Deep Blade Journal

The role of oil

It is patently obvious that nothing U.S. President George W. Bush or any other administration figure says in public about its reasons for going to war can be accepted as stated by a person who is thinking critically. Presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq is irrelevant. Otherwise possession of nuclear, biological or chemical weapons would be a basis for attacking North Korea, or India, Pakistan, or Israel, or even now-hostile France.

U.S. National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice belied this point in a March 9 interview with ABC’s This Week host George Stephanopolous. Stephanopolous asked her if the attack on Iraq would be called off if Saddam did disarm. She was taken aback, as if she would never consider allowing that to happen. Apparently war would go ahead even if the Iraqis turned over their kitchen knives.

As a corollary, since a weapons threat from Iraq is not really operative, present or even future security has little to do with this war. In fact it is likely to make the United States and many other countries less secure for a very long time.

Amongst those of us convinced the administration is not motivated by a weapons threat, speculation is brisk about what is really driving the march to war. Three related areas in which the search for reasons should be concentrated are (1) control of oil; (2) demonstration of U.S.power; and (3) transformation of the political landscape.

The anti-war movement has been consistent to point out that blood should not be spilt for oil. This is a good sentiment. It on some level the best issue we have in helping people understand the real reasons why the war is happening. But I do depart company, slightly, with many in the peace movement that the war is simply about a desire to seize Iraqi oil. In fact, the U.S. could control all of the Iraqi oil it wanted to without a war simply by allowing sanctions to be lifted and cozying up with Saddam Hussein again. Furthermore, division of the oil spoils clearly will not be an easy way for U.S. and U.K. corporations to make a quick buck, though they may be helped in the long run after French and Russian concessions are displaced.

Furthermore, oil can’t be seen as an immediate total solution for Iraq’s humanitarian and financial needs. See, for example, a Washington Post dialog on the topic found here. (This material is among the best business-oriented pooh-poohings of the oil motivation behind the war.)

But, this war is indeed about oil in another sense, as oil has a key role in strategic planning. In that regard, the war is a major piece of the puzzle for a long-term project being executed by a small group of ultra-hawks now installed in the White House, the highest levels of the Pentagon, and the State Department. Iraq will become a hub of U.S. bases. The oil reserves will guarantee that the military will have plenty of fuel far into the future. And it will become a lot easier for the U.S. to influence the political landscape through oil allocation and the threat of force.

Whether or not some profits from Iraqi oil are placed in a U.N. trust and accrue to the Iraqi people as Colin Powell rightly suggests they should, it is the decision-making power about the oil that is most important to U.S. planners. The installation at first of a U.S. military viceroy and then a U.S. client government, democratic or not as long as it is U.S.-compliant, is now seen as a key component in achieving some very significant over-arching policy goals.

Re-alignment of the political landscape of the Middle East and the significant demonstration effect this will have on the world do have a lot to do with the underlying reasons for this war. The underscore value of waging it without direct provocation from Iraq will send a message that will be read loud and clear in Iran, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and throughout the world. This message is that force might be a quick reply to any nation that runs afoul of U.S. desires. Through war waged on this basis, the United States will demonstrate for the first time in a major action the quite explicit military doctrine known as “full spectrum dominance,’ as it asserts its hegemony over land, sea, air, and space, as well as information. We should not diminish the demonstration effects this war would have on the ability of the U.S. to preempt future potential competitors.

To further understand the administration’s political goals, we ought to pay attention to the speech Bush gave before the American Enterprise Institute on February 26, 2003. Here he discussed liberating the people of Iraq and inspiring regional democracy. Taking Bush literally on his desire to eliminate the tyrant Saddam in order to bring the joys of American political freedom is difficult to do given that American is fixing to drop an awesome arsenal on top of millions of Iraqi civilians. What kind of liberation follows incineration of a half-million to a million people? Would America turn Iraq over to an Islamist government that would be the likely post-war electoral result in the majority-Shiite country? Doubt it! So Bush’s message here really is a coded statement of hawk-preferred speculative political transformations, behavioral presumptions that could go badly wrong thus requiring continued application of force, and what will be critical support for the brutal solution Israel’s Sharon government appears to be pursuing with regard to the Palestinian question.

