It's About Oil

Fisk with more info on upcoming petrowar 
 
It's About Oil

The Independent (UK)
January 18, 2003

Robert Fisk

This looming war isn't about chemical warheads or 
human rights: it's about oil. Along with the concern 
for 'vital interests' in the Gulf, this war was
concocted five years ago by oil men such as Dick Cheney

I was sitting on the floor of an old concrete house 
in the suburbs of Amman this week, stuffing into my 
mouth vast heaps of lamb and boiled rice soaked in 
melted butter. The elderly, bearded, robed men from 
Maan - the most Islamist and disobedient city in 
Jordan - sat around me, plunging their hands into 
the meat and soaked rice, urging me to eat more and 
more of the great pile until I felt constrained to 
point out that we Brits had eaten so much of the 
Middle East these past 100 years that we were no 
longer hungry. There was a muttering of prayers 
until an old man replied. "The Americans eat us now," 
he said.

Through the open door, where rain splashed on the
paving stones, a sharp east wind howled in from the
east, from the Jordanian and Iraqi deserts. Every man
in the room believed President Bush wanted Iraqi oil.
Indeed, every Arab I've met in the past six months
believes that this - and this alone - explains his
enthusiasm for invading Iraq. Many Israelis think the
same. So do I. Once an American regime is installed in
Baghdad, our oil companies will have access to 112
billion barrels of oil. With unproven reserves, we
might actually end up controlling almost a quarter of
the world's total reserves. And this forthcoming war
isn't about oil?

The US Department of Energy announced at the beginning
of this month that by 2025, US oil imports will account
for perhaps 70 per cent of total US domestic demand.
(It was 55 per cent two years ago.) As Michael Renner
of the Worldwatch Institute put it bleakly this week,
"US oil deposits are increasingly depleted, and many
other non-Opec fields are beginning to run dry. The
bulk of future supplies will have to come from the Gulf
region." No wonder the whole Bush energy policy is
based on the increasing consumption of oil. Some 70 per
cent of the world's proven oil reserves are in the
Middle East. And this forthcoming war isn't about oil?

Take a look at the statistics on the ratio of reserve
to oil production - the number of years that reserves
of oil will last at current production rates - compiled
by Jeremy Rifkin in Hydrogen Economy. In the US, where
more than 60 per cent of the recoverable oil has
already been produced, the ratio is just 10 years, as
it is in Norway. In Canada, it is 8:1. In Iran, it is
53:1, in Saudi Arabia 55:1, in the United Arab Emirates
75:1. In Kuwait, it's 116:1. But in Iraq, it's 526:1.
And this forthcoming war isn't about oil?

Even if Donald Rumsfeld's hearty handshake with Saddam
Hussein in 1983 - just after the Great Father Figure
had started using gas against his opponents - didn't
show how little the present master of the Pentagon
cares about human rights or crimes against humanity,
along comes Joost Hilterman's analysis of what was
really going on in the Pentagon back in the late 1980s.

Hilterman, who is preparing a devastating book on the
US and Iraq, has dug through piles of declassified US
government documents - only to discover that after
Saddam gassed 6,800 Kurdish Iraqis at Halabja (that's
well over twice the total of the World Trade Centre
dead of 11 September 2001) the Pentagon set out to
defend Saddam by partially blaming Iran for the
atrocity.

A newly declassified State Department document proves
that the idea was dreamed up by the Pentagon - who had
all along backed Saddam - and states that US diplomats
received instructions to push the line of Iran's
culpability, but not to discuss details. No details, of
course, because the story was a lie. This, remember,
followed five years after US National Security Decision
Directive 114 - concluded in 1983, the same year as
Rumsfeld's friendly visit to Baghdad - gave formal
sanction to billions of dollars in loan guarantees and
other credits to Baghdad. And this forthcoming war is
about human rights?

Back in 1997, in the years of the Clinton
administration, Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and a bunch of
other right-wing men - most involved in the oil
business - created the Project for the New American
Century, a lobby group demanding "regime change" in
Iraq. In a 1998 letter to President Clinton, they
called for the removal of Saddam from power. In a
letter to Newt Gingrich, who was then Speaker of the
House, they wrote that "we should establish and
maintain a strong US military presence in the region,
and be prepared to use that force to protect our vital
interests [sic] in the Gulf - and, if necessary, to
help remove Saddam from power".

The signatories of one or both letters included
Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, now Rumsfeld's Pentagon
deputy, John Bolton, now under-secretary of state for
arms control, and Richard Armitage, Colin Powell's
under-secretary at the State Department - who called
last year for America to take up its "blood debt" with
the Lebanese Hizbollah. They also included Richard
Perle, a former assistant secretary of defence,
currently chairman of the defence science board, and
Zalmay Khalilzad, the former Unocal Corporation oil
industry consultant who became US special envoy to
Afghanistan - where Unocal tried to cut a deal with 
the Taliban for a gas pipeline across Afghan territory 
- and who now, miracle of miracles, has been appointed 
a special Bush official for - you guessed it - Iraq.

The signatories also included our old friend Elliott
Abrams, one of the most pro-Sharon of pro-Israeli US
officials, who was convicted for his part in the Iran-
Contra scandal. Abrams it was who compared Israeli
prime minister Ariel Sharon - held "personally
responsible" by an Israeli commission for the slaughter
of 1,700 Palestinian civilians in the 1982 Sabra and
Chatila massacre - to (wait for it) Winston Churchill.
So this forthcoming war - the whole shooting match,
along with that concern for "vital interests" (ie oil)
in the Gulf - was concocted five years ago, by men like
Cheney and Khalilzad who were oil men to their
manicured fingertips.

In fact, I'm getting heartily sick of hearing the
Second World War being dug up yet again to justify
another killing field. It's not long ago that Bush was
happy to be portrayed as Churchill standing up to the
appeasement of the no-war-in Iraq brigade. In fact,
Bush's whole strategy with the odious and Stalinist-
style Korea regime - the "excellent" talks which US
diplomats insist they are having with the Dear Leader's
Korea which very definitely does have weapons of mass
destruction - reeks of the worst kind of Chamberlain-
like appeasement. Even though Saddam and Bush deserve
each other, Saddam is not Hitler. And Bush is certainly
no Churchill. But now we are told that the UN
inspectors have found what might be the vital evidence
to go to war: 11 empty chemical warheads that just may
be 20 years old.

The world went to war 88 years ago because an archduke
was assassinated in Sarajevo. The world went to war 63
years ago because a Nazi dictator invaded Poland. But
for 11 empty warheads? Give me oil any day. Even the
old men sitting around the feast of mutton and rice
would agree with that.