The real reason for Iraq invasion

The following was written by an American
writer/researcher. It appeared in March 2002,
five months after I summarised the same thing
although I did not have the kind of access to quotable
analysts and sources that he has. Anyway, this would
be an eye-opener that I am not a minority of one who
argues that the US plans in the Middle East has much
wider implications than Saddam, weapons, Al Qaeda and
terrorism put together.


The Thirty-Year Itch

Three decades ago, in the throes of the energy crisis,
Washington's hawks conceived of a strategy for US
control of the Persian Gulf's oil. Now, with the same
strategists firmly in control of the White House, the
Bush administration is playing out their script for
global dominance.
By Robert Dreyfuss

Oil and Arms: An In-Depth Look
 

If you were to spin the globe and look for real estate
critical to building an American empire, your first
stop would have to be the Persian Gulf. The desert
sands of this region hold two of every three barrels
of oil in the world -- Iraq's reserves alone are
equal, by some estimates, to those of Russia, the
United States, China, and Mexico combined. For the
past 30 years, the Gulf has been in the crosshairs of
an influential group of Washington foreign-policy
strategists, who believe that in order to ensure its
global dominance, the United States must seize control
of the region and its oil. Born during the energy
crisis of the 1970s and refined since then by a
generation of policymakers, this approach is finding
its boldest expression yet in the Bush administration
-- which, with its plan to invade Iraq and install a
regime beholden to Washington, has moved closer than
any of its predecessors to transforming the Gulf into
an American protectorate.

In the geopolitical vision driving current U.S. policy
toward Iraq, the key to national security is global
hegemony -- dominance over any and all potential
rivals. To that end, the United States must not only
be able to project its military forces anywhere, at
any time. It must also control key resources, chief
among them oil -- and especially Gulf oil. To the
hawks who now set the tone at the White House and the
Pentagon, the region is crucial not simply for its
share of the U.S. oil supply (other sources have
become more important over the years), but because it
would allow the United States to maintain a lock on
the world's energy lifeline and potentially deny
access to its global competitors. The administration
"believes you have to control resources in order to
have access to them," says Chas Freeman, who served as
U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia under the first
President Bush. "They are taken with the idea that the
end of the Cold War left the United States able to
impose its will globally -- and that those who have
the ability to shape events with power have the duty
to do so. It's ideology."

Iraq, in this view, is a strategic prize of
unparalleled importance. Unlike the oil beneath
Alaska's frozen tundra, locked away in the steppes of
central Asia, or buried under stormy seas, Iraq's
crude is readily accessible and, at less than $1.50 a
barrel, some of the cheapest in the world to produce.
Already, over the past several months, Western
companies have been meeting with Iraqi exiles to try
to stake a claim to that bonanza.

But while the companies hope to cash in on an
American-controlled Iraq, the push to remove Saddam
Hussein hasn't been driven by oil executives, many of
whom are worried about the consequences of war. Nor
are Vice President Cheney and President Bush, both
former oilmen, looking at the Gulf simply for the
profits that can be earned there. The administration
is thinking bigger, much bigger, than that.

"Controlling Iraq is about oil as power, rather than
oil as fuel," says Michael Klare, professor of peace
and world security studies at Hampshire College and
author of Resource Wars. "Control over the Persian
Gulf translates into control over Europe, Japan, and
China. It's having our hand on the spigot."
To get a sense of how control of the Gulf's oil
economy has become the focus of Washington's military
strategy, one need only look at the map.
Ever since the oil shocks of the 1970s, the United
States has steadily been accumulating military muscle
in the Gulf by building bases, selling weaponry, and
forging military partnerships. Now, it is poised to
consolidate its might in a place that will be a
fulcrum of the world's balance of power for decades to
come. At a stroke, by taking control of Iraq, the Bush
administration can solidify a long-running strategic
design. "It's the Kissinger plan," says James Akins, a
former U.S. diplomat. "I thought it had been killed,
but it's back."

Akins learned a hard lesson about the politics of oil
when he served as a U.S. envoy in Kuwait and Iraq, and
ultimately as ambassador to Saudi Arabia during the
oil crisis of 1973 and '74. At his home in Washington,
D.C., shelves filled with Middle Eastern pottery and
other memorabilia cover the walls, souvenirs of his
years in the Foreign Service. Nearly three decades
later, he still gets worked up while recalling his
first encounter with the idea that the United States
should be prepared to occupy Arab oil-producing
countries.

