/CONT/ &

Issues of geopolitical primacy and the occupation of Iraq go hand in 
hand with American oil interests in the region. Leftists have used the 
phrase "it's all about the oil" so many times that they have worn it out. 
They rarely present much evidence to verify this claim and this is why 
the phrase has become a cliche in the media. I do have the evidence to 
make this claim without it being just an empty maxim.  

The era of cheap and abundant oil is coming to a close. Many experts 
predict that demand will outrun supply in 10 years time. Therefore it is 
inevitable that world oil prices will dramatically rise. The benefit of 
controlling the world's biggest oil supplies will be greater than it has 
ever been. Iraq contains the second largest oil supply on earth, at least 
112 billion barrels of proven reserves, one tenth of the world's supply, 
with some suggesting it is even more plentiful than number one in the 
world, Saudi Arabia. The script is set for America to turn on its ally 
in a matter of years because the Saudis have threatened to raise their 
oil prices and so an extra source of oil is a necessity for America to 
retain its superpower status. A puppet regime in Iraq would pump three 
times the amount of oil than current levels, as reported by Newsweek. 
The fall in supply from Venezuela has also hit hard, which is why the 
CIA have attempted on more than one occasion to overthrow Venezuelan 
president Hugo Chavez.  

In April 2001, a report by the Baker Institute for Public Policy 
revealed the Bush administration's desperate urge to remove Saddam 
Hussein from the scene to protect their oil interests. The report 
was commissioned by U.S. vice-president Dick Cheney. It read,  

"The United States remains a prisoner of its energy dilemma. 
Iraq remains a destabilising influence to ... the flow of oil to 
international markets from the Middle East. Saddam Hussein has 
also demonstrated a willingness to threaten to use the oil weapon 
and to use his own export programme to manipulate oil markets. 
Therefore the US should conduct an immediate policy review toward 
Iraq including military, energy, economic and political/ diplomatic 
assessments. The United States should then develop an integrated 
strategy with key allies in Europe and Asia, and with key countries 
in the Middle East, to restate goals with respect to Iraqi policy 
and to restore a cohesive coalition of key allies."

The Baker Institute was set up by former secretary of state under 
daddy Bush, James Baker, another key man in the arming of Iraq and 
numerous other criminal activities. The advisors for the report 
included Kenneth Lay, the disgraced former chief executive of Enron, 
and a host of top oil company executives. The Council on Foreign 
Relations were also involved in the proposals.  

The document presents a strategy to deploy United Nations weapons 
inspectors to disarm Iraq of any remaining arms and then to move in 
and take control of the oil within three to five years. This is the 
exact course of events we saw unfold in late 2002 and into 2003. 
Remember, the dossier was released in April 2001 and so this clearly 
indicates that September 11 and the much repeated "it's a more dangerous 
world so we must take out Saddam" mantra is an outright lie. The Sunday 
Herald commented that the document, "fundamentally questions the 
motives behind the Bush administration's desire to take out Saddam 
Hussein and go to war with Iraq."

The Sydney Morning Herald of Australia made a similar conclusion,

'While the US now presses for "regime change" in Iraq, more than 18 
months ago the report repeatedly emphasised its importance as an oil 
producer and the need to expand Iraqi production as soon as possible 
to meet projected oil shortages - shortages it said could be avoided 
only through increased production or conservation in the near-term.'

The report is a smoking gun and tells us that the agenda to 
commandeer the Iraqi oil fields was decided upon two or more years 
before the proposed invasion itself. However, the White House still 
insisted it had not even considered what the consequences in the oil 
market would be from a war even as they were massing troops.  

Mainstream Indian analysts also went public to point out the oil agenda 
of the invasion of Iraq in September 2002,  

"Sources said control over Iraq and its oil wealth would allow 
American firms to manipulate global market prices by deciding on 
production levels and to keep out countries like India, which is 
engaged in developing oil fields in that country."

Even as people like Tony Blair were calling the "alleged" oil agenda a 
conspiracy theory, the biggest newspapers in the world were reporting,  

"A U.S.-led ouster of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein could open a 
bonanza for American oil companies long banished from Iraq, scuttling 
oil deals between Baghdad and Russia, France and other countries, and 
reshuffling world petroleum markets, according to industry officials 
and leaders of the Iraqi opposition."

Former CIA director James R. Woolsey went on the record as saying 
that the oil windfall would be divvied up fairly between the nations 
that agreed to support the war.  

