How the Bush Administration’s Iraqi Oil Grab Went Awry
Greenspan’s Oil Claim in Context
Here is the sentence in The Age of Turbulence, the 531-page memoir of former Federal Reserve chief Alan Greenspan, that caused so much turbulence in Washington last week: “I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.” Honest and accurate, it had the resonance of the Bill Clinton’s election campaign mantra, “It’s the economy, stupid.” But, finding himself the target of a White House attack — an administration spokesman labeled his comment, “Georgetown cocktail party analysis” — Greenspan backtracked under cover of verbose elaboration. None of this, however, made an iota of difference to the facts on the ground.
Here is a prosecutor’s brief for the position that “the Iraq War is largely about oil”:
The primary evidence indicating that the Bush administration coveted Iraqi oil from the start comes from two diverse but impeccably reliable sources: Paul O’Neill, the Treasury Secretary (2001-2003) under President George W. Bush; and Falah Al Jibury, a well-connected Iraqi-American oil consultant, who had acted as President Ronald Reagan’s “back channel” to Iraqi President Saddam Hussein during the Iraq-Iran War of 1980-88. The secondary evidence is from the material that can be found in such publications as the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.
According to O’Neill’s memoirs, The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O’Neill, written by journalist Ron Suskind and published in 2004, the top item on the agenda of the National Security Council’s first meeting after Bush entered the Oval Office was Iraq. That was January 30, 2001, more than seven months before the 9/11 attacks. The next National Security Council (NSC) meeting on February 1st was devoted exclusively to Iraq.
Advocating “going after Saddam” during the January 30 meeting, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said, according to O’Neill, “Imagine what the region would look like without Saddam and with a regime that’s aligned with U.S. interests. It would change everything in the region and beyond. It would demonstrate what U.S. policy is all about.” He then discussed post-Saddam Iraq — the Kurds in the north, the oil fields, and the reconstruction of the country’s economy. (Suskind, p. 85)
Among the relevant documents later sent to NSC members, including O’Neill, was one prepared by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). It had already mapped Iraq’s oil fields and exploration areas, and listed American corporations likely to be interested in participating in Iraq’s petroleum industry.
Another DIA document in the package, entitled “Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield Contracts,” listed companies from 30 countries — France, Germany, Russia, and Britain, among others — their specialties and bidding histories. The attached maps pinpointed “super-giant oil field,” “other oil field,” and “earmarked for production sharing,” and divided the basically undeveloped but oil-rich southwest of Iraq into nine blocks, indicating promising areas for future exploration. (Suskind., p. 96)
According to high flying, oil insider Falah Al Jibury, the Bush administration began making plans for Iraq’s oil industry “within weeks” of Bush taking office in January 2001. In an interview with the BBC’s Newsnight program, which aired on March 17, 2005, he referred to his participation in secret meetings in California, Washington, and the Middle East, where, among other things, he interviewed possible successors to Saddam Hussein.
By January 2003, a plan for Iraqi oil crafted by the State Department and oil majors emerged under the guidance of Amy Myers Jaffe of the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy at Rice University. It recommended maintaining the state-owned Iraq National Oil Company, whose origins dated back to 1961 — but open it up to foreign investment after an initial period in which U.S.-approved Iraqi managers would supervise the rehabilitation of the war-damaged oil infrastructure. The existence of this group would come to light in a report by the Wall Street Journal on March 3, 2003.
Unknown to the architects of this scheme, according to the same BBC Newsnight report, the Pentagon’s planners, apparently influenced by powerful neocons in and out of the administration, had devised their own super-secret plan. It involved the sale of all Iraqi oil fields to private companies with a view to increasing output well above the quota set by the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) for Iraq in order to weaken, and then destroy, OPEC.
Secondary Evidence
On October 11, 2002 the New York Times reported that the Pentagon already had plans to occupy and control Iraq’s oilfields. The next day the Economist described how Americans in the know had dubbed the waterway demarcating the southern borders of Iraq and Iran “Klondike on the Shatt al Arab,” while Ahmed Chalabi, head of the U.S.-funded Iraqi National Congress and a neocon favorite, had already delivered this message: “American companies will have a big shot at Iraqi oil — if he gets to run the show.”
On October 30, Oil and Gas International revealed that the Bush administration wanted a working group of 12 to 20 people to (a) recommend ways to rehabilitate the Iraqi oil industry “in order to increase oil exports to partially pay for a possible U.S. military occupation government,” (b) consider Iraq’s continued membership of OPEC, and (c) consider whether to honor contracts Saddam Hussein had granted to non-American oil companies.
