New Iraq Report: 

Yes, Tony, There is a Conspiracy 
08.04.2003 [16:45] 

Here's the prewar zeitgeist in a nutshell: In a widely reported January 
16 speech, Tony Blair proclaimed that the  impending invasion of Iraq 
"has nothing to do with oil, or any of the other conspiracy theories put 
forward."  

One week later, Sen. Richard Lugar, chairman of the Senate Foreign 
Relations Committee, quietly passed word to Russia and France that 
their countries will be frozen out of staggeringly lucrative postwar 
oil contracts unless they roll over and endorse the US attack.  

Yes, Tony, there is a conspiracy, in the dictionary sense of the term: 
an agreement among people to perform a criminal or wrongful act. It 
consists, not of a tiny cabal, but of the whole of the American power 
elite, from politicians to business executives to journalists. It has 
everything to do with oil. But it is not secret.  

The conspirators know they can count on the uncritical support of the 
mass media. Therefore knowledge of their cynical motives and thuggish 
tactics can be made available in journals and other specialized fora, 
all but invisible to most Americans but accessible to the few with 
sufficient time and inclination to dig beneath the headlines.  

Building on that knowledge, a Mumbai-based independent think tank 
has now anatomized the conspiracy behind the coming war and issued 
a truly comprehensive explanation of the current global crisis.  

Behind the Invasion of Iraq, the startling new book-length report 
authored by the Research Unit for Political Economy (RUPE), synthesizes 
the seemingly disparate threads of the US war drive in what amounts to 
a blistering indictment of American foreign policy. The report (available 
on the Web at www.rupe-india.org) is lavishly documented and jargon- free; 
the effect, especially for readers with limited understanding of global 
commerce and finance, is of puzzle pieces clicking decisively into 
place.  

The RUPE report wholly confirms the widely-held view of the coming 
war as a massive oil grab, "on a scale not witnessed since the days 
of colonialism." Further, the current debate about arms inspections 
and alleged links to al-Qaeda is revealed as pure political theater, 
since the decision to invade Iraq was made months ago.  

But seizure of Iraq's multi-trillion-dollar petroleum reserves is only 
the immediate goal, the report shows. RUPE's rigorous analysis of publicly 
available sources -- including official documents, think-tank papers, and 
press reports -- reveals that the US intends to use the invasion of Iraq 
as a launching pad for a drastic reshaping of the Middle East, to be 
followed by an unprecedented expansion of US power worldwide. The 
strategic trend of US foreign policy now points unmistakably towards 
global empire.  

To be sure, an imperial project on so ambitious a scale entails big 
downside risks for the US, including staggering costs, military hazards, 
and the disruption of global "stability" (i.e., the dearly-bought loyalty 
of US allies and client states.) But the American Establishment seems 
prepared to go for broke, and its enthusiastic consensus behind a 
naked war of conquest cannot be explained solely by the "cowboy 
mentality" that some detect in the White House.  

What's really at stake -- and this will come as no surprise to leftists 
-- is US control of global markets. The report reveals that the US economy 
is now facing a nightmare scenario: A crisis of overproduction has crippled 
US GDP, resulting in monstrous trade and budget deficits, even as a 
potentially disastrous deflationary spiral appears to be under way 
worldwide.  

Meanwhile, superpower rivals Europe, Russia and China are mounting a 
vigorous challenge to US economic preeminence, which is further 
threatened by the euro's emergence as a credible alternative to the 
dollar as global reserve currency. (All this is exhaustively detailed 
in the RUPE report, which draws its most telling evidence from the 
mainstream financial press.)  

In this context, the US sees confiscation of the world's richest oil-
producing regions as a magic bullet. While securing its own access to 
petroleum supplies for the foreseeable future, it can simultaneously 
defend dollar hegemony and restructure Middle East markets for the 
exclusive benefit of US-based corporations.  

Which brings us to the crux: Direct American control of oil would render 
any potential challengers for world or regional supremacy perpetually 
dependent on US forbearance. In RUPE's words, "once it has seized 
the oil wells of west Asia the US will determine not only which firms 
would bag the deals, not only the currency in which oil trade would be 
denominated, not only the price of oil on the international market, but 
even the destination of the oil."  

RUPE's argument here is powerful but complex, and this summary is 
necessarily an extreme oversimplification. But the overall thrust is 
quite clear: The US invasion of Iraq needs to be understood not as an 
end in itself but as the means to an end -- the foundation of a New 
American Empire.  

Needless to say, you won't catch Tony Blair owning up to the war's real 
purpose as he flogs it to a skeptical public. But the truth, or something 
pretty close to it, is now readily available to anyone who cares to look.  

Jacob Levich, a writer and editor based in Queens, N.Y., assisted 
RUPE in researching Behind The Invasion of Iraq -- which is a fancy way 
of saying he forwarded several hundred articles to an email address in  
Mumbai. He can be reached at: jlevich{at}earthlink.net

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Source: IraqWar.ru ...
http://www2.iraqwar.ru/iraq-read_article.php?articleId=2230&lang=en

Cheers, Steve..

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