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'Iraqi Freedom' all about the
oil
By Michael T Klare
(Posted with permission from Foreign
Policy in Focus.)
On the second day of the
invasion of Iraq, US commandos seized two Iraqi offshore
oil terminals in the Persian Gulf, capturing their
defenders without a fight. "Swooping silently out of the
Persian Gulf night," exulted James Dao of the New York
Times, Navy SEALs (sea-air-land specialists) claimed "a
bloodless victory in the battle for Iraq's vast oil
empire".
Dao's dramatic turn of phrase revealed
more about the George W Bush administration's plans for
Iraq than almost every other report from the
battlefield. While US forces turned a blind eye to the
looting of Iraq's archeological treasures, they moved
quickly to gain control over oilfields, refineries, and
pipelines. Even before Iraqi resistance had been
squelched, top US officials were boasting that Iraq's
oil infrastructure was safely in US hands.
Oil
had nothing to do with Washington's motives for the
invasion, we were told. "The only interest the United
States has in the region is furthering the cause of
peace and stability, not in [Iraq's] ability to generate
oil," said press secretary Ari Fleischer in late 2002.
But at a January briefing, an unnamed "senior Defense
official" revealed that General Tommy Franks and his
staff "have crafted strategies that will allow us to
secure and protect those fields as rapidly as possible
in order to preserve those prior to destruction, as
opposed to having to go in and clean them up after".
When pressed, the "senior Defense official"
(presumably Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz) claimed
that these fields would be protected so as to benefit
the Iraqi people "at some point in the future". Other
officials spoke of holding the fields "in trust" for the
Iraqis. Nonetheless, the White House has talked with US
energy companies about assuming a major role in the
post-conflict development of Iraq's mammoth reserves.
For now, the administration's main concern
appears to be to put existing oilfields back into
operation as rapidly as possible so as to help subsidize
the costs of occupying and reconstructing Iraq. To
ensure that this process will move quickly, the Defense
Department awarded a non-competitive,
multimillion-dollar contract to Halliburton, the
Houston-based oil-services firm once headed by Dick
Cheney, to fight fires and repair damage to the
oilfields and begin the task of rehabilitation. In the
coming months, other US oil-services firms, including
Fluor and Bechtel (both with close ties to the
administration), will be invited to bid for even more
lucrative contracts to rebuild Iraq's oil
infrastructure. Ultimately, about US$5 billion will be
needed to restore Iraqi oil production to the levels
achieved before the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq War and the 1991
Gulf War.
Managing this complex enterprise will
be an "interim authority" made up of Iraqis selected or
approved by the US government, presumably including
expatriates such as Ahmad Chalabi of the Iraqi National
Congress (INC), who enjoys close ties with the US
Central Intelligence Agency and Department of Defense.
It can be safely assumed, however, that US occupation
officials will retain ultimate authority over the
oilfields during this period. Washington will seek
United Nations Security Council resolutions lifting the
economic sanctions in order to allow sales of Iraqi oil.
But administration officials vow to exclude the UN from
decision-making on the disposition of Iraqi oil assets.
Once the fields are back in operation, the next
item on the administration's agenda will be to determine
the fate of the Iraqi National Oil Co, the state-owned
firm that has managed Iraq's oil assets since their
nationalization in the 1970s. Most of INOC's current
managers wish to keep the company under state ownership,
but some of the exile leaders being courted by the Bush
team, including Chalabi, favor privatizing the firm and
parceling it out in large pieces to major US and British
oil companies. "American companies will have a big shot
at Iraqi oil," Chalabi declared last September. This
approach was given further support by a meeting of
expatriate Iraqi oil officials convened by the State
Department in early March. The officials, members of the
oil and energy panel of department's Future of Iraq
Project, declared that any post-Saddam Iraqi government
should "develop the right economic environment to allow
investment in and utilization of its oil and gas
resources".
US oil firms have admitted to
meeting with representatives of the INC and other exile
groups to discuss postwar access to Iraqi oil. While
exploitation of Iraq's existing fields, with total
reserves estimated at 112 billion barrels (second only
to Saudi Arabia's holdings of 261 billion barrels) is
appealing enough, what US firms really want is to be
able to tap into Iraq's "virgin" (undeveloped) fields in
remote parts of the country.
According to the
Energy Department, these undeveloped fields may hold as
much as 200 billion barrels of oil, making this the
largest pool of unexploited petroleum in the world.
Saddam had awarded contracts to firms in Russia, China,
and France to develop some of these fields, but any
government installed by the United States - certainly
one headed by Chalabi - would declare those contracts
void. With most big fields in the United States and
other mature production areas in decline, access to
these reserves could prove essential to the survival and
future prosperity of some of the major US energy firms.
It is this fact, more than any other, that belies the
administration's claim that oil had nothing to do with
the decision to invade and occupy Iraq.
Michael T Klare (mklare@hampshire.edu),
author of Resource Wars: The New Landscape of
Global Conflict and a professor of peace and world
security studies at Hampshire College in Amherst,
Massachusetts, is a military affairs analyst with
Foreign Policy In Focus. This piece first appeared in
The Nation.
(Posted with
permission from Foreign Policy in Focus.)
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