BY DOUG LORIMER
While US government officials, from President George Bush down, have publicly denied that the US-led invasion of Iraq has anything to do with seizing control of Iraq's oil vast reserves, the orders given to the invading US troops clearly contradict these denials.
From the very beginning of the invasion on March 19, US troops were ordered to seize control of Iraq's oil fields. And when they occupied Baghdad, US troops allowed the looting and burning of all Iraqi public buildings except one. "While most other public buildings in Baghdad have been left unguarded [from looters], the huge Oil Ministry headquarters on Palestine Street has been ringed by more than 70 US troops and protected by up to a dozen or more armoured personnel carriers", the pro-war Murdoch-owned Australian reported on April 15.
"That glaring contrast", the Australian added, "has convinced many angry Iraqis that Washington's invasion of Iraq was motivated by its own commercial interests and the state of international oil markets rather than its professed concern for the Iraqi public and its democratic rights."
In the months prior to the last Gulf War in 1991, US officials showed little reticence in publicly stating that the war was about control of oil resources. For example, in testimony to the US Senate armed services committee in 1990, then US defence secretary (now vice-president) Dick Cheney made it clear that control over oil resources was at the heart of Washington's decision to go to war with Iraq the first time.
Cheney pointed out that, after invading Kuwait, Iraq controlled 20% of the world's oil reserves. He said that this — and the possibility that Iraq would invade Saudi Arabia — would put Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein "clearly in a position to dictate the future of worldwide energy policy and that gave him a stranglehold on our economy and on that of most other nations of the world as well".
Cheney's position was elaborated upon by George Friedman and Meredith Lebard, who argued in their influential book The Coming War with Japan, published in 1991: "With oil, the Persian Gulf becomes much more than a regional issue. It becomes the pivot of the world economy. For the US, domination of the region would open the door on unprecedented international power...
"During the 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, the US response was explicitly for one purpose: preventing Iraqi domination of the region's oil supply. However ... seizing control of Iraq would place the US in control of a large amount of the world's oil reserves and production."
Oil corporations
The big US oil corporations — ExxonMobil, ChevronTexaco (Caltex), ConocoPhillips and Marathon — already have a dominant position in the transportation, refining and marketing of Saudi Arabia's oil.
They have long wanted to get control of Iraq's oil wealth. "Iraq possesses huge reserves of oil and gas — reserves I'd love Chevron to have access to", ChevronTexaco chief executive officer Kenneth Derr said in a 1998 speech in San Francisco.
With the US military in control of Iraq, the way will be clear for the installation of a pro-US puppet government in Baghdad that will eventually turn over Iraq's nationalised oil wealth to these same US oil "majors".
"The road to economic prosperity in Iraq will not be easily paved, but the Bush administration can help the new Iraqi government achieve fundamental structural reform with massive, orderly and transparent privatisation of various sectors of the economy, including the oil industry", Ariel Cohen and Gerald O'Driscoll, authors of a report on post-war Iraq for the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think-tank closely linked to the Bush administration, argued last December.
At an April 4-5 conference in London convened by the US State Department, Reuters reported on April 5, "Iraqi exiles and senior US officials agreed ... that international oil companies should take a leading post-war role in reviving Iraq's oil industry".
Two days before the conference, Fadhil Chalabi, a former Iraqi petroleum ministry official who is "advising" Washington on post-war plans for Iraq's oil industry told the Boston Christian Science Monitor: "We need to have a huge amount of money coming into the country. The only way is to partially privatise the industry."
Kissinger's plan
The idea of a US seizure of Iraq's oil wealth was first floated more than 25 years ago, according to James Akins, the US ambassador to Saudi Arabia in the mid-1970s. "It's the Kissinger plan", Akins told Mother Jones magazine contributing writer Robert Dreyfuss earlier this year.
In 1975, an article headlined "Seizing Arab Oil" appeared in Harper's magazine, which, as Akins told Dreyfus, outlined how the US "could solve our economic and political problems over the Arab oil fields [and] bringing in Texans and Oklahomans to operate them". The author of the article, who used the pseudonym Miles Ignotus, was identified as "a Washington-based professor and defence consultant with intimate links to high-level US policy makers".
"I said on television", Akins told Dreyfuss, "that anyone who would propose that is either a madman, a criminal, or an agent of the Soviet Union." A short time later, Akins learned that the "madman" was his own boss, Henry Kissinger, at that time US President Gerald Ford's secretary of state. Akins was fired later that year.
"I thought [the "Kissinger plan"] had been killed, but it's back", Akins told Dreyfuss. But perhaps it's not so surprising that Kissinger's proposal has been revived and acted upon by the Bush administration. After all, two of Kissinger's close associates in the Ford administration — Cheney, who was Ford's chief of staff, and Donald Rumsfeld, Ford's defence secretary — are leading figures, as vice-president and defence secretary respectively, in the Bush administration. Both Cheney and Rumsfeld have been campaigning for a US push to take over the Persian Gulf oil fields for the last 10 years.
Moreover, the "Kissinger plan" is a logical extension of previous US policy towards the Middle East. Establishing US military dominance in the region has long been the policy of the US ruling class. It was first officially enunciated at the beginning of the Cold War with the Soviet Union in 1947. In March 1947, US President Harry Truman declared to a joint sitting of Congress that "the preservation of order in the Middle East" was an essential part of US foreign policy.
For most of the Cold War, US rulers sought to maintain "order" in the Middle East through CIA-organised coups against any regimes that appeared to pose a threat to US oil interests — such as the 1953 coup in Iran which restored the pro-US Shah to his throne or the 1963 coup in Iraq which put Hussein's anti-communist Baath Party into power.