In 1975, while Akins was ambassador in Saudi Arabia,
an article headlined "Seizing Arab Oil" appeared in
Harper's. The author, who used the pseudonym Miles
Ignotus, was identified as "a Washington-based
professor and defense consultant with intimate links
to high-level U.S. policymakers." The article
outlined, as Akins puts it, "how we could solve all
our economic and political problems by taking over the
Arab oil fields [and] bringing in Texans and
Oklahomans to operate them." Simultaneously, a rash of
similar stories appeared in other magazines and
newspapers. "I knew that it had to have been the
result of a deep background briefing," Akins says.
"You don't have eight people coming up with the same
screwy idea at the same time, independently.

"Then I made a fatal mistake," Akins continues. "I
said on television that anyone who would propose that
is either a madman, a criminal, or an agent of the
Soviet Union." Soon afterward, he says, he learned
that the background briefing had been conducted by his
boss, then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. Akins
was fired later that year.

Kissinger has never acknowledged having planted the
seeds for the article. But in an interview with
Business Week that same year, he delivered a thinly
veiled threat to the Saudis, musing about bringing oil
prices down through "massive political warfare against
countries like Saudi Arabia and Iran to make them risk
their political stability and maybe their security if
they did not cooperate."

In the 1970s, America's military presence in the Gulf
was virtually nil, so the idea of seizing control of
its oil was a pipe dream. Still, starting with the
Miles Ignotus article, and a parallel one by
conservative strategist and Johns Hopkins University
professor Robert W. Tucker in Commentary, the idea
began to gain favor among a feisty group of hardline,
pro-Israeli thinkers, especially the hawkish circle
aligned with Democratic senators Henry Jackson of
Washington and Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York.

Eventually, this amalgam of strategists came to be
known as "neoconservatives," and they played important
roles in President Reagan's Defense Department and at
think tanks and academic policy centers in the 1980s.
Led by Richard Perle, chairman of the Pentagon's
influential Defense Policy Board, and Deputy Secretary
of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, they now occupy several
dozen key posts in the White House, the Pentagon, and
the State Department. At the top, they are closest to
Vice President Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld, who have been closely aligned since both men
served in the White House under President Ford in the
mid-1970s. They also clustered around Cheney when he
served as secretary of defense during the Gulf War in
1991.

Throughout those years, and especially after the Gulf
War, U.S. forces have steadily encroached on the Gulf
and the surrounding region, from the Horn of Africa to
Central Asia. In preparing for an invasion and
occupation of Iraq, the administration has been
building on the steps taken by military and policy
planners over the past quarter century.

Step one: The Rapid Deployment Force
In 1973 and '74, and again in 1979, political
upheavals in the Middle East led to huge spikes in oil
prices, which rose fifteenfold over the decade and
focused new attention on the Persian Gulf. In January
1980, President Carter effectively declared the Gulf a
zone of U.S. influence, especially against
encroachment from the Soviet Union. "Let our position
be absolutely clear," he said, announcing what came to
be known as the Carter Doctrine. "An attempt by any
outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf
region will be regarded as an assault on the vital
interests of the United States of America, and such an
assault will be repelled by any means necessary,
including military force." To back up this doctrine,
Carter created the Rapid Deployment Force, an
"over-the-horizon" military unit capable of rushing
several thousand U.S. troops to the Gulf in a crisis.

Step two: The Central Command
In the 1980s, under President Reagan, the United
States began pressing countries in the Gulf for access
to bases and support facilities. The Rapid Deployment
Force was transformed into the Central Command, a new
U.S. military command authority with responsibility
for the Gulf and the surrounding region from eastern
Africa to Afghanistan. Reagan tried to organize a
"strategic consensus" of anti-Soviet allies, including
Turkey, Israel, and Saudi Arabia. The United States
sold billions of dollars' worth of arms to the Saudis
in the early '80s, from AWACS surveillance aircraft to
F-15 fighters. And in 1987, at the height of the war
between Iraq and Iran, the U.S. Navy created the Joint
Task Force-Middle East to protect oil tankers plying
the waters of the Gulf, thus expanding a U.S. naval
presence of just three or four warships into a
flotilla of 40-plus aircraft carriers, battleships,
and cruisers.

Step three: The Gulf War
Until 1991, the United States was unable to persuade
the Arab Gulf states to allow a permanent American
presence on their soil. Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia, while
maintaining its close relationship with the United
States, began to diversify its commercial and military
ties; by the time U.S. Ambassador Chas Freeman arrived
there in the late Ô80s, the United States had fallen
to fourth place among arms suppliers to the kingdom.
"The United States was being supplanted even in
commercial terms by the British, the French, even the
Chinese," Freeman notes.

