New Oil Law Means Victory in Iraq for Bush
By Chris Floyd
t r u t h o u t | UK Correspondent
Monday 08 January 2007
I. Surging Toward the Ultimate Prize
The reason that George W. Bush insists that "victory" is achievable in
Iraq is not that he is deluded or isolated or ignorant or detached from
reality or ill-advised. No, it's that his definition of "victory" is
different from those bruited about in his own rhetoric and in the
ever-earnest disquisitions of the chattering cl***** in print and online.
For Bush, victory is indeed at hand. It could come at any moment now,
could
already have been achieved by the time you read this. And the driving
force
behind his planned "surge" of American troops is the need to preserve
those
fruits of victory that are now ripening in his hand.
At any time within the next few days, the Iraqi Council of Ministers
is
expected to approve a new "hydrocarbon law" essentially drawn up by the
Bush
administration and its UK lackey, the Independent on Sunday re****ted. The
new bill will "radically redraw the Iraqi oil industry and throw open the
doors to the third-largest oil reserves in the world," says the paper,
whose
re****ters have seen a draft of the new law. "It would allow the first
large-scale operation of foreign oil companies in the country since the
industry was nationalized in 1972." If the government's parliamentary
majority prevails, the law should take effect in March.
As the paper notes, the law will give Exxon Mobil, BP, Shell and other
carbon cronies of the White House unprecedented sweetheart deals, allowing
them to pump gargantuan profits from Iraq's nominally state-owned
oilfields
for decades to come. This law has been in the works since the very
beginning
of the invasion - indeed, since months before the invasion, when the Bush
administration brought in Phillip Carroll, former CEO of both Shell and
Fluor, the politically-wired oil servicing firm, to devise "contingency
plans" for divvying up Iraq's oil after the attack. Once the deed was
done,
Carroll was made head of the American "advisory committee" overseeing the
oil industry of the conquered land, as Joshua Holland of Alternet.com has
chronicled in two remarkable re****ts on the backroom maneuvering over
Iraq's
oil: "Bush's Petro-Cartel Almost Has Iraq's Oil and "The US Takeover of
Iraqi Oil."
From those earliest days until now, throughout all the twists and
turns,
the blood and chaos of the occupation, the Bush administration has kept
its
eye on this prize. The new law offers the barrelling buccaneers of the
West
a juicy set of production-sharing agreements (PSAs) that will maintain a
fig
leaf of Iraqi owner****p of the nation's oil industry - while letting
Bush's
Big Oil buddies rake off up to 75 percent of all oil profits for an
indefinite period up front, until they decide that their "infrastructure
investments" have been repaid. Even then, the agreements will give the
Western oil majors an unheard-of 20 percent of Iraq's oil profits - more
than twice the average of standard PSAs, the Independent notes.
Of course, at the moment, the "security situation" - i.e., the living
hell of death and suffering that Bush's "war of choice" has wrought in
Iraq - prevents the Oil Barons from setting up shop in the looted fields.
Hence Bush's overwhelming urge to "surge" despite the fierce opposition to
his plans from Congress, the Pentagon and some members of his own party.
Bush and his inner circle, including his chief adviser, old oilman Dick
Cheney, believe that a bigger dose of blood and iron in Iraq will produce
a
sufficient level of stability to allow the oil majors to cash in the PSA
chips that more than 3,000 American soldiers have purchased for them with
their lives.
The American "surge" will be blended into the new draconian effort
announced over the weekend by Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki: an
all-out war by the government's ****ite militia-riddled "security forces"
on
Sunni enclaves in Baghdad, as the Wa****ngton Post re****ts. American troops
will "sup****t" the "pacification effort" with what Maliki says calls
"house-to-house" sweeps of Sunni areas. There is of course another phrase
for this kind of operation: "ethnic cleansing."
The "surged" troops - mostly long-serving, overstrained units
dragooned
into extended duty - are to be thrown into this maelstrom of urban warfare
and ethnic murder, tem****arily taking sides with one faction in Iraq's
hydra-headed, multi-sided civil war. As the conflict goes on - and it will
go on and on - the Bush administration will continue to side with whatever
faction promises to uphold the "hydrocarbon law" and those profitable
PSAs.