However, when the Iranian workers and peasants rose up in February 1979 and threw out the US and British oil companies, along with the Shah and his 20,000 US "advisers", Washington began a long process of steadily increasing the presence of its military forces in the Middle East.
In January 1980, US President Jimmy Carter declared the entire Persian Gulf a de facto US protectorate. "Let our position be absolutely clear", he said, announcing what came to be known as the Carter Doctrine. "An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means, including military force."
At the time, the "outside force" was interpreted as being the Soviet Union. However, the Bush administration's National Security Strategy document made public last September acknowledged that the Soviet Union was "a generally status quo, risk-averse adversary". In reality, Carter's reference to "any outside power" was a euphemism for any indigenous Persian Gulf threat to US economic domination of the region.
Rapid Deployment Force
To back up his doctrine, Carter ordered the creation of the Rapid Deployment Force, a military unit capable of quickly deploying several thousand US troops to the Middle East.
During Ronald Reagan's presidency, the Rapid Deployment Force was transformed into the Central Command, a new US military authority with responsibility for the Persian Gulf and the surrounding region from eastern Africa to Afghanistan.
According to his official Pentagon biography, Paul Wolfowitz, the present US deputy defence secretary, who was a deputy assistant secretary in the Carter administration, "helped create the force that later became the United States Central Command and initiated the Maritime Pre-positioning Ships, the backbone of the initial US deployment twelve years later" in preparation for the 1991 Gulf War.
The Gulf War and the demise of the Soviet Union led Pentagon policy makers to invent a new global adversary — "rogue states" — to justify maintaining and extending the global archipelago of US military bases.
In a February 1991 statement to the US Senate's defence committee, Cheney (at the time President George Bush senior's defence secretary) argued that the Gulf War presaged "very much the type of conflict we are most likely to confront again in this new era. In addition to south-west Asia, we have important interests in Europe, Asia, the Pacific and Central and Latin America. We must configure our policies and our forces to effectively deter, or quickly defeat, such future regional threats."
A few months later, Wolfowitz, then deputy defence secretary to Cheney, drafted a secret Pentagon paper, the "Defense Policy Guidance 1992-1994" (DPG), which recommended taking "pre-emptive action" to "prevent any hostile power from dominating a region" of strategic significance to the US, as well as "discouraging attempts by the advanced industrial nations to challenge US leadership or upset the established political and economic order, and precluding the emergence of any potential future global competitor".
Wolfowitz's DPG said the US should "retain the pre-eminent responsibility for addressing selectively those wrongs which threaten not only our interests but those of our allies and friends". Significantly, among those interests was "access to vital raw materials, primarily Persian Gulf oil".
When excerpts of the document were published in March 1992 by the New York Times, there was a furore over its advocacy of US global domination. Cheney was instructed to produce a toned-down rewrite.
During the eight years of Bill Clinton's presidency, the ideas expressed in Wolfowitz's DPG were promoted by a small and powerful group, with corporate and political links, in US ruling-class think tanks and in the media. Key players in this group included Cheney, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld (who was Reagan's personal emissary to Baghdad when Hussein was a US ally in the 1980s), former CIA director James Woolsey and Richard Perle (who had been Reagan's deputy defence secretary).
'New American Century'
In 1997, the Project for a New American Century lobby group was formed, and a year later another lobby group, the US Committee for the Liberation of Iraq. In 1998, the PNAC wrote to President Bill Clinton urging him to overthrow Hussein's regime because it was a "hazard" to "a significant portion of the world's supply of oil".
The PNAC's September 2000 document Rebuilding America's Defences: Strategies, Forces And Resources For A New Century, stated: "The United States has for decades sought to play a more permanent role in Gulf regional security. While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein."
Cheney and Rumsfeld, reinstalled to power under Bush junior's presidency, took advantage of the September 2000 terrorist attacks in New York to immediately push for a war of conquest against Iraq.
According to Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward, on the morning after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Rumsfeld urged Bush to authorise a US invasion of Iraq. Bush's secretary of state Colin Powell succeeded in persuading the president that "public opinion has to be prepared before a move against Iraq is possible".
Instead, it was agreed to first authorise a war against the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, plans for which had already been drawn up by the Clinton administration. According to the January 3 Washington Post: "On September 17, 2001, six days after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, President Bush signed a 2½-page document marked 'Top Secret' that outlined the plan for going to war in Afghanistan as part of a global campaign against terrorism. Almost as a footnote, the document also directed the Pentagon to begin planning military options for an invasion of Iraq, senior administration officials said."
In his January 2002 State of the Union speech, Bush made public for the first time his administration's aim of launching a preemptive attack on Iraq. Bush declared that his administration was prepared to take "preemptive action" against "evil and lawless regimes", among which he singled out Iraq, Iran and North Korea.
Then in September 2002, the Bush administration released its new National Security Strategy document, which, in the words of Anatol Lieven of the establishment Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, is a plan "for unilateral world domination through absolute superiority".
Washington's seizure of Iraq's oil wealth is a crucial part of that plan. "If the United States controls Persian Gulf oil fields, it will have a stranglehold on the world economy", Michael Klare, a US foreign policy analyst and author of Resource Wars: The New Landscape of Global Conflict, told the March 9 Toronto Star.
Washington is betting, Klare believes, that "controlling Gulf oil, combined with being a decade ahead of everybody else in military technology, will guarantee American supremacy for the next 50 to 100 years."
From Green Left Weekly, April 23, 2003.
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