And so it was no surprise that the first priority after the invasion 
of Iraq was to secure the oil fields. Talks on this began in secret 
because, according to the London Guardian, "The companies are reluctant 
to mention oil in public, fearing it will feed Arab suspicion that it 
is the main factor in the confrontation with Iraq - According to the 
officials, Mr Cheney's staff held a meeting in October with Exxon 
Mobil Corporation, ChevronTexaco Corporation, ConcocoPhilips, Halliburton, 
but both the US administration and the companies deny it." Of course 
when the plan became public the media put out the blatantly ridiculous 
spin that control of the Iraqi oil fields was for the benefit of the 
Iraqi people. Just like the U.N. oil for food program has been to the 
benefit of the Iraqi people too, killing 500,000 of them. Colin Powell 
was the main proponent of this supposition and yet when asked if U.S. 
oil companies would get the contracts for the operation of the oilfields 
he said, "I don't have an answer to that question."

On the eve of the war the U.S. cited fabricated and unreliable evidence 
to try and justify a war in the face of mounting anti-war demonstrations.  

Colin Powell's speech to the U.N. on February 5 2003 was described as 
a watershed because it firmly divided the world into pro and anti-war 
camps. At this point blatantly demonization-driven stories were 
emerging suggesting that Saddam Hussein's spies were running and 
organizing anti-war protests across the world. Hussein can barely 
control his small region of dominance and so how his agents were able 
to leave the country and infiltrate the anti-war movement is baffling.  

Powell's "evidence" consisted of satellite photographs which arrows 
drawn on pointing to objects that could have been anything, if the 
satellite photos were even genuine at all. The Secretary of State also 
outlined that the Islamic terrorist group Ansar al-Islam, which he 
linked to Hussein, were operating a chemical and poisons factory in 
north-eastern Iraq. When journalists from several different countries 
visited this location, they found out that it was in fact a bakery,  

"It emerged that the terrorist factory was nothing of the kind - more a 
dilapidated collection of concrete outbuildings at the foot of a grassy 
sloping hill. Behind the barbed wire, and a courtyard strewn with broken 
rocket parts, are a few empty concrete houses. There is a bakery. 
There is no sign of chemical weapons anywhere - only the smell of 
paraffin and vegetable ghee used for cooking."

The London Observer concluded that Powell's charge was "cheap 
hyperbole".

During his presentation, Powell also held up a British intelligence 
dossier that claimed to detail Iraq's links to terrorist organizations. 
Powell stated,  

"I would call my colleagues' attention to the fine paper that the 
United Kingdom distributed... which describes in exquisite detail 
Iraqi deception activities."

The dossier, entitled "Iraq - its infrastructure of concealment, 
deception and intimidation" was revealed just a day after Powell's 
speech as a compilation of 6-year-old magazine articles and a graduate 
student thesis which cited information that was 12-years-old. Four of 
the report's nineteen pages were copied verbatim from an Internet 
version of an article by Ibrahim al-Marashi, a postgraduate student 
from Monterey in California. Downing Street copied the text without 
even removing the spelling mistakes. The only changes that were made 
were detailed by U.K. Channel 4 News,  

'In several places Downing Street edits the originals to make more 
sinister reading. Number 10 says the Mukhabarat - the main intelligence 
agency - is "spying on foreign embassies in Iraq". The original reads: 
"monitoring foreign embassies in Iraq." And the provocative role of 
"supporting terrorist organisations in hostile regimes" has a weaker, 
political context in the original: "aiding opposition groups in hostile 
regimes.'  

The British government made itself look even more foolish by refusing 
to apologize and actually defending the material as accurate. They 
couldn't see the harm in passing off a student essay as high-level 
MI6 intelligence. Former Labour MP Glenda Jackson commented,  

"If that was presented to Parliament and the country as being up-to-date 
intelligence, albeit collected from a variety of sources but by British 
intelligence agents..... it is another example of how the government is 
attempting to mislead the country and Parliament on the issue of a 
possible war with Iraq. And of course to mislead is a Parliamentary 
euphemism for lying."

Tim Dalyell, the longest serving member of the House of Commons, was 
actually ejected from the House by presiding officer Michael Martin 
after stating,  

"To plagiarize an out of date Ph.D. thesis and to present it as an 
official report of the latest British intelligence information, 
surely it reveals a lack of awareness of the disastrous consequences 
of such a deception. This is not a trivial leak. It is a document on 
which is the basis of whether or not this country goes to war and 
whether or not young servicemen and servicewomen are to put their 
own lives at risk and indeed thousands, tens of thousands of innocent
civilians."  

/CONT/

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