By late October 2002, columnist Maureen Dowd of the New York Times would later reveal, Halliburton, the energy services company previously headed by Vice President Dick Cheney, had prepared a confidential 500-page document on how to handle Iraq’s oil industry after an invasion and occupation of Iraq. This was, commented Dowd, “a plan [Halliburton] wrote several months before the invasion of Iraq, and before it got a no-bid contract to implement the plan (and overbill the U.S.).” She also pointed out that a Times‘ request for a copy of the plan evinced a distinct lack of response from the Pentagon.
In public, of course, the Bush administration built its case for an invasion of Iraq without referring to that country’s oil or the fact that it had the third largest reserves of petroleum in the world. But what happened out of sight was another matter. At a secret NSC briefing for the President on February 24, 2003, entitled, “Planning for the Iraqi Petroleum Infrastructure,” a State Department economist, Pamela Quanrud, told Bush that it would cost $7-8 billion to rebuild the oil infrastructure, if Saddam decided to blow up his country’s oil wells, according to Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward in his 2004 book, Plan of Attack (pp. 322-323). Quanrud was evidently a member of the State Department group chaired by Amy Myers Jaffe.
When the Anglo-American troops invaded on March 20, 2003, they expected to see oil wells ablaze. Saddam Hussein proved them wrong. Being a staunch nationalist, he evidently did not want to go down in history as the man who damaged Iraq’s most precious natural resource.
On entering Baghdad on April 9th, the American troops stood by as looters burned and ransacked public buildings, including government ministries — except for the Oil Ministry, which they guarded diligently. Within the next few days, at a secret meeting in London, the Pentagon’s scheme of the sale of all Iraqi oil fields got a go-ahead in principle.
The Bush administration’s assertions that oil was not a prime reason for invading Iraq did not fool Iraqis though. A July 2003 poll of Baghdad residents — who represented a quarter of the Iraqi national population — by the London Spectator showed that while 23% believed the reason for the Anglo-American war on Iraq was “to liberate us from dictatorship,” twice as many responded, “to get oil”. (Cited in Dilip Hiro, Secrets and Lies: Operation “Iraqi Freedom” and After, p. 398.)
As Iraq’s principal occupier, the Bush White House made no secret of its plans to quickly dismantle that country’s strong public sector. When the first American proconsul, retired General Jay Garner, focused on holding local elections rather than privatizing the country’s economic structure, he was promptly sacked.
Hurdles to Oil Privatization Prove Impassable
Garner’s successor, L. Paul Bremer III, found himself dealing with Philip Carroll — former Chief Executive Officer of the American operations of (Anglo-Dutch) Royal Dutch Shell in Houston — appointed by Washington as the Iraqi oil industry’s supreme boss. Carroll decided not to tinker with the industry’s ownership and told Bremer so. “There was to be no privatization of Iraqi oil resources or facilities while I was involved,” Carroll said in an interview with the BBC’s Newsnight program on March 17, 2005.
This was, however, but a partial explanation for why Bremer excluded the oil industry when issuing Order 39 in September 2003 privatizing nearly 200 Iraqi public sector companies and opening them up to 100% foreign ownership. The Bush White House had also realized by then that denationalizing the oil industry would be a blatant violation of the Geneva Conventions which bar an occupying power from altering the fundamental structure of the occupied territory’s economy.
There was, as well, the vexatious problem of sorting out the 30 major oil development contracts Saddam’s regime had signed with companies based in Canada, China, France, India, Italy, Russia, Spain, and Vietnam. The key unresolved issue was whether these firms had signed contracts with the government of Saddam Hussein, which no longer existed, or with the Republic of Iraq which remained intact.
Perhaps more important was the stand taken by Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the senior Shiite cleric in the country and a figure whom the occupying Americans were keen not to alienate. He made no secret of his disapproval of the wholesale privatization of Iraq’s major companies. As for the minerals — oil being the most precious — Sistani declared that they belonged to the “community,” meaning the state. As a religious decree issued by a grand ayatollah, his statement carried immense weight.
Even more effective was the violent reaction of the industry’s employees to the rumors of privatization. In his Newsnight interview Jibury said, “We saw an increase in the bombing of oil facilities and pipelines built on the premise that privatization is coming.”
