March 30, 2007
George Bush has a land mine planted
in the supplemental appropriation legislation working its way
through Congress.
The Iraq Accountability Act
passed by the House and the companion bill passed in the Senate
contain deadlines for withdrawing our troops from Iraq, in open
defiance of the President's repeated objections.
He threatens a veto, but he
might well be bluffing. Buried deep in the legislation and intentionally
obscured is a near-guarantee of success for the Bush Administration's
true objective of the war-capturing Iraq's oil-and George Bush
will not casually forego that.
This bizarre circumstance is
the end-game of the brilliant, ever-deceitful maneuvering by
the Bush Administration in conducting the entire scenario of
the "global war on terror."
The supplemental appropriation
package requires the Iraqi government to meet a series of "benchmarks"
President Bush established in his speech to the nation on January
10 (in which he made his case for the "surge"). Most
of Mr. Bush's benchmarks are designed to blame the victim, forcing
the Iraqis to solve the problems George Bush himself created.
One of the President's benchmarks,
however, stands apart. This is how the President described it:
"To give every Iraqi citizen a stake in the country's economy,
Iraq will pass legislation to share oil revenues among all Iraqis."
A seemingly decent, even noble concession. That's all Mr. Bush
said about that benchmark, but his brevity was gravely misleading,
and it had to be intentional.
The Iraqi Parliament has before
it today, in fact, a bill called the hydrocarbon law, and it
does call for revenue sharing among Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds.
For President Bush, this is a must-have law, and it is the only
"benchmark" that truly matters to his Administration.
Yes, revenue sharing is there-essentially
in fine print, essentially trivial. The bill is long and complex,
it has been years in the making, and its primary purpose is transformational
in scope: a radical and wholesale reconstruction-virtual privatization-of
the currently nationalized Iraqi oil industry.
If passed, the law will make
available to Exxon/Mobil, Chevron/Texaco, BP/Amoco, and Royal
Dutch/Shell about 4/5's of the stupendous petroleum reserves
in Iraq. That is the wretched goal of the Bush Administration,
and in his speech setting the revenue-sharing "benchmark"
Mr. Bush consciously avoided any hint of it.
The legislation pending now
in Washington requires the President to certify to Congress by
next October that the benchmarks have been met-specifically that
the Iraqi hydrocarbon law has been passed. That's the land mine:
he will certify the American and British oil companies have access
to Iraqi oil. This is not likely what Congress intended, but
it is precisely what Mr. Bush has sought for the better part
of six years.
It is why we went to war.
For years President Bush has
cloaked his intentions behind the fabricated "Global War
on Terrorism." It has long been suspected that oil drove
the wars, but dozens of skilled and determined writers have documented
it. It is no longer a matter of suspicion, nor is it speculation
now: it is sordid fact. (See a brief summary of the story at
http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/47489/
. )
Planning for the two wars was
underway almost immediately upon the Bush Administration taking
office--at least six months before September 11, 2001. The
wars had nothing to do with terrorism. Terrorism was initially
rejected by the new Administration as unworthy of national concern
and public policy, but 9/11 gave them a conveniently timed and
spectacular alibi to undertake the wars. Quickly inventing a
catchy "global war on terror" theme, the Administration
disguised the true nature of the wars very cleverly, and with
enduring success.
The "global war on terror"
is bogus. The prime terrorist in Afghanistan and the architect
of 9/11, Osama bin Laden, was never apprehended, and the President's
subsequent indifference is a matter of record. And Iraq harbored
no terrorists at all. But both countries were invaded, both
countries suffer military occupation today, both are dotted with
permanent U.S. military bases protecting the hydrocarbon assets,
and both have been provided with puppet governments.
And a billion dollar embassy
in Baghdad is under construction now. It will be the largest
U.S. embassy in the world by a factor of ten. It consists
of 21 buildings on 104 acres, six times larger than the United
Nations compound in New York city, larger than Vatican City.
It will house a delegation of more than five thousand people.
It will have its own water, electric, and sewage systems, and
it is surrounded by a fortress wall of concrete fifteen feet
thick. For an Administration committed to fighting terrorism
with armies and bombs, that's far more anti-terror diplomacy
than a tiny country needs. There must be another purpose for
it.
In the first two months of
the Bush Administration two significant events took place that
preordained the Iraqi war. Vice President Cheney's Energy Task
Force was created, composed of federal officials and oil industry
people. By March of 2001, half a year before 9/11, the Task
Force was poring secretly over maps of the Iraqi oil fields,
pipe lines, and tanker terminals. It studied a listing of foreign
oil company "suitors" for exploration and development
contracts, to be executed with Saddam Hussein's oil ministry.
There was not a single American or British oil company included,
and to Mr. Cheney and his cohorts that was intolerable. The
final report of the Task Force was candid: "... Middle
East oil producers will remain central to world security. The
Gulf will be a primary focus of U.S. international energy policy."
The detailed meaning of "focus" was left blank.
The other event was the first
meeting of President Bush's National Security Council, and it
filled in the blank. The Council abandoned abruptly the decades-long
attempt to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and set
a new priority for Middle East foreign policy instead: the invasion
of Iraq. This, too, was six months before 9/11. "Focus"
would mean war.
By the fall of 2002, the White
House Iraq Group-a collection not of foreign policy experts but
of media and public relations people-was cranking up the marketing
campaign for the war. A contract was signed with the Halliburton
Corporation-even before military force in Iraq had been authorized
by Congress-to organize the suppression of oil well fires, should
Saddam torch the fields as he had done in the first Gulf War.