All that changed with the Gulf War. Saudi Arabia and
other Gulf states no longer opposed a direct U.S.
military presence, and American troops, construction
squads, arms salesmen, and military assistance teams
rushed in. "The Gulf War put Saudi Arabia back on the
map and revived a relationship that had been severely
attrited," says Freeman.

In the decade after the war, the United States sold
more than $43 billion worth of weapons, equipment, and
military construction projects to Saudi Arabia, and
$16 billion more to Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, and the
United Arab Emirates, according to data compiled by
the Federation of American Scientists. Before
Operation Desert Storm, the U.S. military enjoyed the
right to stockpile, or "pre-position," military
supplies only in the comparatively remote Gulf state
of Oman on the Indian Ocean. After the war, nearly
every country in the region began conducting joint
military exercises, hosting U.S. naval units and Air
Force squadrons, and granting the United States
pre-positioning rights. "Our military presence in the
Middle East has increased dramatically," then-Defense
Secretary William Cohen boasted in 1995.

Another boost to the U.S. presence was the unilateral
imposition, in 1991, of no-fly zones in northern and
southern Iraq, enforced mostly by U.S. aircraft from
bases in Turkey and Saudi Arabia. "There was a massive
buildup, especially around Incirlik in Turkey, to
police the northern no-fly zone, and around [the Saudi
capital of] Riyadh, to police the southern no-fly
zone," says Colin Robinson of the Center for Defense
Information, a Washington think tank. A
billion-dollar, high-tech command center was built by
Saudi Arabia near Riyadh, and over the past two years
the United States has secretly been completing another
one in Qatar. The Saudi facilities "were built with
capacities far beyond the ability of Saudi Arabia to
use them," Robinson says. "And that's exactly what
Qatar is doing now."

Step four: Afghanistan
The war in Afghanistan -- and the open-ended war on
terrorism, which has led to U.S strikes in Yemen,
Pakistan, and elsewhere -- further boosted America's
strength in the region. The administration has won
large increases in the defense budget -- which now
stands at about $400 billion, up from just over $300
billion in 2000 -- and a huge chunk of that budget,
perhaps as much as $60 billion, is slated to support
U.S. forces in and around the Persian Gulf. Military
facilities on the perimeter of the Gulf, from Djibouti
in the Horn of Africa to the island of Diego Garcia in
the Indian Ocean, have been expanded, and a web of
bases and training missions has extended the U.S.
presence deep into central Asia. From Afghanistan to
the landlocked former Soviet republics of Uzbekistan
and Kyrgyzstan, U.S. forces have established
themselves in an area that had long been in Russia's
sphere of influence. Oil-rich in its own right, and
strategically vital, central Asia is now the eastern
link in a nearly continuous chain of U.S. bases,
facilities, and allies stretching from the
Mediterranean and the Red Sea far into the Asian
hinterland.

Step five: Iraq
Removing Saddam Hussein could be the final piece of
the puzzle, cementing an American imperial presence.
It is "highly possible" that the United States will
maintain military bases in Iraq, Robert Kagan, a
leading neoconservative strategist, recently told the
Atlanta Journal-Constitution. "We will probably need a
major concentration of forces in the Middle East over
a long period of time," he said. "When we have
economic problems, it's been caused by disruptions in
our oil supply. If we have a force in Iraq, there will
be no disruption in oil supplies."

Kagan, along with William Kristol of the Weekly
Standard, is a founder of the think tank Project for
the New American Century, an assembly of
foreign-policy hawks whose supporters include the
Pentagon's Perle, New Republic publisher Martin
Peretz, and former Central Intelligence Agency
director James Woolsey. Among the group's affiliates
in the Bush administration are Cheney, Rumsfeld, and
Wolfowitz; I. Lewis Libby, the vice president's chief
of staff; Elliott Abrams, the Middle East director at
the National Security Council; and Zalmay Khalilzad,
the White House liaison to the Iraqi opposition
groups. Kagan's group, tied to a web of similar
neoconservative, pro-Israeli organizations, represents
the constellation of thinkers whose ideological
affinity was forged in the Nixon and Ford
administrations.

To Akins, who has just returned from Saudi Arabia,
it's a team that looks all too familiar, seeking to
implement the plan first outlined back in 1975. "It'll
be easier once we have Iraq," he says. "Kuwait, we
already have. Qatar and Bahrain, too. So it's only
Saudi Arabia we're talking about, and the United Arab
Emirates falls into place."

