Say It Slowly: It Was About Oil

By Ted Rall, 
April 25, 2003

Iraq is going to hell. Shiites are killing Sunnis, Kurds are killing 
Arabs and Islamists are killing secular Baathists. Baghdad, the cradle 
of human civilization, has been left to looters and rapists. As in 
Beirut during the '70s, neighborhood zones are separated by checkpoints 
manned by armed tribesmen. The war has, however, managed to unite 
Iraqis in one respect: Everyone loathes the United States.  

Some Iraqis hate us for deposing Saddam Hussein. No dictator remains 
in power without the tacit support of at some of his subjects. Now that 
we've committed the cardinal sin of conquest - getting rid of the old 
system without thinking up a new one - even those who chafed under 
Saddam blame us for their present misery.  

Others resent our Pentagon-appointed pretender, 58-year-old 
banker/embezzler Ahmed Chalabi. The State Department points out 
that Iraq's new puppet autocrat has zero support among Iraqis, 
having lived abroad since 1958. But who knows? Maybe he was a 
really popular kid.  

Thousands of Iraqis have been reduced to poverty, raped and murdered 
by rampaging goons as U.S. Marines stood around and watched. We 
watched the plunder of museums in Mosul and Baghdad safe at home 
with our tisk-tisk dismay, but Iraqis will remain outraged by the wanton 
devastation we wrought through war, permitted through negligence and 
shrugged off through arrogance. "We didn't allow it," Defense Secretary 
Donald Rumsfeld shrugged. "It happened."  

Imagine foreign troops sitting idly, laughing as hooligans trashed 
the Smithsonian, stole the gold from Fort Knox and burned down the 
Department of the Interior. That was us in Iraq.  

But let's forget this penny ante stuff. Let the real looting begin! 
George W. Bush's bestest buddies, corporate executives at companies 
which donate money in exchange for a few rounds of golf and a few 
million-dollar favors, are being handed the keys to Iraq's oil fields.  

Bush's brazen Genghis Khan act seems carefully calculated to confirm 
our worst suspicions. First he appoints retired general Jay Garner, 
president of a GOP-connected defense contractor, SYColeman Corp., 
as viceroy of occupied Iraq. "The idea is we are in Iraq not as 
occupiers but as liberators, and here comes a guy who has attachments 
to companies that provided the wherewithal for the military assault on 
that country," marvels David Armstrong, a defense analyst at the National 
Security News Service. A smart and/or decent president would have 
picked a civilian for a civil administration post.  

Then Bush slips a $680 million contract to the Bechtel Group. The deal 
puts the company in position to receive a big part of the $100 billion 
estimated total cost of Iraqi reconstruction. According to the Center 
for Responsive Politics, Bechtel gave Republican candidates, including 
Bush, about $765,000 in PAC, soft money and individual campaign 
contributions between 1999 and 2002.  

Finally, refusing to accept bids from potential competitors, Bush grants 
a two-year, $490 million contract for Iraqi oil field repairs to Halliburton 
Co., the Houston-based company where Vice President Dick Cheney 
worked as CEO from 1995 to 2000. "It will look a lot worse if Halliburton 
gets the USAID [Agency for International Development] contract, too," 
Bathsheba Crocker, an Iraq specialist for the Center for Strategic and 
International Studies, warned in March. "Then it really starts looking 
bad." Guess what! Halliburton has since scored a piece of that $600 
million USAID contract.  

Are we looking bad yet?

Only Bush's most intimate friends were invited to bid for these 
contracts. Even businesses based in Great Britain, where Prime 
Minister Tony Blair risked his political career to support Bush, 
have been excluded from a rigged process where only U.S.-based, 
Republican-led, Bush-connected companies need apply.  

Two senior Democratic Congressmen, Henry Waxman and John 
Dingell, are asking the General Accounting Office to look into these 
sleazy kickback deals. "These ties between the vice president and 
Halliburton have raised concerns about whether the company has 
received favorable treatment from the administration," their letter 
reads. Well, duh. But don't count on appropriate action - like 
impeachment proceedings - from the do-nothing Dems.  

Bush's right-wing Gang of Four - Cheney, Rummy, National Security 
Advisor Condoleezza Rice and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul 
Wolfowitz - saw Operation Iraqi Freedom as a chance to line their 
buddies' pockets, emasculate the Muslim world, place U.S. military 
bases in Russia's former sphere of influence and, according to the 
experts, lower the price of oil by busting OPEC.  

"There will be a substantial increase in Iraqi oil production [under U.S. 
occupation], and I wouldn't be surprised if schemes emerged to weaken, 
if not destroy, OPEC," says Jumberto Calder<=n, former energy minister 
of Venezuela. Former OPEC secretary general Fadhil Chalabi (no 
relation to Ahmed) estimates that increased exploration could 
potentially double Iraq's proven reserves, which would raise production 
from 2.4 to 10 million barrels a day. Such Saudi-scale production would 
"bring OPEC to its knees," says Chalabi.  

The cartel's member nations, ten of 11 of them predominantly Muslim, 
would suffer staggering increases in poverty as a result of falling oil 
revenues, plunging some into the political chaos that breeds Islamist 
fundamentalism. Meanwhile, the people of Iraq, whose self-flagellating 
Shias already make the evening news look like a rerun of Iran's 1979 
Islamic revolution, would starve as foreign infidels raked in billions 
thanks to the oil beneath their land.  

Time to dust off the duct tape.

Ted Rall is the author of "Gas War: The Truth Behind the American 
Occupation of Afghanistan," an analysis of the underreported Trans- 
Afghanistan Pipeline project and the real motivations behind the war 
on  terrorism.

                             -==-

Source: Information Clearinghouse ...
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article3115.htm


Cheers, Steve..

---