In the immediate aftermath of the invasion, much equipment was looted from pipelines, pumping stations, and other oil facilities. By August 2003, four months after American troops entered Baghdad, oil output had only inched up to 1.2 million barrels per day, about two-fifths of the pre-invasion level. The forecasts (or dreams) of American planners’ that oil production would jump to 6 million barrels per day by 2010 and easily fund the occupation and reconstruction of the country, were now seen for what they were — part of the hype disseminated privately by American neocons to sell the idea of invading Iraq to the public.
With the insurgency taking off, attacks on oil pipelines and pumping stations averaged two a week during the second half of 2003. The pipeline connecting a major northern oil field near Kirkuk — with an export capacity of 550,000-700,000 barrels per day — to the Turkish port of Ceyhan became inoperative. Soon, the only oil being exported was from fields in the less disturbed, predominately Shiite south of Iraq.
In September 2003, President Bush approached Congress for $2.1 billion to safeguard and rehabilitate Iraq’s oil facilities. The resulting Task Force Shield project undertook to protect 340 key installations and 4,000 miles (6,400 km) of oil pipeline. It was not until the spring of 2004 that output again reached the pre-war average of 2.5 million barrels per day — and that did not hold. Soon enough, production fell again. Iraqi refineries were, by now, producing only two-fifths of the 24 million liters of gasoline needed by the country daily, and so there were often days-long lines at service stations.
Addressing the 26th Oil and Money conference in London on September 21, 2005, Issam Chalabi, who had been an Iraqi oil minister in the late 1980s, referred to the crippling lack of security and the lack of clear laws to manage the industry, and doubted if Iraq could return to the 1979 peak of 3.5 million barrels per day before 2009, if then.
Meanwhile, the Iraqi government found itself dependent on oil revenues for 90% of its income, a record at a time when corruption in its ministries had become rampant. On January 30, 2005, Stuart W. Bowen, the special inspector general appointed by the U.S. occupation authority, reported that almost $9 billion in Iraqi oil revenue, disbursed to the ministries, had gone missing. A subsequent Congressional inspection team reported in May 2006 that Task Force Shield had failed to meet its goals due to “lack of clear management structure and poor accountability”, and added that there were “indications of potential fraud” which were being reviewed by the Inspector General.
The endorsement of the new Iraqi constitution by referendum in October 2005 finally killed the prospect of full-scale oil privatization. Article 109 of that document stated clearly that hydrocarbons were “national Iraqi property”. That is, oil and gas would remain in the public sector.
In March 2006, three years after the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq, the country’s petroleum exports were 30% to 40% below pre-invasion levels.
Bush Pushes for Iraq’s Flawed Draft Hydrocarbon Law
In February 2007, in line with the constitution, the draft hydrocarbon law the Iraqi government presented to parliament kept oil and gas in the state sector. It also stipulated recreating a single Iraqi National Oil Company that would be charged with doling out oil income to the provinces on a per-capita basis. The Bush administration latched onto that provision to hype the 43-article Iraqi bill as a key to reconciliation between Sunnis and Shiites — since the Sunni areas of Iraq lack hydrocarbons — and so included it (as did Congress) in its list of “benchmarks” the Iraqi government had to meet.
Overlooked by Washington was the way that particular article, after mentioning revenue-sharing, stated that a separate Federal Revenue Law would be necessary to settle the matter of distribution — the first draft of which was only published four months later in June.
Far more than revenue sharing and reconciliation, though, what really interested the Bush White House were the mouthwatering incentives for foreign firms to invest in Iraq’s hydrocarbon industry contained in the draft law. They promised to provide ample opportunities to America’s Oil Majors to reap handsome profits in an oil-rich Iraq whose vast western desert had yet to be explored fully for hydrocarbons. So Bush pressured the Iraqi government to get the necessary law passed before the parliament’s vacation in August — to no avail.
The Bush administration’s failure to achieve its short-term objectives does not detract from the overarching fact — established by the copious evidence marshaled in this article — that gaining privileged access to Iraqi oil for American companies was a primary objective of the Pentagon’s invasion of Iraq.
Dilip Hiro is the author of Secrets and Lies: Operation “Iraqi Freedom” and, most recently, Blood of the Earth: The Battle for the World’s Vanishing Oil Resources, both published by Nation Books.