LAST SUMMER, Perle provided a brief glimpse into his
circle's thinking when he invited rand Corporation
strategist Laurent Murawiec to make a presentation to
his Defense Policy Board, a committee of former senior
officials and generals that advises the Pentagon on
big-picture policy ideas. Murawiec's closed-door
briefing provoked a storm of criticism when it was
leaked to the media; he described Saudi Arabia as the
"kernel of evil," suggested that the Saudi royal
family should be replaced or overthrown, and raised
the idea of a U.S. occupation of Saudi oil fields. He
ultimately lost his job when rand decided he was too
controversial.

Murawiec is part of a Washington school of thought
that views virtually all of the nations in the Gulf as
unstable "failed states" and maintains that only the
United States has the power to forcibly reorganize and
rebuild them. In this view, the arms systems and bases
that were put in place to defend the region also
provide a ready-made infrastructure for taking over
countries and their oil fields in the event of a
crisis.

The Defense Department likely has contingency plans to
occupy Saudi Arabia, says Robert E. Ebel, director of
the energy program at the Center for Strategic and
International Studies (CSIS), a Washington think tank
whose advisers include Kissinger; former Defense
Secretary and CIA director James Schlesinger; and
Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter's national security
adviser. "If something happens in Saudi Arabia," Ebel
says, "if the ruling family is ousted, if they decide
to shut off the oil supply, we have to go in."

Two years ago, Ebel, a former mid-level CIA official,
oversaw a CSIS task force that included several
members of Congress as well as representatives from
industry including ExxonMobil, Arco, BP, Shell,
Texaco, and the American Petroleum Institute. Its
report, "The Geopolitics of Energy Into the 21st
Century," concluded that the world will find itself
dependent for many years on unstable oil-producing
nations, around which conflicts and wars are bound to
swirl. "Oil is high-profile stuff," Ebel says. "Oil
fuels military power, national treasuries, and
international politics. It is no longer a commodity to
be bought and sold within the confines of traditional
energy supply and demand balances. Rather, it has been
transformed into a determinant of well-being, of
national security, and of international power."

As vital as the Persian Gulf is now, its strategic
importance is likely to grow exponentially in the next
20 years. Nearly one out of every three barrels of oil
reserves in the world lie under just two countries:
Saudi Arabia (with 259 billion barrels of proven
reserves) and Iraq (112 billion). Those figures may
understate Iraq's largely unexplored reserves, which
according to U.S. government estimates may hold as
many as 432 billion barrels.

With supplies in many other regions, especially the
United States and the North Sea, nearly exhausted, oil
from Saudi Arabia and Iraq is becoming ever more
critical -- a fact duly noted in the administration's
National Energy Policy, released in 2001 by a White
House task force. By 2020, the Gulf will supply
between 54 percent and 67 percent of the world's
crude, the document said, making the region "vital to
U.S. interests." According to G. Daniel Butler, an
oil-markets analyst at the U.S. Energy Information
Administration (EIA), Saudi Arabia's production
capacity will rise from its current 9.4 million
barrels a day to 22.1 million over the next 17 years.
Iraq, which in 2002 produced a mere 2 million barrels
a day, "could easily be a double-digit producer by
2020," says Butler.

U.S. strategists aren't worried primarily about
America's own oil supplies; for decades, the United
States has worked to diversify its sources of oil,
with Venezuela, Nigeria, Mexico, and other countries
growing in importance. But for Western Europe and
Japan, as well as the developing industrial powers of
eastern Asia, the Gulf is all-important. Whoever
controls it will maintain crucial global leverage for
decades to come.

Today, notes the EIA's Butler, two-thirds of Gulf oil
goes to Western industrial nations. By 2015, according
to a study by the CIA's National Intelligence Council,
three-quarters of the Gulf's oil will go to Asia,
chiefly to China. China's growing dependence on the
Gulf could cause it to develop closer military and
political ties with countries such as Iran and Iraq,
according to the report produced by Ebel's CSIS task
force. "They have different political interests in the
Gulf than we do," Ebel says. "Is it to our advantage
to have another competitor for oil in the Persian
Gulf?"

David Long, who served as a U.S. diplomat in Saudi
Arabia and as chief of the Near East division in the
State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research
during the Reagan administration, likens the Bush
administration's approach to the philosophy of Admiral
Mahan, the 19th-century military strategist who
advocated the use of naval power to create a global
American empire. "They want to be the world's
enforcer," he says. "It's a worldview, a geopolitical
position. They say, 'We need hegemony in the region.'"


