Yes, 'twas oil all the time

Bill Moyers from truthout.org:

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.

Comments

[Olivier Withoff]

Of course it’s about oil and always has been. Post the Clinton years, we placed a (UN sanctioned) embargo on Iraq, which included the oil-for-food program. The OFF prog, was corrupt at its core, and lead all the way up to the higher echelons of the UN. Basically, Saddam hated the US, but we were never *after* his oil. The last thing that was needed was for a poor dictator to become a rich dictator and act on that hatred. The OFF prog was crumbling, and Russia had already started financing extraction. Do you strike when your enemy is weak, or wait until they're strong? Even through the Clinton years he was a constant verbal threat.
By stomping on Iraq, GWB did several things: (1) He took the show to foreign lands, so that we wouldn’t suffer another 9/11 (2) He showed the world that we won’t stand idly by, and have someone threaten us that has the potential to act on that threat (3) To a lesser extent, tried the democracy experiment – which was doomed to failure, but if it had worked would have saved us having to be there for the next 100 years.

[Sally G]

I just read John M. Perkins' book, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. It provides an interesting perspective on how the U.S., multinationals, and World Bank conspired to put "Third World" countries over their heads in debt building energy/electrical plants/infraastructure sized to meet unreasonable growth plans made by the energy/engineering/contracting U.S.A. companies who would get the contracts for the projects, thus bringing these countries under the influence of the expanding U.S. global empire. Next, when it was obvious that these countries were buried in never-payable debt, debt forgiveness was offered. . . but only under conditions favorable to the U.S. economy and such multimationals as Bechtel, Halliburton, and Brown & Root. It seems that leaving foreign policy to the private sector eliminates a lot of pesky oversight/Freedom of Information Act problems. . .

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[cheap jerseys]

I just read John M. Perkins' book, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. It provides an interesting perspective on how the U.S., multinationals, and World Bank conspired to put "Third World" countries over their heads in debt building energy/electrical plants/infraastructure sized to meet unreasonable growth plans made by the energy/engineering/contracting U.S.A. companies who would get the contracts for the projects, thus bringing these countries under the influence of the expanding U.S. global empire. Next, when it was obvious that these countries were buried in never-payable debt, debt forgiveness was offered.

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