The shame of this war can only be redeemed by an all-out Apollo Project to develop clean renewable energy sources for America and the world. This will staunch our unwholesome appetite for other nations’ oil, get our stalled economy booming with energy R&D and recycling jobs, help to slow global warming, and point us in the direction of being the good guys again.
Anyone watching Ken Burns’ “The War” can see what a country full of motivated citizens can do to turn an economy completely around. We don’t have FDR, but if we know where we want to go, the leaders will appear.
why am i not surprised to find that bush screwed that one up too.
its beginning to look like the us is facilitating the iraq/china love affair, and should bush be allowed to continually blow the foreign policy in the area you might find yourslef facing a region of fundamnetalist musilm countries, with no one willing to sell a drop of oil to your country.
wouldn’t that be something.
Gee, what a surprise.
Is it any wonder that Venezuelans call the stuff “the devil’s excrement”?
Is the monetary expense of the war in Iraq really impacting American consumers that negatively? Let me give my experience: I shop at Whole Foods in an average middle-class suburb. It’s not Beverly Hills and it’s not Watts, it’s somewhere tuckd comfortably in between. There are 12 checkstands and at any time during business hours 8 of them are open and have lines of 4-5 people. On Sundays it is a madhouse. Try to picture a hoard of army ants swarming over carrion and you get a good image of what I have to battle when I shop there on Sundays. Whole Foods does NOT sell average priced food. It’s expensive stuff. WF’s patrons are mostly young, and many dress in jeans and cut-offs. I watched one such couple with a half a shopping cart full of groceries ring up a $190 receipt. That is common. My question: if the middle class is disappearing, and if wages are being cut back, and jobs are going overseas, and if my city represents a microcosm of middle-class America, then where are these kids getting this kind of money? Many don’t put it on credit cards, they pay with cash or checks. The blogosphere constantly barrages us with apocalyptic visions of a destitute, hungry America in the near future, but from my POV we have never been doing better. The local Vons and Ralphs are graveyards these days. Everyone is either at WF or Trader Joes. What gives? Any opinions?
While it’s hardly news that the war was and is about oil, the failures of the Bush regime and his neo-con cheerleaders are mindboggling. Their intention, of course, was to take Iraq in a cakewalk and then invade Iran. Even though the first part of the venture has completely failed, these delusional imbeciles still want to proceed with the second as if nothing along the way had set their plans awry. Their hallucinations are putting us all at risk, the entire planet, and they must be stopped immediately.
Bush, Cheney, and the neocons in Iraq = Hitler’s Nazi Party combined with the Keystone Cops
Historians will endlessly debate whether their evil was greater than their incompetence or vice versa.
Interesting how many people in the USA actually knew the real reasons for the invasion but kept silent–conspiracy on a very large scale. Also illustartive of the education link espoused by Eisenhower’s Military-Industrial-Educational-Congressional Complex Speech’s first draft. What should be done with all the various Holocaust enablers mentioned above? Should they swing from the gallows along with Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld/Powell/Rice/Feith/Wolfowitz/Pearle, etc.?
JoeT September 26th, 2007 12:34 pm
Just remember that those consumers are being financed by the folks willing to buy our already incredible debt. If and when that debt is called in, as in the subprime mortgage market, the rug will be pulled out from under the economy so fast people won’t know what hit them.
Before the first Gulf War in 1991, there was a car on my block with a red, white, and blue bumpersticker, with a picture of Saddam in his jaunty beret. The bumpersticker said:
Kick His Ass
Take His Gas
That just about said it all.
And by now we can accurately conclude that the American oil giants were in on the invasion as Bush was being chosen by the Supreme Court. They were all present at Cheney’s secret “energy meeting”, and no doubt they were advised of the administration’s plans at that time, months before 911. It was a good Pearl Harbour moment for Bush and Cheney…
I, for one, heartily hope that the Bush administration fails in its theft of Iraq’s oil profits. We MUST restore the principle of integrity in our government if we are not to be subjected to the theft of what is valuable to us as well by foreign nations. We may suffer more than we can imagine from the consequences of Bush’s criminal warmongering and attempted robbery of Iraq’s oil profits, and part of that suffering may be a severe shortage of oil in the US and perhaps world-wide. But I believe that most of us as individuals will survive by making do, even if corporations don’t do so well.
It enrages me that Americans must now pay trillions of dollars for Bush’s attempt to steal Iraqi oil profits, something the Bush administration had no legal or moral right to. That’s money out of our pockets that would be far better spent on America’s needs, not a war of theft. I do not wish anybody in the Bush administration well. I really don’t. They have tainted America with their criminality, bullying, and lying.
