July 19, 2007
Oil, war and Iraq
Conspiracy theorists who would like to believe that the invasion of Iraq was all about oil will be tempted to fork out £17 for a new book - "Oil Wars" (Pluto Press). The editors carry the stamp of academic respectability - they hail from the LSE and Stanford. And they definitely flirt with the "war for oil" thesis.
The book’s introduction starts with a very suggestive quote from Paul Wolfowitz - "The most important difference between North Korea and Iraq is that economically we just had no choice in Iraq. The country swims on a sea of oil." Infuriatingly this quote is not footnoted. I would love to read it in context.
The authors also note that - "Vice-President Cheney’s Energy Task Force, created just ten days after the Bush administration took office, explicitly argued that it was in the vital interests of the United States to protect its sources of oil in the Middle East at a time of increasingly tight and volatile markets." And they point out that the "the first military objective of the invasion of Iraq…was to seize control over the oilfields and refineries of southern Iraq" - and then to protect the oil ministry once Baghdad was seized, while other official buildings were looted.
They also point out that it is hardly unusual for wars to be fought over oil. The struggle to get hold of the stuff dictated Japanese and German military tactics during the second world war - playing an important role both in the decision to attack Pearl Harbour and in Hitler’s plan to invade Russia. As the authors note - "US control over oil was thought to be a decisive factor shaping the course and the outcome of the war - a fact that was not lost on post-war policy planners."
In the end, however, the editors of "Oil Wars" back off from arguing that the Iraq invasion was about oil for a couple of good reasons. The first reason is that it is an unprovable thesis. In fact, there is a lot of evidence pointing in the opposite direction. Unless, you believe that all the rhetoric about terror, WMD and democracy was entirely cynical - and just a front for the real oily motive - then you simply have to dismiss the large public record that exists on the reasons for going to war in Iraq. You also have to gloss over the fact that the US and its allies also invaded Afghanistan - which is not a country noted for its natural resources. The most that Mary Kaldor and her co-authors will ultimately say is that the existence of huge stocks of oil in Iraq made it easier to make the case for war in Iraq - because the argument was consistently made that Iraqi oil revenues would cover the cost of the war. So there would be no choice between "guns and butter". This too was a major mistake. The Iraq war is currently costing $300m a day.
There is a second good reason why the authors do not dwell on the Iraq conflict. This is a volume that was conceived well before the Iraq invasion and that is really not about the "old" kind of oil war - in which major industrial powers invade third world countries to seize oil. Instead Kaldor et al are most interested in the "new" oil wars - internal civil conflicts, fuelled by the struggle for control of oil. They develop a political equivalent of the old economic argument about the "resource curse". In their view - illustrated by chapters on six separate conflicts including Nigeria, Chechnya and Aceh - oil creates "rentier states". These are countries which fail to develop democratically because their rulers do not need to raise taxes. Instead they simply buy off interest groups with oil revenues. But, in the end, the oil money is not enough to satisfy everybody - and war breaks out. That is an over-simplified version of a complex and fascinating argument. If you want to get the whole version, buy the book.
An alternative to buying the book would be to wait until all official documents enter the public space. We know now that the Kennedy Presidency was directly involved in attempts to assassinate Castro, which would have been impossible to establish at the time when the complicity took place.
Posted by: Dr S Banerji | July 19th, 2007 at 1:41 pm | Report this commentHi. The Iraq oil quote comes from a mistranslation that was published by the Guardian, then retracted (which may be why the authors could no longer find the source for the quote they had written down).
You can read the Guardian’s retraction here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,972482,00.html
“A report which was posted on our website on June 4 under the heading ‘Wolfowitz: Iraq war was about oil’ misconstrued remarks made by the US deputy defence secretary, Paul Wolfowitz, making it appear that he had said that oil was the main reason for going to war in Iraq. He did not say that. He said, according to the department of defence website, ‘The…difference between North Korea and Iraq is that we had virtually no economic options with Iraq because the country floats on a sea of oil. In the case of North Korea, the country is teetering on the edge of economic collapse and that I believe is a major point of leverage whereas the military picture with North Korea is very different from that with Iraq.’
Posted by: Matt Drinkwater | July 19th, 2007 at 2:08 pm | Report this commentYou say there is a lot of evidence pointing in the opposite direction, but you have failed to consider what weight such ‘evidence’ actually has. There may be numerous speeches on the public record decrying Saddam Hussein’s oppressive regime and stoking fear of WMDs, but this is really no more than pre-war propoganda. Surely this cannot be cited or depended upon as evidence for the real motivation behind going to war.
