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2 Oil: The sovereignty showdown in
Iraq By Jack Miles
The
oil game in Iraq may be almost up. On September
29, like a landlord serving notice, the government
of Iraq announced that the next annual renewal of
the United Nations Security Council mandate for a
multinational force in Iraq - the only legal basis
for a continuation of the American occupation -
will be the last. That was, it seems, the first
shoe to fall. The second may be an announcement
terminating the little-noticed, but crucial
companion Security Council mandate governing the
disposition of
Iraq's oil revenues.
By December 31, 2008, according to Iraqi
Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari, the government of
Iraq intends to have replaced the existing mandate
for a multinational security force with a
conventional bilateral security agreement with the
United States - an agreement of the sort that
Washington has with Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and
several other countries in the Middle East.
The Security Council has always paired the
annual renewal of its mandate for the
multinational force with the renewal of a second
mandate for the management of Iraqi oil revenues.
This happens through the "Development Fund for
Iraq", a kind of escrow account set up by the
occupying powers after the overthrow of the Saddam
Hussein regime and recognized in 2003 by UN
Security Council Resolution 1483. The oil game
will be up if and when Iraq announces that this
mandate, too, will be terminated at a date certain
in favor of resource-development agreements that -
like the envisioned security agreement - match
those of other states in the region.
The
game will be up because, as Antonia Juhasz pointed
out last March in a New York Times op-ed, "Whose
Oil Is It, Anyway?":
Iraq's neighbors Iran, Kuwait and
Saudi Arabia ... have outlawed foreign control
over oil development. They all hire
international oil companies as contractors to
provide specific services as needed, for a
limited duration, and without giving the foreign
company any direct interest in the oil
produced.
By contrast, the oil
legislation now pending in the Iraqi parliament
awards foreign oil companies coveted, long-term,
20-35 year contracts of just the sort that
neighboring oil producers have rejected for
decades. It also places the Iraqi oil industry
under the control of an appointed body that would
include representatives of international oil
companies as full voting members.
The news
that the duly elected government of Iraq is
exercising its limited sovereignty to set a date
for termination of the American occupation
radically undercuts all discussion in the US
Congress or by American presidential candidates of
how soon the US occupation of Iraq may "safely"
end. Yet if, by the same route, Iraq were to
resume full and independent control over the
world's third-largest proven oil reserves - 200 to
300 million barrels of light crude worth as much
as $30 trillion at today's prices - a politically
incorrect question might break rudely out of the
Internet universe and into the mainstream media
world, into, that is, the open: Has the Iraq war
been an oil war from the outset?
Former
Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan evidently
thought so, or so he indicated in a single
sentence in his recent memoir: "I am saddened that
it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what
everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about
oil." When asked, Gen John Abizaid, former CENTCOM
commander who oversaw three and a half years of
the American occupation of Iraq, agreed. "Of
course it's about oil, we can't really deny that,"
he said during a roundtable discussion at Stanford
University. These confessions validated the
suspicions of foreign observers too numerous to
count. Veteran security analyst Thomas Powers
observed in the New York Review of Books recently:
What it was only feared the Russians
might do [by invading Afghanistan in the 1980s]
the Americans have actually done - they have
planted themselves squarely astride the world's
largest pool of oil, in a position potentially
to control its movement and to coerce all the
governments who depend on that oil. Americans
naturally do not suspect their own motives but
others do. The reaction of the Russians, the
Germans, and the French in the months leading up
to the war suggests that none of them wished to
give Americans the power which [former National
Security Adviser Zbigniew] Brzezinski had feared
was the goal of the
Soviets.
Apologists for the war point
out lamely that the United States imports only a
small fraction of its oil from Iraq, but what
matters, rather obviously, is not Iraq's current
exports but its reserves.
Before the
invasion of Iraq in March 2003, media mogul Rupert
Murdoch said, "The greatest thing to come out of
this for the world economy, if you could put it
that way, would be $20 a barrel for oil."
In the 21st century's version of the
"Great Game" of 19th century imperialism, the Bush
administration made a colossal gamble that Iraq
could become a kind of West Germany or South Korea
on the Persian Gulf - a federal republic with a
robust, oil-exporting economy, a rising standard
of living, and a set of US bases that would
guarantee lasting American domination of the most
resource-strategic region on the planet.
The political half of that gamble has
already been lost, but the Bush administration has
proven adamantly unwilling to accept the loss of
the economic half, the oil half, without a
desperate fight. Perhaps the five super-bases that
the US has been constructing in Iraq for as many
as 20,000 troops each, plus the ill-built
super-embassy (the largest on the planet) it has
been constructing inside Baghdad's Green Zone,
will suffice to maintain American control over the
oil reserves, even in defiance of international
law and the officially stated wishes of the Iraqi
people - but perhaps not.
Blackwater
and the sovereignty showdown In any case, a
kind of slow-motion showdown may lie not so far
ahead; and, during the past weeks, we may have
been given a clue as to how it could unfold.
Recall that after the gunning down of at least 17
Iraqis in a Baghdad square, Prime Minister Maliki
demanded that the State Department dismiss and
punish the trigger-happy private security firm,
Blackwater USA, which was responsible for the
safety of American diplomatic personnel in Iraq.
He further demanded that the immunity former
occupation head L Paul Bremer III had granted, in
2004, to all such private security firms be
revoked. Startled, the Bush administration briefly
grounded its diplomatic operations, then defiantly
resumed them - with security still provided by
Blackwater. Within days, though, Bush found
himself face-to-face in New York with Maliki for
discussions whose topic National Security Advisor
Stephen Hadley revealingly named as "Iraqi
sovereignty". Who would blink first?
We're
still waiting to see, but in the wake of an Iraqi
investigation that ended with a demand for $8
million compensation for each of the 17 murdered
Baghdadis, Blackwater is reportedly "on its way
out" of security responsibility in Iraq, probably
by the six-month deadline that Maliki has
demanded. Despite its disgrace, the well-connected
private security company continues to win
lucrative State Department security contracts.
Blackwater expert Jeremy Scahill told Bill Moyers
that losing the Iraq gig would only slightly
affect Blackwater's bottom line, but could
grievously inconvenience US diplomatic operations
in Iraq. In forcing such a crisis on the State
Department, the Maliki government, whose
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