How dare they?
JoeT September 26th, 2007 12:34 pm
“Is the monetary expense of the war in Iraq really impacting American consumers that negatively? Let me give my experience: I shop at Whole Foods in an average middle-class suburb. It’s not Beverly Hills and it’s not Watts, it’s somewhere tuckd comfortably in between. My question: if the middle class is disappearing, and if wages are being cut back, and jobs are going overseas, and if my city represents a microcosm of middle-class America, then where are these kids getting this kind of money?”
Joe there is no microcosm anywhere that represents all of American middle class. I live in city that borders Mexico. The wages are low and unemployment is almost always in the double digit range. If you visit the rust belt where our industrial base has been decimated by factories moving overseas to unregulated low wage areas of the world I seriously doubt if you would see what you see where you are either.
Also keep in mind that depending on profit margins most businesses need more than one really good day a week to make a decent profit and stay in business.
Just feel fortunate that you live in an area that apparently still has some good paying jobs, but don’t count on it lasting. The high wage jobs such as in the IT industry are increasingly being outsourced also, or are being filled by H1-B’s that work for $12,000 a year less than the average American worker. Another industry that is booming is military contracting which will have to end or at least slow down dramatically. We are borrowing at the rate of 2 billion dollars a day which unsustainable. When other nations realize how bad a credit risk we are, which is already starting to happen, the party will be over and it won’t be pretty.
Lobo Gris
Joe T: if you go to a store where the prices are high, you will meet people who can afford high prices. There are over 300 million people in america. According to CNN - “The number of Americans living in poverty jumped to 35.9 million last year, up by 1.3 million, while the number of those without health care insurance rose to 45 million from 43.6 million in 2002, the U.S. government said in a report Thursday”
.Please read the following article,; then read Barbara Ehrenreich’s books Nickled and Dimed, and Bait and Switch. Do whatever it takes to open your eyes to poverty and the working poor in Amercia.
How I Learned about the Minimum Wage
By Ashley Herzog
I was seventeen years old when I wrote a school essay entitled “The correct minimum wage: $0.00.” Back then, I was a budding libertarian, and I was proud of that assignment. I explained my opposition to a government-mandated minimum wage with arguments that many economic conservatives consider hard fact: Minimum wage increases lead to unemployment. They force business owners to pay unskilled laborers more than they’re worth. And besides teens and secondary-wage earners, who really works for the bare minimum, anyway?
The partisan battle over minimum-wage laws was the last thing on my mind when I took a job in a chain restaurant last June. I’d held a few after-school jobs as a teen, but the restaurant job was meant to be my first serious foray into the working world.
I liked my job immediately, especially my co-workers: some were single moms, some were students, and others were second-wage earners, supplementing a spouse’s meager income.
At first, our conversations were limited to the usual small talk about movies, celebrities, and workplace gossip. But as the weeks wore on, I was able to piece together the stories of my new friends’ lives. Although each one was unique, they had a common theme: money was a problem.
They used code words to describe money troubles and the public assistance they needed to circumvent them. When I overheard one waitress talking about her “financial aid,” I asked where she went to college. She reluctantly admitted that “financial aid” was a euphemism for food stamps — and she’d needed them ever since her husband lost his job.
Relying on food stamps isn’t a worst-case scenario in the world of low-wage work. Another young waitress confessed that she was living in a motel because she couldn’t make the last month’s rent. After swearing me to secrecy, she resolved to find a new apartment within a week — as long as she could afford the security deposit.
Needless to say, my view of laissez-faire capitalism was shaken. Libertarian philosophy promised that an unbridled free market would provide everything people needed, as long as they worked hard enough. So how could it be that people working two or three jobs, averaging seven to eight dollars an hour, could barely afford necessities like food and housing?
When I asked a co-worker if she had health insurance, she looked at me as if I were crazy. It was then that I uttered the words I never thought I’d say: “Well, maybe they should raise the minimum wage.”
But like many others, she doubted that “they” were really concerned about her. She told me she refused to vote for Democrats or Republicans, “Because what do those assholes know about being poor?”
A few weeks later, I quit that job and returned to college, where I’m again shielded from the realities of low-wage life. I sit in classes where middle-class students and tenured professors debate the minimum wage in theoretical terms. Sometimes I think back to the question my co-worker posed: “What do they know about being poor?”