A simple example: a criminal might say to a number of people that he did not commit the crime (and have all these conversations recorded), but his assertions cannot count as reliable evidence!
Posted by: Anonymous | July 19th, 2007 at 2:12 pm | Report this commentWe must not shoot down valid arguments with new tool called ‘conspiracy theory’. It is quite fashionable now a days. What more evidence one need to make a point that the iraq war is about oil and israel. This what millions believe and one must respect others opinion.
Regards
Posted by: Dr Shahid Qureshi | July 19th, 2007 at 3:32 pm | Report this commentWe’re finally coming around to a conclusion that Bush didn’t have oil as his primary motivator for going into Iraq. The quote out of context from Wolfowitz nevertheless helps sell the book to a crowd that would like for it to be that simple. There is probably more of a case to be made for conspiracy among the countries that argued that the “logic of war” didn’t make sense in Iraq. Those were the countries that had the most to lose from the U.N. Oil for Food program in Iraq.
Posted by: Stubic Asbury | July 19th, 2007 at 3:55 pm | Report this commentSir,
The quote you reference from Mr. Wolfowitz was I believe from a Vanity Fair interview with him? The question posed to him was ….’why Iraq and not North Korea?’ Wolfowitz responded something to the extent that both regimes were odious; however, it would be very hard for North Korea to sustain its current behavior. They were/are an economic train wreck and ultimately will implode. On the other, Iraq and Hussein, funded through oil receipts, could continue to obfuscate UN inspectors, fund Palestinian suicide bombers, work on his weapons program, etc. indefinitely.
John
Posted by: John Trochimowicz | July 19th, 2007 at 10:55 pm | Report this comment“unless you believe that the rhetoric about terror, WMD and democracy was entirely cynical”
YES SIR! I Do.
WMD: If the aggressors really believed that Iraq had WMD’s they wouldn’t resort to blatant forgery and fraud like downloading out of date PhD theses to make up a story. In case you have a short memory, do a Google on “dodgy dossier” and read up on the British side of the fraud committed on the public.
Note that today the same lies are being rehashed and recycled about Iran.
Terror: Practically every expert who was not a Likudnik-NeoCon pointed out the implausibility of the Saddam-Al Qaeda connection due to their entirely divergent ideologies. In fact, either of them had more contacts with Washington than with the other.
Al Qaeda had no presence in Saddam’s Iraq but it now appears well-rooted in Bush’s Iraq!
AGAIN, note that today the same lies are being rehashed and recycled about Iran despite the tremendous animosity of the Shia Iranians and Wahabi Al Qaeda.
Democracy: Ha ha ha! Bloody Ha!
If Democracy were the reason, why not put right the allies of America first? Why not Saudi Arabia which is an obscurantist antithesis to democracy (as well as the home to Al Qaeda’s founder and a main provider of manpower and funds to it, even today? Why not Egypt or Pakistan (two more hotbeds of extremism and terrorism where democracy has stalled)? Why attack Iraq when the 15 out of the 9/11 bombers were Saudis and 3 were Egyptians?
AGAIN, note that today the Likudnik-NeoCons in Washington and London have everything to say about the situation in Iran where a high degree of plurality exists (although not a functioning democracy by any means) but nothing about Saudi, Pakistan, UAE, Egypt or Jordan!!
Mr. Rachman, we may not be successful, highly intelligent journalists like you but please don’t treat us like 5 day old puppies.
P
Posted by: Pacifist | July 20th, 2007 at 10:01 am | Report this commentI agree with Pacifist.
I have to say that I’m rather disappointed with you Mr Rachman. I really did think you were an independent thinker and that you weren’t playing fiddle for the neocons. Sadly, it looks like you are.
Posted by: Anonymous | July 20th, 2007 at 3:05 pm | Report this comment“I would love to read it in context.” …
Here you go:
http://www.defenselink.mil/transcripts/transcript.aspx?transcriptid=2704.
Evidently Iraq “floats” rather than “swims” on a sea of oil, suggesting something more passive and pluckable.