Clues about how to read this code may be found in the opinions and writings of administration officials. There is a whole series of chain reactions that the ultra-hawks are hoping for: a crackdown on and maybe an eviction of the Palestinians that Israel will conduct with impunity during and after the war, a breakdown of Syrian and Jordanian support for the Palestinians as vital Iraqi oil will go to those countries with new and different strings attached, and a decrease in Saudi influence as Iraqi oil will now be in the U.S.-friendly domain. Iran could very likely be the next target of force.

In a published article (“After Iraq: The plan to remake the Middle East,” The New Yorker, February 17-24, 2003), Nicholas Lemann interviews and reviews the work of a number of officials. In it, he describes policy considerations in the writings of key State Department adviser, David Wurmser, who wrote an influential book called “Tyranny’s Ally: America’s Failure to Defeat Saddam Hussein.” [note 2/25/07: Tyranny’s Ally, 196-pg pdf available here]

Lemann presents Wurmser’s views on the effect crushing Saddam will have on Iran: “‘Launching a policy and resolutely carrying it through until it razes Saddam’s Ba’thism to the ground will send terrifying shock waves into Teheran.’ In Wurmser’s scenario, a post-Saddam government in Iraq that includes meaningful participation by Iraq’s Shiite majority will remove the Iranian mullahs’ most powerful claim to legitimacy, which is that they represent the only regional power center for Shiites.”

Lemann continues,

One can easily derive from Wurmser’s book a crisp series of post-Saddam moves across the chessboard of the Middle East. The regime in Iran would either fall or be eased out of power by an alliance of the radical students and the more moderate mullahs, with the United States doing what it could to encourage the process. After regime change, the United States would persuade Iran to end its nuclear-weapons program and its support for terrorists elsewhere in the Middle East, especially Hezbollah. Syria, now surrounded by the pro-American powers of Turkey, the reconfigured Iraq, Jordan, and Israel, and no longer dependent on Saddam for oil, could be pressured to cooperate with efforts to clean out Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and Hezbollah. As Syria moved to a more pro-American stand, so would its client state, Lebanon. That would leave Hezbollah, which has its headquarters in Lebanon, without state support. The Palestinian Authority, with most of its regional allies stripped away, would have no choice but to renounce terrorism categorically. Saudi Arabia would have much less sway over the United States because it would no longer be America’s only major source of oil and base of military operations in the region, and so it might finally be persuaded to stop funding Hamas and Al Qaeda through Islamic charities.

Here emerges a risky strategy that seems to address in a totally convoluted manner the terrible terrorism that mostly affects Israel. But beyond Wurmser’s circumspect presentation of the effect of this war is a more sinister possible future for the Palestinians. And the peace movement has been too quiet about the Palestinian issue as it relates to the war.

On this matter, former CIA political analyst Bill Christison writes,

[Current] absence of discussion makes it easier for Israel to slip its new proposal for large-scale aid from the U.S. through Congress while continuing its harsh and unjust actions in the West Bank and Gaza. Furthermore, talk is continuing to mount in Israel of ‘transfer,’ that is, expelling the Palestinians in the West Bank to Jordan, leaving the West Bank open to total takeover by the Israelis. This transfer is an integral part of the Middle East transformation that the peace movement seems not to want to talk about. If the war comes, the peace movement’s present silence on the subject will also make it easier for Israel actually to carry out the process of “transfer”.