The answer, for many of us, is not much. The working poor are relatively easy to ignore. They aren’t interviewed on nightly newscasts. They don’t write op-eds for The New York Times. In many cases, they don’t even vote. People who work for wages just above the minimum typically fly under society’s radar — until financial disaster strikes and they turn to government programs for help. It is then that they are chastised for their lack of self-reliance and initiative.
Maybe in some cases a low-wage job is the first step out of poverty. Of course, most people who have time to philosophize about the minimum wage will never find out for themselves.
Its time we got behind this presidency. We need to get behind Bush and especially Cheney. Quit talking and get behind them. Enough talk already. We all know the mistakes that have been made. Lets get behind and push,push like hell. Push these bozos right off a cliff while there is still hope for our planet. I for one am going to get behind them..and push with all my might anyway I can!!!
When any informed individual connects the dots, a case for TREASON becomes plain and evident. The problem of course is who exists in a position of authority to enforce it. Hypothetically that “job” goes to the American public. But as has been shown by the MSM reception to the president of Iran, a great deal of time, muscle and PR is invested in manufacturing the kind of consent that is itself divorced from both reason and reality.
Regardless of whether 911 was a convenient Pearl Harbor or an inside job, the case was FIXED to go to war, and now we know why. It was suspected, but this puts it out in plain sight. To commence a war for oil against a sovereign nation when the majority of this administration’s co-conspirators have been in the oil industry or otherwise directly benefit from it, is almost too obscene for me to wrap my mind around. And yet it sits before us in plain evidence.
The callous disregard not only for Iraqi lives, but those of our soldiers, and the rape of our national treasury to so unapologetically profit a few already obscene rich, sociopathic operatives, must rival any of the worst examples of pure carnage that exists on any historical record.
EVERY one of these enablers should be tried for treason. Beyond bad leadership, beyond mangled planning, it’s outright treason: to put the profits of a few before the welfare of this nation, and to prostitute its troops for this carpicious war of choice. This administration thinks it owns America and operates like a corporation with a drunken CEO.
Other nations: Help us! WE citizens are at a loss. We would not have won our initial revolution without aid against King George… looks like necessity has come full circle.
Gee…I thought Bush Junior violated the Geneva Convention and UN charter by illegally invading a sovereign nation in order to bring them Big Macs and Freedom to watch Amercian Porn!!…
Or was it because Saddam personally flew the 4th jet on 911?
Or was it because the the massive Nuclear/Chemical/Biological Arsenal Saddam had secretly hidden from all the UN Inspectors?
Or was it because he has a very small dick and Daddy Issues?
“Oil is much too important a commodity to be left in the hands
of the Arabs.”
— Henry Kissinger,
US Secretary of State under Presidents Nixon & Ford
What we need is an “Apollo Project” to re-build our nation. We need to get all of the politicians out of office. We need taxation with representation. These assholes whole plan is to say “see..no tax, no representation” and the greedy bastards just keep on licking it up. I agree with trying the corrupt for treason and by the way, the penalty is death without appeal. Just like chimpy likes it.
JoeT,
Today, the U.S. economy is based on the military. With no war or military spending the U.S. economy would collapse.
In your world it seems that things are good. Have you ever thought about what it’s like in Iraq, in Mexico, in Central America, in Africa, in Asia. The U.S. has 5% of the global population but consumes 25% of global energy and, I would guess, an equal disproportionate amount of global food supply. Things may be good because America goes to war, militarily or economically, to control people and resources.
kivals September 26th, 2007 12:46 pm
Right on…. Only to say; so as not confuse readers….It is the 2007 Americanized Version replete with English language; American Values and Pivotal Norms, and American Icons. This is all in full color with modern high tech MSM; remembering Nazi Germany in most documentaries seen today are all fading Black and White photographs and old stilted Black and White jerky movies. Which most Americans may find a big stretch identifying with. But make no mistake about it, any American with any insight would realize the political frustration felt, is close to what the ‘Good Germans’ would have experienced circa 1930’s….
History has a nasty habit of repeating itself….
joe T,
The very fact that a Whole Foods is located there indicates that your neighborhood may not be as “average middle class” as you believe. I suggest you look up some statistics. The only Whole Foods here in Pittsburgh, suburbs included, is in a rapidly gentrifying area that adjoins the cities richest neighborhoods.
