DISPATCHES FROM AMERICA No blood for ... er ... um ...
By Tom Engelhardt
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, it was exactly these four giants which "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 2% annual growth in global
oil demand over the years ahead along with conservatively a 3% 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 naive 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 pre-war 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 pre-war 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 US. 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?
Note: In its follow-up piece on the "no-bid" contracts, the
Washington Post added a fifth oil giant, Chevron, to the list and managed, as
well, to include this already familiar paragraph: "A higher-profile role for
Western companies in Iraq's oil industry is likely to revive speculation that
the Iraq war was motivated by a desire to tap into reserves that were
controlled by foreigners until the 1960s, when the industry was nationalized.
The belief is widespread in the Arab world." Like some cameo role in a film,
this cameo paragraph is evidently all that's now left of the largest pre-war
anti-war movement in history. For some good background on the history of
Western exploitation of Iraqi oil and its subsequent nationalization, check out
Juan Cole's
"They're Baaack..." at his Informed Comment blog.
Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the
Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com.
The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire(Verso,
2008), a collection of some of the best pieces from his site, has just been
published. Focusing on what the mainstream media hasn't covered, it is an
alternative history of the mad Bush years.
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