The truth is finally out in the open: The Iraq war really is all about oil

Media Tell Us About Iraq War-Oil Connection Five Years After the Fact
By Tom Engelhardt, Tomdispatch.com
Posted on June 25, 2008, Printed on June 26, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/89310/
More than five years after the invasion of Iraq -- just in case you
were still waiting -- the oil giants finally hit the front page...


Last Thursday, the New York Times led with this headline: "Deals with
Iraq Are Set to Bring Oil Giants Back." (Subhead: "Rare No-bid
Contracts, A Foothold for Western Companies Seeking Future Rewards.")
And who were these four giants? ExxonMobil, Shell, the French company
Total and BP (formerly British Petroleum). What these firms got were
mere "service contracts" -- as in servicing Iraq's oil fields -- not
the sort of "production sharing agreements" that President Bush's
representatives in Baghdad once dreamed of, and that would have left
them in charge of those fields. Still, it was clearly a start. The
Times reporter, Andrew E. Kramer, added this little detail: "[The
contracts] include a provision that could allow the companies to reap
large profits at today's prices: the [Iraqi oil] ministry and
companies are negotiating payment in oil rather than cash." And here's
the curious thing, exactly these four giants "lost their concessions
in Iraq" back in 1972 when that country's oil was nationalized. Hmmm.


You'd think the Times might have slapped some kind of "we wuz wrong"
label on the piece. I mean, remember when the mainstream media, the
Times included, seconded the idea that Bush's invasion, whatever it
was about -- weapons of mass destruction or terrorism or liberation or
democracy or bad dictators or... well, no matter -- you could be sure
of one thing: it wasn't about oil. "Oil" wasn't a word worth including
in serious reporting on the invasion and its aftermath, not even after
it turned out that American troops entering Baghdad guarded only the
Oil and Interior Ministries, while the rest of the city was looted.
Even then -- and ever after -- the idea that the Bush administration
might have the slightest urge to control Iraqi oil (or the flow of
Middle Eastern oil via a well-garrisoned Iraq) wasn't worth spending a
few paragraphs of valuable newsprint on.


I always thought that, if Iraq's main product had been video games,
sometime in the last five years the Times (and other major papers)
would have had really tough, thoughtful pieces, asking really tough,
thoughtful questions, about the effects of the invasion and ensuing
chaos on our children's lives and the like. But oil, well... After
all, with global demand for energy on the rise, why would anybody want
to invade, conquer, occupy, and garrison a country that, as Deputy
Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz once observed, "floats on a sea of
oil"?


And let's be fair. At the time of the impending invasion, reasonable
people couldn't possibly have imagined that it had anything to do with
oil, not while George W. Bush was politely ignoring the subject,
except when referring obliquely to Iraq's "patrimony" of "natural
resources." Forget that our President had had an 11-year career in the
energy business (and had been Arbusto-ed); or that his Vice President
had been the CEO of a giant energy services corporation, Halliburton
-- retiring during the presidential campaign of 2000 with a $34
million severance package; or that, back in those distant years, he
had not hesitated to talk about the necessity of getting a tad more
oil into the international pipeline. (As he told an oil industry crowd
back in 1999, "By some estimates there will be an average of two
percent annual growth in global oil demand over the years ahead along
with conservatively a three percent natural decline in production from
existing reserves. That means by 2010 we will need on the order of an
additional fifty million barrels a day. So where is the oil going to
come from?" Where indeed? He then answered his own question: "While
many regions of the world offer great oil opportunities, the Middle
East, with two-thirds of the world's oil and the lowest cost, is still
where the prize ultimately lies.")


Or how about the President's national security advisor, who was on the
board of Chevron and had a double-hulled oil tanker, the Condoleezza
Rice, named after her in the oh-so-innocent 1990s. Forget as well the
Veep's secret energy task force of 2000 (also starring ExxonMobil and
pals) which recommended that the new administration turn its good
offices to convincing Middle Eastern countries "to open up areas of
their energy sectors to foreign investment." Forget it all and be
fair.