If "Al Qaeda in Iraq" vowed to open the nation's oil spigots for Exxon,
Fluor and Halliburton, they would suddenly find themselves transformed
from
"terrorists" into "moderates" - as indeed has Maliki and his violent,
sectarian Dawa Party, which once killed Americans in terrorist actions but
are now hailed as freedom's champions.
So Bush will surge with Maliki and his ethnic cleansing for now. If
the
effort flames out in a disastrous crash that makes the situation worse -
as
it almost certainly will - Bush will simply back another horse. What he
seeks in Iraq is not freedom or democracy but "stability" - a government
of
any shape or form that will deliver the goods. As the Independent wryly
noted in its Sunday story, Dick Cheney himself revealed the true goal of
the
war back in 1999, in a speech he gave when he was still CEO of
Halliburton.
"Where is the oil going to come from" to slake the world's ever-growing
thirst, asked Cheney, who then answered his own question: "The Middle
East,
with two-thirds of the world's oil and the lowest cost, is still where the
prize ultimately lies."
And therein lies another hidden layer of the war. For Iraq not only
has
the world's second largest oil reserves; it also has the world's most
easily
retrievable oil. As the Independent succinctly notes: "The cost-per-barrel
of extracting oil in Iraq is among the lowest in the world because the
reserves are relatively close to the surface. This contrasts starkly with
the expensive and risky lengths to which the oil industry must go to find
new reserves elsewhere - witness the super-deep offshore drilling and
cost-intensive techniques needed to extract oil form Canada's tar sands."
This is precisely what Cheney was getting at in his 1999 talk to the
Institute of Petroleum. In a world of dwindling petroleum resources, those
who control large reserves of cheaply-produced oil will reap unimaginable
profits - and command the heights of the global economy. It's not just
about
profit, of course; control of such resources would offer tremendous
strategic advantages to anyone who was interested in "full spectrum
domination" of world affairs, which the Bush-Cheney faction and their
outriders among the neo-cons and the "national greatness" fanatics have
openly sought for years. With its twin engines of cor****ate greed and
military empire, the war in Iraq is a marriage made in Valhalla.
II. The Win-Win Scenario
And this unholy union is what Bush is really talking about when he
talks
about "victory." This is the reason for so much of the drift and dithering
and chaos and incompetence of the occupation: Bush and his cohorts don't
really care what happens on the ground in Iraq - they care about what
comes
out of the ground. The end - profit and dominion - justifies any means.
What
happens to the human beings caught up in the war is of no ultimate
im****tance; the game is worth any number of broken candles.
And in plain point of fact, the Bush-Cheney faction - and the elite
interests they represent - has already won the war in Iraq. I've touched
on
this theme before elsewhere, but it is a reality of the war that is very
often overlooked, and is worth examining again. This ultimate victory was
clear as long ago as June 2004, when I first set down the original version
of some of the updated observations below.
Put simply, the Bush Family and their allies and cronies represent the
confluence of three long-established power factions in the American elite:
oil, arms and investments. These groups equate their own interests, their
own wealth and privilege, with the interests of the nation - indeed, the
world - as a whole. And they pursue these interests with every weapon at
their command, including war, torture, deceit and corruption. Democracy
means nothing to them - not even in their own country, as we saw in the
2000
election. Laws are just whips to keep the common herd in line; they don't
apply to the elite, as Bush's own lawyers and minions have openly asserted
in the memos, signing statements, court cases and presidential decrees
asserting the "inherent power" of the "unitary executive" to override any
law he pleases.
The Iraq war has been immensely profitable for these Bush-linked power
factions (and their tributary industries, such as construction); billions
of
dollars in public money have already poured into their coffers.
Halliburton
has been catapulted from the edge of bankruptcy to the heights of no-bid,
open-ended, guaranteed profit. The Carlyle Group is gorging on war
contracts. Individual Bush family members are making out like bandits from
war-related investments, while dozens of Bush minions - like Richard
Perle,
James Woolsey, and Joe Allbaugh - have cashed in their insider chips for
blood money.