The US is peculiar in it’s ability to both hide poverty while making the wealthy look like their just middle class.
If you want to recalibrate your notions what middle class looks like, and see some real poverty as well, come over to my neighborhood. Whole foods won’t be locating here anytime soon, thank goodness.
Old news, everyone knows America is killing thousands of innocent Iraqies for oil. Nothing new there. The real question is, what are “we the people” going to do about it? Answer, nothing! What America needs is a good old fashion revolution, but thats going to take good old fashion caring, patriotic people willing to lay it on the line. Sorry but, marching and posting isn’t going to cut it with this administration or congress.
This greenspan talk of oil is a diversion from the recent events in the iraq war. The Jews did not accept Jesus {who is a jew } as a messiah and the muslims created their own messiah .These wars are going on for 2000 years and will go on for the next million years as the religion will be used as a pretext for the real estate grab. They fought before the oil and they will fight after the oil. It does not have to be between Jews and muslims. It is also muslim against muslim.Religion or a sect of religion is just an excuse. If you follow the history in ME, the jews lost the real estate for 2000 years and it is the muslims turn now to lose.{the real estate} Oil or no Oil in ME is going to solve the problem. Just imagine how many billions of barrels of oil can be bought with just the 500 or so billions of dollars spent so far? I am not convinced of the oil connection.It is war between the semites. The irish-british problem and the hindu-muslim war have the same root cause i.e real estate.
irs: But there may be only about 14 million Jews worldwide. Whereas there are 1.5 billion adherents to Islam. Furthermore, Islam is destined to grow faster, since it (like Christianity) can proselytize without connection to race/tribe (though primarily limited to non-caucasians in spread vector it seems).
But you may be onto something regarding real estate. Being against usury, I wonder how the purchase of real estate works in the Islamic world. Goldman-Sachs, Chase, JP Morgan, etc. probably see a tremendous market there. (1) boot people off their land (2) make them buy it back over a lifetime of work (3) charge interest, amortized even more than the value of the land.
That’s the American way, anyway…
Paul,
I agree with you regarding proselytization be it forcefully {in the past}or by financial incentives now. The 14 million jews have stringent rules regarding who can become a jew. Inspite of the above, the reality is more a real estate than oil. The Goldmans, Morgans and Chase have their own financial interests and I do not blame them as it is their nature of business or profession.
The 1.5 billion muslims are from 40 plus countries and the very real estate is going to keep them apart. Less than 2% of muslims control 90% of ME oil wealth. The unfortunate reality is the remaining 98% are at times more interested in religious frenzy than ways to improve their economic standards.
The greatest strength of the Jewry is their 14 million only population and unfortunately is also their weakness. How is this going to reshape in this century is anybody’s guess. They are doing what they have to do to survive but they have their reservations with both Muslims {some}who want to purge them in red sea and the right wing who may forcefully proseytize them to see Jesus come back.{and take the holy land back to christians.} I have wondered many times who is using whom in this context.{how can they forget history including the pre holocaust era }
Before some idiot makes comments of anti-semitism or some other crap, I am an agnostic and respect one’s religion and my intention is to explain human behavior in current geopolitical stage .
We damn well knew that oil was the only reason for the war, not WMD or Bin Laden. Congrats to the Iraqis for denying greedy lying Bush access to their national treasure. And it’s about time for them to tell him to get the hell out of their country. But he will stall it long enough so it becomes the next administration’s problem. It will certainly be great to see him disappear after he leaves office. As for his desire to get big bucks for speaking engagements, that he might just as well forget. Nobody wants to hear from him ever again. Good riddance.
To author of the main article:
Thanks for documenting real oil/Iraq history our media cannot do while pleasing corporate sponsors. We need to hear this, and we need to realize that it cannot be quickly reversed, even by Democrats in 2008–some of whom are flirting with false promises about withdrawal.
We will be in the Mid-east with large forces for a long time to come–to protect the oil, keep the “peace” and rectify our recent actions. Perhaps we shouldn’t have gone there the way we did, but we went, and there are still consequences to responsibly unwind, maybe by liberals (we hope) in power after 2008.
To justinp:
Thanks for showing us an honest perspective of the minimum wage and the reality of life for people who actually take care of us at restaurants, hotels and many other places. Send that paper (above) everywhere!
