[WCUSP] It's about oil--except in the MSM

[yvonne simmons]

> This worthy article reflects what is received wisdom
> in the rest of the
> world. It also suggests that when Clinton talks
> those "vital US
> interests"--code words for what will compel any new
> president to stay in
> Iraq-- this is what she's talking about. Buit you
> have to go to the London
> Review of Books for it: the NYTimes even censored
> Greenspan's quote(see
> below)
> 
> 
> 
> http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n20/holt01_.html
> It's the Oil
> London Review of Books
> Oct. 18, 2007
> 
> Jim Holt  writes for the New York Times Magazine and
> the New Yorker. So how
> come he didn't publish this in the US?
> 
> Iraq is 'unwinnable', a 'quagmire', a 'fiasco': so
> goes the received
> opinion. But there is good reason to think that,
> from the Bush-Cheney
> perspective, it is none of these things. Indeed, the
> US may be 'stuck'
> precisely where Bush et al want it to be, which is
> why there is no 'exit
> strategy'.
> 
> Iraq has 115 billion barrels of known oil reserves.
> That is more than five
> times the total in the United States. And, because
> of its long isolation, it
> is the least explored of the world's oil-rich
> nations. A mere two thousand
> wells have been drilled across the entire country;
> in Texas alone there are
> a million. It has been estimated, by the Council on
> Foreign Relations, that
> Iraq may have a further 220 billion barrels of
> undiscovered oil; another
> study puts the figure at 300 billion. If these
> estimates are anywhere close
> to the mark, US forces are now sitting on one
> quarter of the world's oil
> resources. The value of Iraqi oil, largely light
> crude with low production
> costs, would be of the order of $30 trillion at
> today's prices. For purposes
> of comparison, the projected total cost of the US
> invasion/occupation is
> around $1 trillion.
> 
> Who will get Iraq's oil? One of the Bush
> administration's 'benchmarks' for
> the Iraqi government is the passage of a law to
> distribute oil revenues. The
> draft law that the US has written for the Iraqi
> congress would cede nearly
> all the oil to Western companies. The Iraq National
> Oil Company would retain
> control of 17 of Iraq's 80 existing oilfields,
> leaving the rest - including
> all yet to be discovered oil - under foreign
> corporate control for 30 years.
> 'The foreign companies would not have to invest
> their earnings in the Iraqi
> economy,' the analyst Antonia Juhasz wrote in the
> New York Times in March,
> after the draft law was leaked. 'They could even
> ride out Iraq's current
> "instability" by signing contracts now, while the
> Iraqi government is at its
> weakest, and then wait at least two years before
> even setting foot in the
> country.' As negotiations over the oil law stalled
> in September, the
> provincial government in Kurdistan simply signed a
> separate deal with the
> Dallas-based Hunt Oil Company, headed by a close
> political ally of President
> Bush.
> 
> How will the US maintain hegemony over Iraqi oil? By
> establishing permanent
> military bases in Iraq. Five self-sufficient
> 'super-bases' are in various
> stages of completion. All are well away from the
> urban areas where most
> casualties have occurred. There has been precious
> little reporting on these
> bases in the American press, whose dwindling corps
> of correspondents in Iraq
> cannot move around freely because of the dangerous
> conditions. (It takes a
> brave reporter to leave the Green Zone without a
> military escort.) In
> February last year, the Washington Post reporter
> Thomas Ricks described one
> such facility, the Balad Air Base, forty miles north
> of Baghdad. A piece of
> (well-fortified) American suburbia in the middle of
> the Iraqi desert, Balad
> has fast-food joints, a miniature golf course, a
> football field, a cinema
> and distinct neighbourhoods - among them,
> 'KBR-land', named after the
> Halliburton subsidiary that has done most of the
> construction work at the
> base. Although few of the 20,000 American troops
> stationed there have ever
> had any contact with an Iraqi, the runway at the
> base is one of the world's
> busiest. 'We are behind only Heathrow right now,' an
> air force commander
> told Ricks.
