Bush must "make energy security a priority of our trade and foreign policy".
While Iraq is a valuable "prize" for US oil corporations, access to Iraqi oil alone is not the driving force behind the White House war drive. The new Gulf War needs to be understood as part of broader — regional and global — US strategy.
In the Middle East, US interests require that the region is "stabilised" under its hegemony — with Hussein eliminated, a "final solution" to the Palestinian insurgency found and US client regimes strengthened.
The coming war on Iraq will not be waged to create a democratic Iraq or to destroy weapons of mass destruction. It will be a war waged for US hegemony of the region and the world's vital energy supplies.
From Green Left Weekly, November 27, 2002.
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