| Steve's update: the most important one. Please read. |
[Jul. 11th, 2006|08:01 pm] |
At last, someone tells us the reason for the war in Iraq. In his latest book, Greg Palast spells it out using quotes hotly denied by many industry insiders (but fortunately he caught them on tape). The reason the US had to remove Saddam was:
He was a bad man
He had WMD
He was defying the UN
"Freedom"
Oil.
But not in the way you think.
The US didn’t want Iraq’s oil because the world is running out of it and we need to secure more supplies. (It’s not, we don’t). They didn’t even want it so they could make money from selling it in the future, or provide cheap oil for a grateful American public.
They wanted it so they could stop oil production and keep prices UP.
This war wasn’t between the US and Saddam, it was between the US and... the US. Specifically, the Neo-conservatives/Pentagon and Big Oil/State Department. And the Government got its ass righteously kicked by the Oil Companies.
Let’s backtrack for a second. This Gulf war isn’t the second one, it’s the sixth the UK has been in since 1927. And they were all about oil.
Saudi Arabia tells the world what to do. Every day. They control OPEC, and therefore the price of oil. They also control *how much* oil various countries are allowed to produce – a quota. If they can keep some countries (such as Iraq) producing only one-sixth of the oil it has access to, the total amount of oil in the world stays low and prices stay high. Iraq doesn’t make much as money itself, but everywhere else that sells oil (including the US) gets a bigger profit.
Enter Saddam Hussein. He’s tired of not being allowed to sell as much oil as he’d like. While he doesn’t quite have the biggest fields in the world, his current production is enough to "swing" the price up and down – so he does. It’s not the amount of oil you have, it’s your control over global oil price that makes you a player. He was becoming a major inconvenience. He had to go.
(Saudi/Iraq games over withholding oil are also why the US tried to get rid of Venezuela’s President Chavez in a US-sponsored coup 2002. They failed miserably, but they had to try in the next 48 hours because of oil threats from Saudi. Long story, but again all about the oil.)
So we go into Iraq, and there’s two plans on the table.
Plan A (the Neo-cons and Pentagon): Privatise everything you can see. The Iraqis get to own nothing, especially not their oil fields, and no controls on prices or imports. Yes, this will flood the market with cheap Chinese things and mean the Iraqis won’t be able to sell their own stuff, so they’ll starve, but several US companies will be very, very rich. The potential drawbacks to angry starving Iraqi population are not mentioned in the report.
Also, produce the maximum amount of oil possible. This will break Saudi’s hold on OPEC and give us control of the world price! Smash OPEC!
Plan B (the Oil Industry, 'The State Department'): Don’t piss off Saudi.
Let Iraqis own their oil, provided they stay in OPEC and behave themselves. Absolutely do not produce more oil than now. We’ll still be rich, because prices will go up because supply is tight (despite there being much more available, which we’re choosing not to use). Obey OPEC quotas.
Still with me? Okay, time for The Blackadder Moment.
'There was just one problem with the Neo-cons' otherwise brilliant plan. It was bollocks.' It was never, ever going to happen because Saudi, OPEC and the US oil industry weren’t going to let it, and some ultra-right-wing true believers in the White House have no power at all compared to those guys.
Why you should be angry:
We went into Iraq – okay, for whatever reason, it happened. That’s not the whole story, though. The utter carnage and years of chaos since did not have to be that way, even after we went in for oil.
Interestingly, nothing in this entire post is George Bush's fault. Honestly. no-one quoted in Washington ever mentions him, ever. He doesn’t exist. Dick Cheney is all over the place, but Bush is left out of everything. Somehow I feel this should be a surprise, but it really isn’t.
Anyway, the US gets into Iraq. General Jay Garner knows he’s got a very short time to make the population happy or he's into un-winnable civil war, so he announces that elections are to be held in 90 days. He also announces that Iraqis will get what they want – the right to decide to do with their own oil.
Mistake on both counts: the 101 page Neo-con report says everything must be privatised (sold to foreigners) "especially the oil". It also says it’ll take longer than 90 days to achieve this, so he’s promptly fired and the elections are postponed until 2005 (remember, we’re there to bring democracy to Iraq). A government is set up (without any voting) by the new American in charge – Paul Bremer.
The city of Najaf had been due to have elections, and didn't like having them cancelled. When nothing else happened on the election front, the Shia 'Mahdi Army' formed and let the US know it wasn't happy. They were labelled "insurgents".