The aftermath of the war promises equal if not greater riches. Even if
the new Iraqi government maintains nominal state control of its oil
industry, there are still untold billions to be made in PSAs for drilling,
refining, distributing, servicing and securing oilfields and pipelines.
Likewise, the new Iraqi military and police forces will require billions
more in weapons, equipment and training, bought from the US arms industry
-
and from the fast-expanding "private security" industry, the politically
hard-wired mercenary forces that are the power elite's latest lucrative
spin-off. And as with Saudi Arabia, oil money from the new Iraq will pump
untold billions into American banks and investment houses.
But that's not all. For even in the worst-case scenario, if the
Americans had to pull out tomorrow, abandoning everything - their bases,
their contracts, their collaborators - the Bush power factions would still
come out ahead. For not only has their already-incalculable wealth been
vastly augmented (with any potential losses indemnified by US taxpayers),
but their deeply-entrenched sway over American society has also increased
by
several magnitudes. No matter which party controls the government, the
militarization of America is so far gone now it's impossible to imagine
any
major rollback in the gargantuan US war machine - 725 bases in 132
countries, annual military budgets topping $500 billion, a planned $1
trillion in new weapons systems already moving through the pipeline.
Indeed,
the Democratic "opposition" has promised to expand the military.
Nor will either party conceivably challenge the dominance of the
energy
behemoths - or stand against the American public's demand for cheap gas,
big
vehicles, and unlimited consumption of a vast dispro****tion of the world's
oil. As for Wall Street - both parties have long been the eager courtesans
of the investment elite, dispatching armies all over the world to protect
their financial interests. The power factions whose influence has been so
magnified by Bush's war will maintain their supremacy regardless of the
electoral outcome.
[By the way, to think that all of this has happened because a small
band
of extremist ideologues - the neo-cons - somehow "hijacked" US foreign
policy to push their radical dreams of "liberating" the Middle East by
force
and destroying Israel's enemies is absurd. The Bush power factions were
already determined to pursue an aggressive foreign policy; they used the
neo-cons and their bag of tricks - their inflated rhetoric, their
conspiratorial zeal, their murky Middle East contacts, their ideology of
brute force in the name of "higher" causes - as tools (and PR cover) to
help
bring about a long-planned war that had nothing to do with democracy or
security or any coherent ideology whatsoever beyond the remorseless
pursuit
of wealth and power, the blind urge to be top dog.]
So Bush and his cohorts have won even if the surge fails and Iraq
lapses
into perpetual anarchy, or becomes an extremist religious state; they've
won
even if the whole region goes up in flames, and terrorism flares to
unprecedented heights - because this will just mean more war-profiteering,
more fear-profiteering. And yes, they've won even though they've lost
their
Congressional majority and could well lose the presidency in 2008, because
war and fear will continue to fill their coffers, buying them continuing
influence and power as they bide their time through another interregnum of
a
Democratic "centrist" - who will, at best, only nibble at the edges of the
militarist state - until they are back in the saddle again. The only way
they can lose the Iraq War is if they are actually arrested and imprisoned
for their war crimes. And we all know that's not going to happen.
So Bush's confident strut, his incessant upbeat pronouncements about
the
war, his complacent smirks, his callous indifference to the unspeakable
horror he has unleashed in Iraq - these are not the hallmarks of
self-delusion, or willful ignorance, or a disassociation from reality. He
and his accomplices know full well what the reality is - and they like it.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Chris Floyd is an American journalist. His weekly political column,
"Global Eye," ran in the Moscow Times from 1996 to 2006. His work has
appeared in print and online in venues all over the world, including The
Nation, Counterpunch, Columbia Journalism Review, the Christian Science
Monitor, Il Manifesto, the Bergen Record and many others. His story on
Pentagon plans to foment terrorism won a Project Censored award in 2003.
He
is the author of Empire Burlesque: High Crimes and Low Comedy in the Bush
Imperium, and is co-founder and editor of the "Empire Burlesque" political
blog.
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