To joeT:
Indeed there is little to no economic problem in the USA for folks making about $90,000 and up, and especially those who buy and sell investments at a 15% capital gains tax (instead of higher combined income + payroll tax rates paid by lower-paid wage earners.) John Edwards has spoken of “two Americas” and some have made fun of him for doing so. But it’s true. And the Bush tax cuts of 2003 were remarkably generous to those who were already doing well, causing some of them to erroneously believe that supply-side “trickle down” is somehow working for folks in lower brackets too. Only problem is,…it isn’t. Whenever money trickles, corporations have learned to be very skilled at sopping it up before it gets all the way down.
You will find no shortage of folks at Whole Foods, and also no shortage of folks buying any/all of their groceries at Walmart. There is yet another fast-growing group of folks that visit charitable food pantries–because Walmart is out of reach.
Plan B was to keep Iraq oil off of the market so that the oil pigs could get rich on the oil they had.
Remember, they haven’t given up on stealing the Iraq oil yet. We can pay some more yet. Their kids don’t go to wars - so THINGS ARE LOOKING UP!
The trouble is W has about 15 months to go.
I have been reading the “Bush at War” series. All through the run-up to Iraq, the Pentagon was using stealth deployment. Add a few troops here, use money for one thing on another, and keep everything hush-hush. That way there was no accountability or oversight.
Iran is now looming and the same things are happening.
The real reason for the Surge, to get more troops in for the next invasion, it doesn’t matter if we don’t have the Troops; God is on out side.
What will happen if we go in?
Who will be stuck with three wars as President, four if you count TWOT?
W will probably say, “we can’t have a Girl, running things, or an unknown man, I think I have to stay on as President. At least until we Win.”
Sounds like the US version of the Wannsee conference. They can still get the oil, all they have to do is fight to the finish. Like the Germans used to say - blood and iron.
Jews, moslems, and christians are all refereed to as “people of the book” as they share many of the same biblical prophets (in old testament) and all believe in “holy lands” and as a consequence fight over them. As I have said before you can crudely distill this down to: “My god is tougher then your god and he’s going to kick your gods ass.”
Sadly they all have some apocalyptic death wish type visions of their own salvation through the ultimate battle in which each group sees themselves as miraculously victorious and the complete destruction of the children of the lesser gods (the devil).
Everyone want’s god on his side in a fight and the fighting is heating up without even the slightest type of real-politic pragmatism. This is especially dangerous for the the U.S. as we have so much fire power. It used to be that the military (in this country) was always ultimately contained and controlled by the elected or appointed civilians. Now you have a situation where the civilian leaders are even more hawkish and quick triggered then the military do to their fanatical ideological and fundamentalist religious beliefs. Concepts like MAD have little or no restraining effect on these people because of their scriptualized death wish. In short they don’t think they can loose….. It’s like Dr. Strangelove isn’t just a movie anymore…. Wish I was more optimistic….. Oh well lets follow Voltaire’s advise and “cultivate our gardens.” …. and vote for peace and sanity!
SRose:
Very articulate and expressive summary of the Big Oil war crimes and the betrayal of the American republic. This truth must be repeated over and over again until everyone in corporate fascist Amerika understands.
And above all we cannot forget the one million dead Iraqis and the four million refugees. It is approaching the category of a holocaust. In a sense, our entire society is complicit.
To add a bit to the economic question I am quoting a paragraph from a longer essay that was posted by CD not too long ago.
“Unfortunately, we are paying for this bloody corporate welfare in more ways than one. Iraq’s oil production has declined, raising prices at the pump along with record profits. Our floating dollar is beginning to sink due to deficit war spending propped up by international loans. Inflation becomes a hardship for anyone on a fixed income. Our grandchildren will be paying interest on the debt after profiteers have taken their capital and moved on. Escalation of the Vietnam conflict also began with a presidential lie, became a devastating stalemate, was financed with debt, followed by inflation, and left the nation divided. But fortunes were made then as now by prolonging the carnage although leaked Pentagon papers revealed they knew it was a lost cause. When leaders betray our trust, the integrity of our nation and quality of life is changed forever.”
from: http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/07/31/2886/
The long term effects of the Iraq and Afghanistan war crimes are just beginning to kick in. Inflation is on the rise for a variety of war-induced reasons. This affects nearly everyone and will only get worse. It is not possible to engage in the deficit spending they are using to subsidize this corporate imperialism without someone paying down the road. And that burden will be shared by the majority rather than the economic elite who are the capitalist freaks behind the war crimes.
“Behind every great fortune there is a crime”