Little was left to chance.
The oil industry is the primary
client and top-ranked beneficiary of the Bush Administration.
There can be no question the Administration intended to secure
for American oil corporations the rich petroleum resources of
Iraq: 115 billion barrels of proven reserves, twice that in probable
and possible resources, potentially far more than Saudi Arabia.
The Energy Task Force spoke to this and the National Security
Council answered.
A secret NSC memorandum in
2001 spoke candidly of "actions regarding the capture of
new and existing oil and gas fields" in Iraq. In 2002 Paul
Wolfowitz suggested simply seizing the oil fields. These words
and suggestions were draconian, overt, and reprehensible-morally,
historically, politically and diplomatically. The seizure of
the oil would have to be oblique and far more sophisticated.
A year before the war the State
Department undertook the "Future of Iraq" project,
expressly to design the institutional contours of the postwar
country. The "Oil and Energy Working Group" looked
with dismay at the National Iraqi Oil Company, the government
agency that owned and operated the Iraqi oil fields and marketed
the products. 100% of the revenues went directly to the central
government, and constituted about 90% of its income. Saddam
Hussein benefited, certainly-his lavish palaces-but the Iraqi
people did so to a far greater extent, in terms of the nation's
public services and physical infrastructure. For this reason
nationalized oil industries are the norm throughout the world.
The Oil and Energy Working
Group designed a scheme that was oblique and sophisticated, indeed.
The oil seizure would be less than total. It would be obscured
in complexity. The apparent responsibility for it would be shifted,
and it would be disguised as benefiting, even necessary to Iraq's
well being. Their work was supremely ingenious, undeniably brilliant.
The plan would keep the National
Iraqi Oil Company in place, to continue overseeing the currently
producing fields. But those fields represent only 19% of Iraq's
petroleum reserves. The other 81% would be flung open to "investment"
by foreign oil interests, and the companies in favored positions
today-because of the war and their political connections-are
Exxon/Mobil, Chevron/Texaco, BP/Amoco, and Royal Dutch/Shell.
The nationalized industry would
be 80% privatized.
The investment vehicle would
be the "production sharing agreement," a long-term
contract-up to 40 years-that grants to the company a share of
the oil produced; in exchange, the company underwrites the development
costs and oilfield infrastructure. Such "investment"
is touted by the Bush Administration and its puppets in Iraq
as necessary to the country's recovery, and a huge benefit, accordingly.
But it is not unusual for these contracts to grant the companies
more than half the profits for the first 15-30 years, and to
deny the host country any revenue at all until the investment
costs have been recovered.
The Iraqi oil industry does
very much need a great deal of investment capital, to repair,
replace, and upgrade its infrastructure. But it does not need
Exxon/Mobil or any other foreign company to provide it. At a
reduced level, Iraq is still producing oil and hence revenue,
and no country in the world, perhaps, has better collateral against
which to float bond issues for public investment. Privatization
of any sort and in any degree is utterly unnecessary in Iraq
today.
The features of the State Department
plan were inserted by Paul Bremer's Provisional Coalition Authority
into the developing structures of Iraqi governance. American
oil companies were omnipresent in Baghdad then and have been
since, shaping and shepherding the plan through the several iterations
of puppet governments-the "democracy" said to be taking
hold in Iraq.
The package today is in the
form of draft legislation, the hydrocarbon law. Only a handful
of Iraqi officials know its details. Virtually none of them
had a hand in its construction. (It was first written in English.)
And its exclusive beneficiaries are the American and British
oil companies, whose profits will come directly from the pockets
of the Iraqi people.
The Iraqi people do, however,
benefit to some degree. The seizure is not total. The hydrocarbon
law specifies the oil revenues-the residue accruing to Iraq-will
be shared equally among the Sunni, Shiite, and Kurdish regions,
on a basis of population. This is the feature President Bush
relies upon exclusively to justify, to insist on the passage
of the hydrocarbon law. His real reasons are Exxon/Mobil, Chevron/Texaco,
BP/Amoco, and Royal Dutch/Shell.
No one can say at the moment
how much the hydrocarbon law will cost the Iraqi people, but
it will be in the hundreds of billions. The circumstances of
its passage are mired in the country's chaos, and its final details
are not yet settled. If and when it passes, however, Iraq will
orchestrate the foreign capture of its own oil. The ingenious,
brilliant seizure of Iraqi oil will be assured.
That outcome has been on the
Bush Administration's agenda since early in 2001, long before
terrorism struck in New York and Washington. The Iraqi war has
never been about terrorism.
It is blood for oil.
The blood has been spilled
already, hugely, criminally. More than 3,200 American military
men and women have died in Iraq. 26,500 more have been wounded.
But the oil remains in play.
The game will end if the revenue-sharing
"benchmark" is fully enforced. The land mine will
detonate.
Mission almost accomplished,
Mr. President.
Richard W. Behan lives and writes on Lopez Island,
off the northwest coast of Washington state. He is the author
of Plundered
Promise: Capitalism, Politics, and the Fate of the Federal Lands
(Island Press, 2001) and he is working on his next book, To Provide
Against Invasions: Corporate Dominion and America's Derelict
Democracy. He can be reached at rwbehan@rockisland.com.
(This essay is deliberately
not copyrighted: It may be reproduced without restriction.)