Doug Lorimer
As the candidate most identified with the US occupation, former CIA pin-up boy Iyad Allawi's career took a nose dive in the January 30 Iraqi elections. With Allawi finishing a distant third after Sistani's United Iraqi Alliance and the electoral bloc formed by the two pro-US Kurdish parties, former finance "minister" Adel Abdel-Mahdi looks likely to become Washington's new puppet prime minister.
Abdel-Mahdi is a member of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), part of the UIA.
The February 5 Newsday reported that unnamed Iraqi officials had told the New York daily that, while "Washington strongly supports Allawi and has been lobbying to keep him in power", the US "also would back Abdel-Mahdi if a consensus emerged around his candidacy".
The replacement of the secular Allawi with a leader of the Islamist and formerly Iran-based SCIRI has led some Western leftists to argue that the outcome of the elections could be an anti-US, Iran-style regime in Iraq. Thus, in a January 26 speech in Santa Fe, Noam Chomsky argued that the Iraqi elections could result in "what in Washington must be the ultimate nightmare — a Shiite region which controls most of the world's oil and is independent".
However, top US officials, including Vice-President Dick Cheney and defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld, are clearly confident that Abdel-Mahdi and the other leaders of the SCIRI will continue to serve Washington's imperial goals in Iraq.
In an article posted on the AlterNet web site on January 27, Antonia Juhasz, a former legislative assistant to US Congress members John Conyers and Elijah Cummings, explained why: "On December 22, 2004, Iraqi finance minister Abdel-Mahdi told a handful of reporters and industry insiders at the National Press Club in Washington, DC, that Iraq wants to issue a new oil law that would open Iraq's national oil company to private foreign investment. As Mahdi explained: 'So I think this is very promising to the American investors and to American enterprise, certainly to oil companies.'
"In other words, Mahdi is proposing to privatize Iraq's oil and put it into American corporate hands.
"According to the finance minister, foreigners would gain access both to 'downstream' and 'maybe even upstream' oil investment. This means foreigners can sell Iraqi oil and own it under the ground — the very thing for which many argue the US went to war in the first place.
"As Vice President Dick Cheney's Defense Policy Guidance report explained back in 1992, 'Our overall objective is to remain the predominant outside power in the [Middle East] region and preserve US and Western access to the region's oil.'
"While few in the American media other than Emad Mckay of Inter Press Service reported on — or even attended — Mahdi's press conference, the announcement was made with US Undersecretary of State Alan Larson at Mahdi's side...
"While announcing the selling-off of the resource which provides 95 percent of all Iraqi revenue may not garner Mahdi many Iraqi votes ... it will unquestionably win him tremendous support from the US government and US corporations."
From Green Left Weekly, February 16, 2005.
Visit the Green Left Weekly home page.