you mean it was about oil?

[Guest guest]

Our " Vital " National Interest in Iraq? Oil, Oil, Oil

by Randolph T Holhut | Sep 19 2007 - 12:55pm |

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DUMMERSTON, Vt. - In his new book, " The Age of Turbulence, " former

Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan departed from the Bush

administration's script and wrote that " the Iraq war is largely about

oil. "

 

Of course, Greenspan immediately had to backpedal from that statement.

Despite the fact that nearly everyone in the world knows that control

of Iraq's oil reserves was one of the main reasons for the U.S.

invasion, public officials still have to feign shock and outrage when

someone says it.

 

President Bush certainly wants us to keep pretending that oil has

nothing to do with the U.S. occupation of Iraq. Last week, Bush said

that Iraqi leaders " have asked for an enduring relationship with

America. And we are ready to begin building that relationship in a way

that protects our interests in the region and requires many fewer

American troops. "

 

" Our interests " in the region can be summed up in one single three

letter word: oil.

 

When you hear the president and his staff talk about " our assets in

the region, " the ones that need to be protected, they are talking

about dozens of military bases built to protect our access to the

region's oil, including the permanent bases that have been built in

Iraq.

 

The U.S. military has served as the security force to ensure the flow

of crude oil from the Persian Gulf for decades. It is the stated

policy of the United States that nothing is to interfere with the flow

of oil from the region and that any interference is to be treated as a

direct threat to our national security.

 

The invasion of Iraq was part of that policy. As investigative

journalist Greg Palast ably outlined in his recent book, " Armed

Madhouse, " the neocons at the Project for a New American Century - the

think tank that created much of the Bush administration's foreign

policy - prepared a 101-page plan for transforming Iraq into a free

market paradise after the invasion.

 

Hyperbole? The plan called for the sale of Iraq's infrastructure and

its state-run companies to foreign corporations, complete deregulation

of Iraq's industries and a rewrite of the tax laws to make Iraq a more

business-friendly place. In other words, privatization at gunpoint.

 

Remember how we were told that the war would finance itself? The oil

revenues that Iraq would generate would pay for the invasion and

reconstruction, the war planners told us. That turned out to be as

much of a lie as our bringing freedom and democracy to Iraq.

 

Remember how quickly Gen. Jay Garner was sacked from his position as

the U.S. viceroy in Iraq in April 2003? That was because he was more

interested in helping set up a new government that represented the

will of the Iraqi people. Doing that, however, would have meant the

end of the grand privatization plan. So Garner was fired.

 

Garner was replaced by Paul Bremer, who agreed to follow the PNAC

script. The problem was that the script called for denying Iraqis a

say in the rebuilding of their country. It helped fuel the insurgency

that has killed thousands of Americans and more than a million Iraqis

over the past four years.

 

And the kicker to all this is that Iraq's oil industry still hasn't

been privatized and is producing less oil than before the war. That's

why the United States has been so adamant about the Iraqi government,

such as it is, approving an agreement that would not only equitably

split oil revenues between the Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds, but give the

big oil companies a much larger cut of the profits.

 

That agreement has not been reached. There are no signs it will be

reached. If you were sitting on a commodity that the whole world wants

and will pay dearly for, would you give it away?

 

The story of how the Bush administration and its allies in the oil

industry sought to control Iraq's oil is a long and convoluted one.

It's certainly a story that Bush doesn't want to talk about, but it is

one has to be acknowledged.

 

As long as America is totally dependent on oil for its economic

survival, our soldiers are going to be in the Middle East. As oil

becomes a more scarce and expensive commodity, there will be more wars

fought over it. It is disingenuous for the people running this nation

to deny this.

 

Unfortunately, they still do.

 

 

What gets us into trouble is not what we don't know, it's what we know for sure

that just ain't so.

- Mark Twain