Secret U.S.
Plans For Iraq's Oil
By Greg Palast
18 March, 2005
CommonDreams.org
The Bush administration made plans for
war and for Iraq's oil before the 9/11 attacks sparking a policy battle
between neo-cons and Big Oil, BBC's Newsnight has revealed.
Two years ago today
- when President George Bush announced US, British and Allied forces
would begin to bomb Baghdad - protestors claimed the US had a secret
plan for Iraq's oil once Saddam had been conquered.
In fact there were
two conflicting plans, setting off a hidden policy war between neo-conservatives
at the Pentagon, on one side, versus a combination of "Big Oil"
executives and US State Department "pragmatists."
"Big Oil"
appears to have won. The latest plan, obtained by Newsnight from the
US State Department was, we learned, drafted with the help of American
oil industry consultants.
Insiders told Newsnight
that planning began "within weeks" of Bush's first taking
office in 2001, long before the September 11th attack on the US.
An Iraqi-born oil
industry consultant Falah Aljibury says he took part in the secret meetings
in California, Washington and the Middle East. He described a State
Department plan for a forced coup d'etat.
Mr. Aljibury himself
told Newsnight that he interviewed potential successors to Saddam Hussein
on behalf of the Bush administration.
Secret sell-off
plan
The industry-favored
plan was pushed aside by yet another secret plan, drafted just before
the invasion in 2003, which called for the sell-off of all of Iraq's
oil fields. The new plan, crafted by neo-conservatives intent on using
Iraq's oil to destroy the Opec cartel through massive increases in production
above Opec quotas.
The sell-off was
given the green light in a secret meeting in London headed by Ahmed
Chalabi shortly after the US entered Baghdad, according to Robert Ebel.
Mr. Ebel, a former Energy and CIA oil analyst, now a fellow at the Center
for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, flew to the London
meeting, he told Newsnight, at the request of the State Department.
Mr Aljibury, once
Ronald Reagan's "back-channel" to Saddam, claims that plans
to sell off Iraq's oil, pushed by the US-installed Governing Council
in 2003, helped instigate the insurgency and attacks on US and British
occupying forces.
"Insurgents
used this, saying, 'Look, you're losing your country, your losing your
resources to a bunch of wealthy billionaires who want to take you over
and make your life miserable," said Mr Aljibury from his home near
San Francisco.
"We saw an
increase in the bombing of oil facilities, pipelines, built on the premise
that privatization is coming."
Privatization
blocked by industry
Philip Carroll,
the former CEO of Shell Oil USA who took control of Iraq's oil production
for the US Government a month after the invasion, stalled the sell-off
scheme.
Mr Carroll told
us he made it clear to Paul Bremer, the US occupation chief who arrived
in Iraq in May 2003, that: "There was to be no privatization of
Iraqi oil resources or facilities while I was involved."
The chosen successor
to Mr Carroll, a Conoco Oil executive, ordered up a new plan for a state
oil company preferred by the industry.
Ari Cohen, of the
neo-conservative Heritage Foundation, told Newsnight that an opportunity
had been missed to privatize Iraq's oil fields. He advocated the plan
as a means to help the US defeat Opec, and said America should have
gone ahead with what he called a "no-brainer" decision.
Mr Carroll hit back,
telling Newsnight, "I would agree with that statement. To privatize
would be a no-brainer. It would only be thought about by someone with
no brain."
New plans, obtained
from the State Department by Newsnight and Harper's Magazine under the
US Freedom of Information Act, called for creation of a state-owned
oil company favored by the US oil industry. It was completed in January
2004, Harper's discovered, under the guidance of Amy Jaffe of the James
Baker Institute in Texas. Former US Secretary of State Baker is now
an attorney. His law firm, Baker Botts, is representing ExxonMobil and
the Saudi Arabian government.
View segments of
Iraq oil plans at: www.GregPalast.com/opeconthemarch.html
Questioned by Newsnight,
Ms Jaffe said the oil industry prefers state control of Iraq's oil over
a sell-off because it fears a repeat of Russia's energy privatization.
In the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, US oil companies were
barred from bidding for the reserves.
Jaffe said "There
is no question that an American oil company ... would not be enthusiastic
about a plan that would privatize all the assets with Iraq companies
and they (US companies) might be left out of the transaction."
In addition, Ms.
Jaffe says US oil companies are not warm to any plan that would undermine
Opec, "They [oil companies] have to worry about the price of oil."
"I'm not sure
that if I'm the chair of an American company, and you put me on a lie
detector test, I would say high oil prices are bad for me or my company."
The former Shell
oil boss agrees. In Houston, he told Newsnight, "Many neo-conservatives
are people who have certain ideological beliefs about markets, about
democracy, about this that and the other. International oil companies
without exception are very pragmatic commercial organizations. They
don't have a theology."
Greg Palast's
film - the result of a joint investigation by BBC Newsnight and Harper's
Magazine - will broadcast on Thursday, 17 March, 2005. You can watch
the program online - available Thursday, March 17 after 7pm EST for
24hrs - from the Newsnight website: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/newsnight/default.stm.
You can also read the story in greater detail in the latest issue of
Harper's magazine