> 
> The Defense Department was initially coy about these
> bases. In 2003, Donald
> Rumsfeld said: 'I have never, that I can recall,
> heard the subject of a
> permanent base in Iraq discussed in any meeting.'
> But this summer the Bush
> administration began to talk openly about stationing
> American troops in Iraq
> for years, even decades, to come. Several visitors
> to the White House have
> told the New York Times that the president himself
> has become fond of
> referring to the 'Korea model'. When the House of
> Representatives voted to
> bar funding for 'permanent bases' in Iraq, the new
> term of choice became
> 'enduring bases', as if three or four decades wasn't
> effectively an
> eternity.
> 
> But will the US be able to maintain an indefinite
> military presence in Iraq?
> It will plausibly claim a rationale to stay there
> for as long as civil
> conflict simmers, or until every groupuscule that
> conveniently brands itself
> as 'al-Qaida' is exterminated. The civil war may
> gradually lose intensity as
> Shias, Sunnis and Kurds withdraw into separate
> enclaves, reducing the
> surface area for sectarian friction, and as warlords
> consolidate local
> authority. De facto partition will be the result.
> But this partition can
> never become de jure. (An independent Kurdistan in
> the north might upset
> Turkey, an independent Shia region in the east might
> become a satellite of
> Iran, and an independent Sunni region in the west
> might harbour al-Qaida.)
> Presiding over this Balkanised Iraq will be a weak
> federal government in
> Baghdad, propped up and overseen by the
> Pentagon-scale US embassy that has
> just been constructed - a green zone within the
> Green Zone. As for the
> number of US troops permanently stationed in Iraq,
> the defence secretary,
> Robert Gates, told Congress at the end of September
> that 'in his head' he
> saw the long-term force as consisting of five combat
> brigades, a quarter of
> the current number, which, with support personnel,
> would mean 35,000 troops
> at the very minimum, probably accompanied by an
> equal number of mercenary
> contractors. (He may have been erring on the side of
> modesty, since the five
> super-bases can accommodate between ten and twenty
> thousand troops each.)
> These forces will occasionally leave their bases to
> tamp down civil
> skirmishes, at a declining cost in casualties. As a
> senior Bush
> administration official told the New York Times in
> June, the long-term bases
> 'are all places we could fly in and out of without
> putting Americans on
> every street corner'. But their main day-to-day
> function will be to protect
> the oil infrastructure.
> 
> This is the 'mess' that Bush-Cheney is going to hand
> on to the next
> administration. What if that administration is a
> Democratic one? Will it
> dismantle the bases and withdraw US forces entirely?
> That seems unlikely,
> considering the many beneficiaries of the continued
> occupation of Iraq and
> the exploitation of its oil resources. The three
> principal Democratic
> candidates - Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John
> Edwards - have already
> hedged their bets, refusing to promise that, if
> elected, they would remove
> American forces from Iraq before 2013, the end of
> their first term.
> 
> Among the winners: oil-services companies like
> Halliburton; the oil
> companies themselves (the profits will be
> unimaginable, and even Democrats
> can be bought); US voters, who will be guaranteed
> price stability at the gas
> pump (which sometimes seems to be all they care
> about); Europe and Japan,
> which will both benefit from Western control of such
> a large part of the
> world's oil reserves, and whose leaders will
> therefore wink at the permanent
> occupation; and, oddly enough, Osama bin Laden, who
> will never again have to
> worry about US troops profaning the holy places of
> Mecca and Medina, since
> the stability of the House of Saud will no longer be
> paramount among
> American concerns. Among the losers is Russia, which
> will no longer be able
> to lord its own energy resources over Europe.
> Another big loser is Opec, and
> especially Saudi Arabia, whose power to keep oil
> prices high by enforcing
> production quotas will be seriously compromised.
> 
> Then there is the case of Iran, which is more
> complicated. In the short
> term, Iran has done quite well out of the Iraq war.
