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It Was Oil, All Along

Oh, no, they told us, Iraq isn't a war about oil. That's cynical and simplistic, they said. It's about terror and al-Qaeda and toppling a dictator and spreading democracy and protecting ourselves from weapons of mass destruction. But one by one, these concocted rationales went up in smoke, fire and ashes. And now the bottom line turns out to be ... the bottom line. It is about oil.

Alan Greenspan said so last fall. The former chairman of the Federal Reserve, safely out of office, confessed in his memoir, "Everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil." He elaborated in an interview with The Washington Post's Bob Woodward, "If Saddam Hussein had been head of Iraq and there was no oil under those sands, our response to him would not have been as strong as it was in the first Gulf War."

Remember, also, that soon after the invasion, Donald Rumsfeld's deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, told the press that war was our only strategic choice. "We had virtually no economic options with Iraq," he explained, "because the country floats on a sea of oil."

Shades of Daniel Plainview, the monstrous petroleum tycoon in the movie, "There Will Be Blood." Half-mad, he exclaims, "There's a whole ocean of oil under our feet!" then adds, "No one can get at it except for me!"

No wonder American troops only guarded the Ministries of Oil and the Interior in Baghdad, even as looters pillaged museums of their priceless antiquities. They were making sure no one could get at the oil except ... guess who?

Here's a recent headline in The New York Times: "Deals With Iraq Are Set to Bring Oil Giants Back." Read on: "Four western companies are in the final stages of negotiations this month on contracts that will return them to Iraq, 36 years after losing their oil concession to nationalization as Saddam Hussein rose to power."

There you have it. After a long exile, Exxon Mobil, Shell, Total and BP are back in Iraq. And on the wings of no-bid contracts - that's right, sweetheart deals like those given Halliburton, KBR and Blackwater. The kind of deals you get only if you have friends in high places. And these war profiteers have friends in very high places.

Let's go back a few years to the 1990's, when private citizen Dick Cheney was running Halliburton, the big energy supplier. That's when he told the oil industry that, "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? 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."

Fast forward to Cheney's first heady days in the White House. The oil industry and other energy conglomerates were handed backdoor keys to the White House, and their CEO's and lobbyists were trooping in and out for meetings with their old pal, now Vice President Cheney. The meetings were secret, conducted under tight security, but as we reported five years ago, among the documents that turned up from some of those meetings were maps of oil fields in Iraq - and a list of companies who wanted access to them. The conservative group Judicial Watch and the Sierra Club filed suit to try to find out who attended the meetings and what was discussed, but the White House fought all the way to the Supreme Court to keep the press and public from learning the whole truth.

Think about it. These secret meetings took place six months before 9/11, two years before Bush and Cheney invaded Iraq. We still don't know what they were about. What we know is that this is the oil industry that's enjoying swollen profits these days. It would be laughable if it weren't so painful to remember that their erstwhile cheerleader for invading Iraq - the press mogul Rupert Murdoch - once said that a successful war there would bring us $20-a-barrel oil. The last time we looked, it was more than $140 a barrel. Where are you, Rupert, when the facts need checking and the predictions are revisited?

At a Congressional hearing this week, James Hansen, the NASA climate scientist who exactly twenty years ago alerted Congress and the world to the dangers of global warming, compared the chief executives of Big Oil to the tobacco moguls who denied that nicotine is addictive or that there's a link between smoking and cancer. Hansen, whom the administration has tried again and again to silence, said these barons of black gold should be tried for committing crimes against humanity and nature in opposing efforts to deal with global warming.

Perhaps those sweetheart deals in Iraq should be added to his proposed indictments. They have been purchased at a very high price. Four thousand American soldiers dead, tens of thousands permanently wounded, hundreds of thousands of dead and crippled Iraqis plus five million displaced, and a cost that will mount into trillions of dollars. The political analyst Kevin Phillips says

Re: It Was Oil, All Along

Bush and cheny and the united states could have gotten acess to the iraqi oil fields far more easily than toppling saddam. all that would have to have beeen done was to agree to remove the sanctions against him remove our navy from the persian gulf and for a time he would have gone along with that . Until he regained his power and was able to reconstitute his WMD programs chemical biloligical nuclear. the very programs no less an expert than slick Willie stated for the reasons to bomb iraq in dec 1998. Now could Bubba be wrong of course not.
Now there is a govt in iraq that was placed there by the Iraqi people. That is the reason few if any democrats like it.

Re: It Was Oil, All Along

"Now there is a govt in iraq that was placed there by the Iraqi people." Are you out of your mind? (that's rhetorical, of course!)

Duane, you need to look up the word delusional.

John R...

Re: It Was Oil, All Along

John R you obviously didnt watch the people of iraq walk to the polls a couple of years ago when they voted for their constitution and their parliment.
The first time in their lives they had the opurtunity to do that is it perfect no . But even you are not perfect although if one listens to you and swallowa all the things you say. a person may get the idea you are . Fortuneately hardly no one listens to you or believes anything you say.
You are the poster boy for modrenday liberal drmocrats . People who dont want the united states or any other peaceful people to survive and prosper. Democrats who never met a dictator they didnt like. Because saddam the mullahs of iran have the ideal form of govt (in your minds ) no elections no differences every one just doing what they are told. And bowing down to you and your fellow travelers.

Re: It Was Oil, All Along

Hey, Quano! Listen up - do you remember all of those years of communist dictatorial rule in the Soviet Union? They had elections, too.

Ever hear of a place called Zimbabwe and a man named Mugabe? They just had an election, too!

Yep, elections always insure that the people's will gets done, doesn't it?

Sure it does.

Re: It Was Oil, All Along

Jack B,

Quite right! Every iron curtain country, soviet satellite and even Russia itself had free democratic elections during the tenure of the USSR that ostensibly manifested the will of their people.

John R...