After all, the only people who thought that oil might have something
to do with the invasion of Iraq weren't on the Times staff. They
weren't, in fact, in the mainstream at all. And, to put things into
context, depending on your estimates, there were only somewhere
between 11 million and 30 million of them marching around in the
streets of cities and towns all over the planet before the invasion,
carrying signs that said ludicrous, easily dismissible things like:
"No Blood for Oil," "How did USA's oil get under Iraq's sand?" and
"Don't trade lives for oil!"


Let's face it: Among those who counted, they -- with their
simpleminded slogans on hand-lettered placards -- just didn't count at
all. Not when everyone who was anyone knew that the world was a much,
much, much subtler and much, much more complicated place. No blood for
oil? Sure, it was short and snappy and easy enough to get on a sign,
but also about as absurdly reductionist, as unsubtle, as uncomplicated
as possible.


I mean, really! And, worse yet, that thoughtless crew of demonstrators
had the nerve to suspect -- prospectively, not retrospectively -- the
worst of the Bush administration, even when their betters, men (and a
few women) with so many years of experience in the ways of Washington
and the world, were ready to give its top officials the benefit of the
doubt. Waving those silly signs, they actually expected bad things to
happen. It didn't seem to matter to them that the President, Vice
President, National Security Advisor, and Secretary of Defense assured
them no such thing was possible; assured them, in fact, that not to
invade would lead to mushroom clouds over American cities and Iraqi
unmanned aerial vehicles spraying bio- or chemical weaponry along the
east coast of the United States.


No wonder those masses of naïve demonstrators have been erased from
the blackboard of history. No wonder, since the invasion, the Times
hasn't bothered to attend to them seriously again. No wonder, on the
fifth anniversary of the Bush administration's "cakewalk" to victory
in Baghdad, the newspaper's op-ed page turned to L. Paul Bremer III,
Richard Perle, and others from the crew that got us into Iraq, or
cheered the administration on, to comment on what had gone wrong,
while skipping the crew in the streets that got it right in the first
place.


Now, with a barrel of crude selling at more than quadruple its prewar
price, more than double its price a mere year ago, the oil majors are
finally moving in for the... well, let's not say "kill," let's just
say that tasty little sip of the ol' patrimony.


And, by the way, here's how Times reporter Kramer, in a single
paragraph, managed to (barely) reintroduce those missing prewar
demonstrators, while sidling up to reality and history: "There was
suspicion," he wrote, "among many in the Arab world [notoriously
suspicious types, of course] and among parts of the American public
that the United States had gone to war in Iraq precisely to secure the
oil wealth these contracts seek to extract. The Bush administration
has said that the war was necessary to combat terrorism. It is not
clear what role the United States played in awarding the contracts;
there are still American advisors to Iraq's Oil Ministry."


Arabs with suspicions and unidentified "parts" of the American public,
all in the same sentence. Still sounds dismissible to me. Well, you
know those types. They deserve no less. They're the sorts who might
even be suspicious of "American advisors to Iraq's Oil Ministry," or,
yet more absurdly, of those "no-bid" contracts for the oil majors --
and just because it was in the DNA of the Bush administration to award
similar no-bid contracts to corporate cronies like... uh...
Halliburton. But the odds are that "the Iraqis" who awarded those
contracts probably just knew a good idea when they saw one up close
and personal over so many years.


And now, here we are. Sure, it's kinda thoughtless, kinda
embarrassing, and yet so typical of ExxonMobil and Co. not to care
about making all those pundits and knowledgeable observers look
really, really bad. What an unfortunate coincidence, this story
breaking just now, don't you think? I mean, after all that blood,
American and Iraqi, has been spilled, here comes the oil.


It's the sort of thing that could make suspicious Arabs even more so
and give a new life to some really dumb slogans in the U.S. But you
know, sometimes, if you're an oil giant, you just have to bite the
bullet. After all, there's still one heck of a lot of that patrimonial
oil in Iraq's ground. At more than $130 a barrel, someone has to get
it out -- and why not, as Kramer puts it, "western companies with
experience managing large projects"? I mean, after all these years,
why not?

Tom Engelhardt, editor of Tomdispatch.com, is co-founder of the
American Empire Project and author of The End of Victory Culture.

© 2008 Tomdispatch.com All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/89310/
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