UNTIL THE 1970s, the face of American power in the
Gulf was the U.S. oil industry, led by Exxon, Mobil,
Chevron, Texaco, and Gulf, all of whom competed
fiercely with Britain's BP and Anglo-Dutch Shell. But
in the early '70s, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and the other
Gulf states nationalized their oil industries, setting
up state-run companies to run wells, pipelines, and
production facilities. Not only did that enhance the
power of opec, enabling that organization to force a
series of sharp price increases, but it alarmed U.S.
policymakers.

Today, a growing number of Washington strategists are
advocating a direct U.S. challenge to state-owned
petroleum industries in oil-producing countries,
especially the Persian Gulf. Think tanks such as the
American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage
Foundation, and CSIS are conducting discussions about
privatizing Iraq's oil industry. Some of them have put
forward detailed plans outlining how Iraq, Saudi
Arabia, and other nations could be forced to open up
their oil and gas industries to foreign investment.
The Bush administration itself has been careful not to
say much about what might happen to Iraq's oil. But
State Department officials have had preliminary talks
about the oil industry with Iraqi exiles, and there
have been reports that the U.S. military wants to use
at least part of the country's oil revenue to pay for
the cost of military occupation.

"One of the major problems with the Persian Gulf is
that the means of production are in the hands of the
state," Rob Sobhani, an oil-industry consultant, told
an American Enterprise Institute conference last fall
in Washington. Already, he noted, several U.S. oil
companies are studying the possibility of
privatization in the Gulf. Dismantling
government-owned oil companies, Sobhani argued, could
also force political changes in the region. "The
beginning of liberal democracy can be achieved if you
take the means of production out of the hands of the
state," he said, acknowledging that Arabs would resist
that idea. "It's going to take a lot of selling, a lot
of marketing," he concluded.

Just which companies would get to claim Iraq's oil has
been a subject of much debate. After a war, the
contracts that Iraq's state-owned oil company has
signed with European, Russian, and Chinese oil firms
might well be abrogated, leaving the field to U.S. oil
companies. "What they have in mind is
denationalization, and then parceling Iraqi oil out to
American oil companies," says Akins. "The American oil
companies are going to be the main beneficiaries of
this war."

The would-be rulers of a post-Saddam Iraq have been
thinking along the same lines. "American oil companies
will have a big shot at Iraqi oil," says Ahmad
Chalabi, leader of the Iraqi National Congress, a
group of aristocrats and wealthy Iraqis who fled the
country when its repressive monarchy was overthrown in
1958. During a visit to Washington last fall, Chalabi
held meetings with at least three major U.S. oil
companies, trying to enlist their support. Similar
meetings between Iraqi exiles and U.S. companies have
also been taking place in Europe.

"Iraqi exiles have approached us, saying, 'You can
have our oil if we can get back in there,'" says R.
Gerald Bailey, who headed Exxon's Middle East
operations until 1997. "All the major American
companies have met with them in Paris, London,
Brussels, all over. They're all jockeying for
position. You can't ignore it, but you've got to do it
on the QT. And you can't wait till it gets too far
along."

But the companies are also anxious about the
consequences of war, according to many experts,
oil-company executives, and former State Department
officials. "The oil companies are caught in the
middle," says Bailey. Executives fear that war could
create havoc in the region, turning Arab states
against the United States and Western oil companies.
On the other hand, should a U.S. invasion of Iraq be
successful, they want to be there when the oil is
divvied up. Says David Long, the former U.S. diplomat,
"It's greed versus fear."

Ibrahim Oweiss, a Middle East specialist at Georgetown
University who coined the term "petrodollar" and has
also been a consultant to Occidental and BP, has been
closely watching the cautious maneuvering by the
companies. "I know that the oil companies are scared
about the outcome of this," he says. "They are not at
all sure this is in the best interests of the oil
industry."

Anne Joyce, an editor at the Washington-based Middle
East Policy Council who has spoken privately to top
Exxon officials, says it's clear that most
oil-industry executives "are afraid" of what a war in
the Persian Gulf could mean in the long term --
especially if tensions in the region spiral out of
control. "They see it as much too risky, and they are
risk averse," she says. "They think it has 'fiasco'
written all over it." What do you think?

A Mother Jones contributing writer, Robert Dreyfuss
was named one of the "best unsung investigative
journalists working in print" last year by the
Columbia Journalism Review.



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