Posted by: Bert | July 21st, 2007 at 12:57 am | Report this commentHi Bert,
Thanks for the link. I think, if read in context, the hated Wolfo was saying that in the case of N Korea there were options of economic sanctions because it was a bust country but the same options did not exist in the case of Iraq because it had a lot of oil and could survive the sanctions.
Taken at face value, it seems to me that the quote per se could not be used as support for the theory that Iraq was attacked to loot its oil.
Nevertheless, it is fair to say that the sanctions had truly brought Iraq to its knees (at the expense of the ordinary people and not at the expense of the Ba’athist elite) and that the UN inspection regime had done away with the Iraqi WMD’s.
The reasons given by the Likudnik-Neocons were implausible when analysed through the prism of facts and logic and one has to remain entirely cynical as to their motives, however tacituran and hypocritical they may have been in their public utterances.
Best,
P
Posted by: Pacifist | July 22nd, 2007 at 1:04 pm | Report this commentIf oil was not the main motive for the US invasion of Iraq, why did Vice-President Cheney, a former energy company CEO, meet with oil company exectutives before the invasion in order to go over maps of Iraqi oil fields and then fight successfully in court to keep details of the meetings secret? Why did so many Bush administration officials responsible for promoting the war have ties, either to the oil industry, or to neo-conservative think tanks that had been long been pushing for a Pax Americana based on control of Middle Eastern oil? Has Mr. Rachman never heard of or read the Project for a New American Century?
Was there no concern in Washington that Saddam was on the point of making deals with European oil companies which would have shut out US ones, or that he might have tried to break the cartel by selling oil more cheaply? Did no one care about the strained US relations with Saudia Arabia after the 9/11 attacks or the growth of Islamic fundamentalism in that oil rich country?
Was is just an accident that US troops were guarding the Iraqi oil ministry so zealously while the national museum and other government offices were being looted? Why is the US even now pushing so hard for the Iraqi Parliament to enact a law giving US companies control over Iraq’s oil through lucrative “Production Sharing Agreements”, leaving little or nothing over for the Iraqi people? Why is the US embassy in the Green Zone the largest of its kind in the world?
Mr. Rachman is right, however, in one respect. Oil was not the only motive for the invasion. Helping well-connected defense contractors like Halliburton and Bechtel make billions in profits by performing shoddy or non-existent work, under no-bid contracts at US taxpayer expense, also played an obvious role in the decision to go to war.
Posted by: Roger Algase | July 23rd, 2007 at 1:25 pm | Report this commentMr Rachman
Posted by: william hall | July 26th, 2007 at 4:47 am | Report this commentRe Oil, War and Iraq
I have no problem believing the Iraq pre war rhetoric apropos wmd’s, democracy and terror was all cynical nonsense. Did you/do you believe any of the above? Do I dare to “Dismiss the larger public record for going to war in Iraq.” Are you joking? The “public record” has not only been “dismissed” but ridiculed, negated and disparaged. What alternate state of disinformation are you living in?
As for using the invasion of Afghanistan and it’s paucity of oil as an indicator that Iraq was not invaded for it’s oil shows a lack of critical thinking and ingenousness that is, quite frankly, beyond belief.
In his July 31 column “Revealed: the hidden theory of conspiracy theories”, Gideon Rachman has given us a sequel to his July 19 column “Oil War and Iraq”, in which he attempted to dismiss anyone who dissents from the official US government line about the reasons for invading Iraq as a “consiracy theorist”.
In his latest column, Mr. Rachman continues his distortions of the events leating up to the invasion by suggesting that two of the most vigorous neocon supporters of the war, Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle, may have “fallen prey” to a “conspiracy theory” namely Saddam Hussein’s supposed responsibility for the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center.
It is difficult to believe that Mr. Rachman can take his own statements seriously. Far from “falling prey” to anything, Wolfowitz and Perle used their highly influential positions to promote this “conspiracy theory”, which was openly supported by President Bush, Vice-President Cheney and almost every other member of the administration until its falsity became so obvious that they were forced to retreat.
Mr. Rachman also fails to mention the biggest conpsiracy theory of all, namely that Saddam allegedly had WMD and was reconstituting his nuclear program. Most of us would define a conspiracy theory according to its truth value, or, to be more precise, the lack of it. Mr. Rachman, however, seems to define “conspiracy theory” as anything that differs from the official government line, no matter how false that may be.
Roger Algase
Posted by: Roger Algase | July 31st, 2007 at 12:35 pm | Report this commentNew York NY 10024