In summary, strategic military basing and fuel supply, consolidated Middle East political leverage through decision making about oil allocation, demonstration of aggressive doctrines of preemption and global dominance, chain reaction political realignment especially affecting Iran, Syria, Jordan and Saudi Arabia, and a brutal Israeli crackdown and possible eviction of the Palestinians are all effects of this war that have been weighed in policy circles. Weapons of mass destruction that may or may not be in Iraq are irrelevant by comparison. The result of these considerations by Bush and his administration has been a decision to deploy of an awesome force now ready to strike Iraq. Most of these considerations have been reported in various media, but are absent from the headlines and front-page drumbeat war coverage. As a result, the American people are woefully uninformed about underlying motivations for the war.

In the short term, some Americans, informed or not but usually not, like to feel powerful because of the fact that we can dominate and destroy Iraq while changing its government, occupying its lands, and rebuilding it in our image at our president’s will. Many of these fine Americans unfortunately swallow the pretexts hook line and sinker. They are unaware of or willfully ignore the war’s underlying motivations and potentially disastrous consequences.

Will it dawn on us some day that we have allowed another disingenuous administration write yet another sorry entry for the annals of U.S. history to be filed with Vietnam and the human tragedy for civilians and soldiers alike that that war represented? If the war can be stopped, this can be prevented. Otherwise, I cry for my country.

Note: When this entry was ported into the new blog on 2/25/2007, a couple of very minor misspellings were corrected and links to original 2003 articles were verified still to be working and either corrected from the original post or added today.

Powell’s credibility collapse leads to diplomatic disaster

Secretary of State Colin Powell traveled to the UN February 5 to give evidence of Iraq’s refusal to fully disclose its weapons. His exposition was impressive and breathtaking. The picture he painted indeed was a scary one: Iraq has trucked out its weapons ahead of the UNMOVIC inspectors, lied in its declaration, maintained mobile bio-weapons labs, sought components necessary for the construction of nuclear bombs, and consorted with and provided camps for poison-spreading al-Qa’ida terrorists in an alleged desire to conduct unspecified attacks. Powell’s bottom line conveys yet again that the United States cannot take the chance that some of these scary weapons will be used in or against America. Could any listener to these formidable complaints fail to conclude that a major U.S. war against Iraq is therefore justified?

On February 14, Powell returned to the Security Council to attempt a belittling of the UNMOVIC weapons reports given by Hans Blix, the chief weapons inspector, and Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the U.N.’s nuclear watchdog. But by this time, Powell’s credibility had been shattered. Shortly after Powell’s first presentation, it had been discovered that a major MI6 intelligence report from the U.K., on which part of the presentation was based, was cribbed directly off of the internet from a decade-old graduate student’s paper concerning confiscated 1980s Iraqi documents (that described a period of heavy U.S. support). This disclosure had an enhancing influence on the massive worldwide anti-war demonstrations held on February 15.

Discovery of hijinks continued when a piece by John Barry in Newsweek detailed the debriefing of Saddam’s son-in-law, Gen. Hussein Kamel. He defected in the mid-1990s with extensive documentation of Saddam’s destruction of biological and chemical weapons.

Kamel has been repeatedly cited as a credible source by George Bush, Tony Blair and leading administration officials. He was cited by Powell in his February 5 presentation to the UN Security Council:

“It took years for Iraq to finally admit that it had produced four tons of the deadly nerve agent, VX… The admission only came out after inspectors collected documentation as a result of the defection of Hussein Kamel, Saddam Hussein’s late son-in-law.”

But Kamel, who was killed after returning to Iraq in 1996, actually told UN inspectors that Iraq had destroyed its entire stockpile of chemical and biological weapons and banned missiles, as Iraq has always claimed.

Those disclosures seemingly have had no effect on weeks of parading administration figures droning on about how “Saddam must disarm immediately.” Then on March 7, Hans Blix threw more of Powell’s case out the window:

”Intelligence authorities have claimed that weapons of mass destruction are moved around Iraq by trucks. In particular, that there are mobile production units for biological weapons. The Iraqi side states that such activities do not exist. Several inspections have taken place at declared and undeclared sites in relation to mobile production facilities. Food testing mobile laboratories and mobile workshops have been seen, as well as large containers with seed processing equipment. No evidence of proscribed activities has so far been found.”