> Iraq's ruling Shia
> coalition is now dominated by a faction friendly to
> Tehran, and the US has
> willy-nilly armed and trained the most pro-Iranian
> elements in the Iraqi
> military. As for Iran's nuclear programme, neither
> air strikes nor
> negotiations seem likely to derail it at the moment.
> But the Iranian regime
> is precarious. Unpopular mullahs hold onto power by
> financing internal
> security services and buying off elites with oil
> money, which accounts for
> 70 per cent of government revenues. If the price of
> oil were suddenly to
> drop to, say, $40 a barrel (from a current price
> just north of $80), the
> repressive regime in Tehran would lose its steady
> income. And that is an
> outcome the US could easily achieve by opening the
> Iraqi oil spigot for as
> long as necessary (perhaps taking down Venezuela's
> oil-cocky Hugo Chávez
> into the bargain).
> 
> And think of the United States vis-à-vis China. As a
> consequence of our
> trade deficit, around a trillion dollars' worth of
> US denominated debt
> (including $400 billion in US Treasury bonds) is
> held by China. This gives
> Beijing enormous leverage over Washington: by
> offloading big chunks of US
> debt, China could bring the American economy to its
> knees. China's own
> economy is, according to official figures, expanding
> at something like 10
> per cent a year. Even if the actual figure is closer
> to 4 or 5 per cent, as
> some believe, China's increasing heft poses a threat
> to US interests. (One
> fact: China is acquiring new submarines five times
> faster than the US.) And
> the main constraint on China's growth is its access
> to energy - which, with
> the US in control of the biggest share of world oil,
> would largely be at
> Washington's sufferance. Thus is the Chinese threat
> neutralised.
> 
> Many people are still perplexed by exactly what
> moved Bush-Cheney to invade
> and occupy Iraq. In the 27 September issue of the
> New York Review of Books,
> Thomas Powers, one of the most astute watchers of
> the intelligence world,
> admitted to a degree of bafflement. 'What's
> particularly odd,' he wrote, 'is
> that there seems to be no sophisticated,
> professional, insiders' version of
> the thinking that drove events.' Alan Greenspan, in
> his just published
> memoir, is clearer on the matter. 'I am saddened,'
> he writes, 'that it is
> politically inconvenient to acknowledge what
> everyone knows: the Iraq war is
> largely about oil.'
> 
> Was the strategy of invading Iraq to take control of
> its oil resources
> actually hammered out by Cheney's 2001 energy task
> force? One can't know for
> sure, since the deliberations of that task force,
> made up largely of oil and
> energy company executives, have been kept secret by
> the administration on
> the grounds of 'executive privilege'. One can't say
> for certain that oil
> supplied the prime motive. But the hypothesis is
> quite powerful when it
> comes to explaining what has actually happened in
> Iraq. The occupation may
> seem horribly botched on the face of it, but the
> Bush administration's
> cavalier attitude towards 'nation-building' has all
> but ensured that Iraq
> will end up as an American protectorate for the next
> few decades - a
> necessary condition for the extraction of its oil
> wealth. If the US had
> managed to create a strong, democratic government in
> an Iraq effectively
> secured by its own army and police force, and had
> then departed, what would
> have stopped that government from taking control of
> its own oil, like every
> other regime in the Middle East? On the assumption
> that the Bush-Cheney
> strategy is oil-centred, the tactics - dissolving
> the army,
> de-Baathification, a final 'surge' that has hastened
> internal migration -
> could scarcely have been more effective. The costs -
> a few billion dollars a
> month plus a few dozen American fatalities (a figure
> which will probably
> diminish, and which is in any case comparable to the
> number of US
> motorcyclists killed because of repealed helmet
> laws) - are negligible
> compared to $30 trillion in oil wealth, assured
> American geopolitical
> supremacy and cheap gas for voters. In terms of
> realpolitik, the invasion of
> Iraq is not a fiasco; it is a resounding success.
> 
> Still, there is reason to be sceptical of the
> picture I have drawn: it
> implies that a secret and highly ambitious plan
> turned out just the way its
> devisers foresaw, and that almost never happens.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 


       
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