Al Qaeda was formed because Saudi wouldn't pay their debts to Bin Laden. Osama specifically says that his terrorists shouldn't destroy oil sites, because this was about oil and money. That's about the only relevance Al Qaeda has to Iraq, or indeed the "War on Terror" in general. They don't get any consideration in any of these top level reports. Ending the military situation comes a very distant second to the fighting over oil, and privatising the World.
It looked like events were going the Neo-cons' way: Bremer would sell everything.
...Until Phillip Carroll, former CEO of Shell Oil, turned up in Iraq and told him not to.
See, Bremer was only officially in charge of the country. Carroll was someone *actually important*, and had far more political weight than this new guy. So the sales stopped. Ish.
It’s difficult to describe just how much everyone involved in this is an unholy scumbag who needs a good beating. All through the story so far, every single person who is in the government in Iraq or the US is working for an oil company. Nobody is the best guy for the job, they’re all old-time friends of Dick Cheney and various CEOs. *Everybody* is on the board of something, or in an influential Conservative think-tank.
And they all lie, continuously. The plans for the oil (which are in the book, covered in 'secret' and 'confidential' stamps) don’t exist, and we can't let you see them even though the Freedom of Information Act says you can, they don’t exist, who told you they exist? This conversation didn’t happen. I never said that. You said you wouldn’t record that. That’s not true. Where did you get that report? I never said that. Okay, I said it but I meant something different. You were recording that?!
So, Bremer was defeated by Big Oil. Oh – I nearly forgot. While he was there, millions and millions and millions of dollars went missing. Practically 75% of contracts ended with the money disappearing into air, US agents were walking around with millions in cubes of notes, everyone retired overnight. It was fraud. The scale of this is beyond belief, but isn’t the main point I want to make here, so we’ll move on. The official Washington policy is "don't ask, don't tell".
The Neocons installed their good friend Ahmed Chalabi as Iraqi leader. All it took was a secret Pentagon strike team and 700 troops and they totally had their opponents by surprise – their opponents, the US state department and Big Oil.
Chalabi, another US-picked leader, looked set to help the Neocons win. OPEC would be broken, cheap oil all 'round, wanting this outcome was labelled in the Neo-Con circles as a "no brainer". (CEO Carroll agreed, saying "Privatisation IS a no-brainer. It would only be thought about by someone with no brain." And he was a friend of Thatcher, so he knows what he's talking about.)
So the Oil Companies came up with an alternative plan.
Later, they denied their plan report existed. Many people denied it, many times. The report (what, this one? "Options for a sustainable Iraqi Oil Industry"?) definitely didn’t exist.
It was time for the showdown – who would win? The 'break OPEC, maximum oil production' Neo-cons, who had Dick Cheney on their side, or the 'OPEC-friendly, suppress supplies' Oil Companies who had... Dick Cheney... on their side...
Sorry, what?
Oh, he’s the most powerful man in the world and a Neo-con who’s also a CEO, so he gets both. Right. So who did the man who makes decisions for America (no, it wasn’t ever going to be Bush) decide should win?
He went with State Department, and not selling the oil.
Now, you might be forgiven for thinking that this was a US-US struggle with no outside influence, but there's this small matter of the Iraqi people. They don't know what the fuck the US thinks it's doing, but they're sure they want it gone and their oil back in their own hands. A public announcement that the oil has been sold by Americans TO Americans (and friends) would probably cause a small amount of dissatisfaction. Possibly involving mortars. The amount of Iraq the US could still control at that point was already tiny, so all this may have factored into Cheney’s thinking.
Or it could just have been about money.
Either way, Chalabi was replaced and then returned to power by a neo-con plot. Iyad Allawi then replaced him. Coincidentally, Allawi was also on the CIA's payroll just like Chalabi.
Allawi's reign was brief and kinda hilarious. The Neo-cons tried a power-grab against him, in an effort to get enough hold in the Iraqi "Government" to privatise some of the oil. Which they have. He was unpopular to a comedy level, and the December 2005 elections finished him off. (The bounty the insurgents put on his head hasn't, so far).
Current top guy: Jawad al-Maliki. Disliked by Sunnis. Probably irrelevant to US schemes, since Paul Bremer's laws were signed to affect *every Iraq government from now on no matter who it is*.
It’s okay, Donald Rumsfeld's assistant Larry Di Rita assures us that the current complete shitstorm in Iraq was a product of US inexperience at taking over other people’s oil economies so quickly. The terribly calming thought he leaves us with is that
"We’ll get better as we do it more often."
I'm halfway through the book so far. |
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