In other words, Colin Powell probably lied. The only other explanation is that he misinterpreted the intelligence. But there is a problem with the latter charitable explanation — if he wanted real mobile weapons facilities discovered, why was UNMOVIC never provided with the intelligence in real time?

There really is no charitable explanation concerning forged documents about Iraqi uranium imports from Niger. ElBaradei reported on March 7 that his agency had determined that documents said by the United States and Britain to support the allegations, and trumpeted during the fall of 2002 by Bush and Blair, were fraudulent.

“Based on thorough analysis, the IAEA has concluded, with the concurrence of outside experts, that these documents — which formed the basis for the reports of these uranium transactions between Iraq and Niger — are, in fact, not authentic,” he said.

Even if the fabrications in Powell’s exposition are set aside and we assume Powell is 100% correct about all of the deceptions by Iraq, that only would show Iraq is under extreme scrutiny. Any escalation of its weapons development or attempt to use the weapons would presumably not escape U.S. notice. Powell’s faulty case, even if taken on its own terms, argues against a war if you believe war is a last resort.

Looking at Iraqi weapons in a different way, and getting beyond all of the hand-wringing about Iraqi non-cooperation, it emerges that the U.S. has completely obstructed Iraqi compliance with the Security Council. The excellent analyst, Glen Rangwala (who broke the internet cribbing story), has posted a counter-dossier and an extensive, up-to-the-minute evaluation of claims concerning Iraqi weapons.

Here, Rangwala provides clear analysis supporting the case that the United States in fact has deceived the world with its claims about Iraqi weapons and has failed to fulfill its own responsibilities under U.N. Security Council resolutions. The U.N. weapons inspection regime and Iraqi cooperation with it in reality has gone a long way towards disarming Saddam Hussein, an interpretation of events that is the polar opposite of the usual line found in the U.S. media. Yes, there are officially unresolved issues concerning chemical and biological agents that could be locally very dangerous. And full credence should be given to the possibility that Hussein Kamel correctly reported the destruction of these agents. Above all, there is no way these issues add up to war in the absence of a direct threat from Iraq.

Rangwala writes, “Iraq has repeatedly asked for a clear timetable for the lifting of economic sanctions to be coupled with the weapons inspections system. This is not an unreasonable demand: in fact, it was the agreement made in the ceasefire that ended the Gulf War, and which the U.S. in particular has done so much since 1991 to obscure. The ceasefire agreement - Security Council resolution 687 laid out a political settlement: the weapons inspectorate, an end to the threat of war, a clear timetable to lifting economic sanctions, and the creation of a weapons of mass destruction free zone in the Middle East (entailing the need for the end of Israel’s nuclear arsenal).”

In other words, a solution short of war has always been possible—lifting of sanctions and permanent in-country inspections coupled with region-wide peace initiatives. We probably will never know if present day Iraq can cooperate with the international community and heal itself from decades of tyrannical rule because the U.S. will not allow it.

Administration officials are now well-rehearsed in delivering lines like, “Saddam Hussein is a practiced liar, there is no doubt about it. We should take everything he says very skeptically.”

Apparently, the same holds true for Colin Powell and our own administration. Other countries see this clearly as their citizens line up at 80%+ rates against the war. Notwithstanding posturing of the U.S. administration that failure to vote along lines of U.S. will renders the U.N. “irrelevant,” the U.S. still faces three likely vetoes of a war resolution from China, France, and Russia; teetering of the Blair government in the U.K. as it desperately seeks cover for war; even withdrawal of support for the U.S. position in third-world countries like Pakistan and Cameroon. These are no small measures of how badly Powell’s diplomatic disaster has turned out.