It Was Oil, All Along
Saturday 28 June 2008
by: Bill Moyers and Michael Winship, t r u t h o u t
| Perspective
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 America
has become little more than an "energy protection
force," doing anything to gain access to expensive
fuel without regard to the lives of others or the
earth itself. One thinks again of Daniel Plainview
in "There Will Be Blood." His lust for oil came at
the price of his son and his soul.
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Bill Moyers is managing editor and Michael Winship
is senior writer of the weekly public affairs
program Bill Moyers Journal, which airs Friday
nights on PBS. Check local airtimes or comment at
The Moyers Blog at www.pbs.org/moyers.
Editor's Note: This Bill Moyers comment on America's
oil policy was presented on Friday 27 June 2008 on
Bill Moyers Journal.