Examining recently released government and corporate sources, researchers at the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) have uncovered new evidence that oil has long been the driving concern behind US-Iraqi relations.
In the 1980s, key figures associated with the current US administration, in particular defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld, brushed aside knowledge that the Iraqi regime was using chemical weapons in its war with Iran and continued to urge then-US ally Iraqi president Saddam Hussein to approve the Aqaba pipeline project from Iraq to Jordan.
In Crude Vision: How Oil Interests Obscured US Government Focus on Chemical Weapons Use by Saddam Hussein, the IPS reveals that Rumsfeld and the administration of US President Ronald Reagan worked for two years attempting to secure the US$1 billion pipeline scheme on behalf of the Bechtel corporation. Bechtel is today a primary contractor for the rebuilding of Iraq's infrastructure.
"The men who courted Saddam while he gassed Iranians are now waging war against him, ostensibly because he holds these same weapons of mass destruction", said Jim Vallette, lead author of the report. "To a man, they now deny that oil has anything to do with the conflict. Yet during the Reagan administration, and in the years leading up to the present conflict, these men shaped and implemented a strategy that has everything to do with securing Iraqi oil exports. All of this documentation suggests that Reagan administration officials bent many rules to convince Saddam Hussein to open up a pipeline of central interest to the US, from Iraq to Jordan."
"In their own words, we now see that for administration officials, a dictator is a friend of the US when he is willing to make an oily deal, and a mortal enemy when he is not", said Vallette.
Crude Vision can be downloaded from <http://www.ips-dc.org> or <http://www.seen.org>.
From Green Left Weekly, April 2, 2003.
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