The Great Iraq
Oil Giveaway
By Chris Floyd
20 July, 2005
Counterpunch
They
were still scraping body parts out of the blasted carriages in the London
Underground last week when the terrorists brazenly announced a harvest
of blood fruits from their murderous campaign. The declaration -- bone-chilling
in its moral nullity, its brutal cynicism -- was made in the fearsome
name of Jihad.
That would be Asim
Jihad, of course, spokesman for the Iraqi Oil Ministry. Yes, just one
day after London's agony, the state terrorists who perpetrated the ongoing
mass atrocity of aggressive war in Iraq celebrated an important victory
in their campaign of violence and fear: 11 juicy oil fields are being
put up for tender to international investors, AdnKronos International
reports.
The corporate cornucopia
of these fertile fields in oil-laden southern Iraq -- 3 million barrels
per day, said Jihad -- will surpass the nation's entire current output
of 2.2 million bpd: rich pickings for the oil barons whose branch office
in the White House has done such outstanding advance work for them.
With oil prices soaring past $60 per barrel -- on their way to the $100
mark in the near future, some experts say -- the $25 billion ante that
the Iraqis are seeking will be a small price to pay for a seat at this
game.
But goodness gracious
me -- as Pentagon pump-jockey Don Rumsfeld would say, in that prim spinster
patois he likes to affect when wiping blood off his hands -- nobody
in their right mind believes all that money will actually go to the
Oil Ministry, which will maintain ostensible control of the sold-off
fields for the alleged benefit of the Iraqi people. Heavens to Betsy,
no!
Some of the loot
will be skimmed by Bushist-favored bagmen in the new Baghdad regime.
Some will be siphoned off to fund the death-dealing, torture-happy goon
squads now operating on behalf of various factions in the government.
Some will be kicked back to the oil barons. And some will be smuggled
into slush funds for covert ops, mercenaries, campaign hijinks in the
Homeland and "retirement packages" for good and faithful servants
of the Bush war machine.
How do we know this
will happen? Because it has already happened to Iraqi oil money that
fell into the hands of the profiteer-in-chief, President George W. Bush.
According to detailed audits and investigations by Congress, the Pentagon,
the General Accountability Office, the International Advisory and Monitoring
Board, and the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, more
than $8.8 billion in Iraqi money under Bush's control simply went walking
between October 2003 and July 2004, the London Review of Books reports.
These were revenues supposedly earmarked for the Iraqi government --
but no one knows where they actually went, except for a few dollops
that investigators found were bankrolling many of the worthy endeavors
outlined above.
And this epic rapine
-- looting on a scale not seen since the days of the Mongol Horde --
is just a single rivulet in the vast delta of corruption draining the
conquered land. Christian Aid estimates that an additional $4 billion
in unmetered oil export revenue was sold off under the counter, Saddam-style,
to coalition cronies. Then there were the planeloads of cold cash spread
around by Bush's "Provisional Authority" -- off the books,
natch -- to "couriers," brokers, Western contractors, tribal
leaders, "intelligence assets" and anyone else who had the
moxie to put their hands out at the right time.
All of this money
was stolen from the Iraqi people. In fact, every bit of Iraq's oil money
was seized by Bush and transferred to New York's Federal Reserve Bank
in May 2003. Perhaps this was the operation Bush was referring to in
his ballyhooed "Mission Accomplished" declaration that same
month. (He certainly couldn't have been talking about the military mission
-- not with "major combat operations" still being launched
even as we speak.) And oil revenues kept flowing to Bush's bank account
after the conquest. All told, by the time Bush's personal viceroy, Jerry
Bremer, did his "last days of Saigon" bug-out from Baghdad
last year, the Crawford Caligula had run through $20 billion of Iraq's
oil money.
No one has been
brought to justice for this monstrous -- indeed murderous -- thievery.
And the oil barons preparing to feast on the new tenders needn't worry
about such "quaint" notions as legality either. That's because
Bush -- hugger-mugger as usual -- recently renewed his infamous Executive
Order 13303, the blanket immunity for all U.S. corporate interests involved
in any way with Iraq's oil, the Deep Blade web log reports. The original
edict was issued in that fateful, fruitful month of May 2003.
Bush's ukase applies
to all traffickers in Iraqi oil -- as long as their loot finds its way,
by hook or crook, into the coffers of "United States persons or
entities." Bush declares flatly that any "judicial process"
launched against these protected entities -- not excluding criminal
proceedings for, say, fraud, corruption, extortion, even murder -- "shall
be deemed null and void." But what if some rogue nation still clinging
to the outmoded principle of law and order tries to take Bush's cronies
to court? Not to worry: one of the many agencies authorized to "employ
all powers" to "carry out the purposes of this order"
is none other than Spinster Rumsfeld's own little parlor -- the Pentagon.
Money and power,
grabbed through violence and deceit: that's the real point -- the only
point -- of Bush's "war on terror." It is in fact a war of
terror, where both sides use senseless murder and mass slaughter to
advance their degraded ambitions. No doubt the innocent victims of the
London bombing are happy to have died in the service of such a noble
cause.
Chris Floyd is
a columnist for The Moscow Times. His new blog of political news and
commentary can be found at Empire Burlesque (www.empireburlesquenow.blogspot.com).