Another War For Oil With Iran?
By Sherwood Ross
30 January, 2012
Countercurrents.org
Over and over again in the Middle East, we see the same pattern
repeating itself:
An oil-rich country takes control of its own oil fields and cuts out
the Western oil companies.
What follows as the night the day, the western countries overthrow the
offending government and reinstall their favorite oil companies.
This has happened in both Iran and Iraq.
Right now, the U.S. is threatening Iran with war on grounds that it is
making a nuclear weapons.
To begin with, Iran is a peaceful country. It hasn’t started a war in
hundreds of years. It only fought when Iraq invaded it in 1980.
In that war, Iraq used chemical weapons that it got from the United
States---so here we have an example of an American attack by proxy on
Iran without any provocation.
But the United States attacked Iran on its own without using
intermediaries in 1953 and overthrew the legitimate government.
Most Americans don’t know about that overthrow. It was engineered by
the Central Intelligence Agency.
Since Iran did not even have a nuclear facility in 1953, what could
have been the excuse for the attack?
The answer is oil. Iran kicked out the British oil company it felt was
cheating it out of a fair profit for the oil it was extracting and
took the oil field over from the British.
The British tried to overthrow the “insolent” Iran government but
failed. Iran kicked the British spies out of the country.
So Britain asked the American CIA to overthrow the government and the
U.S. did, deposing Prime Minister Mossadegh and putting a king on the
throne.
And guess who got the contracts? The western oil companies: Gulf,
Standard Oil of New Jersey, Texaco and Mobil---got a 40 percent share
of the new National Iranian Oil Company.
And what happened in Iran in 1953 was also going to happen in Iraq in
2003---- the U.S. attacked Iraq after which the western oil companies
got the plum contracts.
“Prior to the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq, US and other
western oil companies were all but completely shut out of Iraq’s oil
market,” industry analyst Antonia Juhasz told Al Jazeera wire service.
“But thanks to the invasion and occupation, the companies are now back
inside Iraq and producing oil there for the first time since being
forced out of the country in 1973.”
And, adds Business Week magazine, “Western producers like BP,
ExxonMobil, and Shell are enjoying their best access to Iraq’s
southern oil fields since 1972,” 1972 was the year Saddam Hussein
nationalized Iraq’s oil fields. Another big winner of the U.S.
invasion: Hunt Oil Co., of Dallas, Tex., run by Ray Hunt, President
George W. Bush’s friend and fund-raiser.
Oil industry analyst Juhasz says that ExxonMobil, BP, and Shell
aggressively lobbied their governments “to ensure that the invasion
would result in an Iraq open to foreign oil companies” and that “they
succeeded.” Sure they succeeded. Because the Pentagon works
hand-in-glove with the oil industry.
So what we have here is history repeating itself. Whenever Iraq or
Iran have been attacked by the U.S. in the past it’s been over oil.
That’s the record. Those are facts. But if you like you can believe
the U.S. and Israel are threatening to attack only because they’re
trying to stop Iran from getting a nuke. That’s an echo of President
George Bush’s lie that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.
There’s an inscription from Shakespeare etched on the National
Archives building in downtown Washington, D.C. It says, “What’s past
is prologue.” Shakespeare was right. Better believe it. And history
will repeat itself with a new U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran unless the
American people rise up and declare: “No blood for oil.” I’m
Sherwood Ross. Good night to every one of you---and, oh, good
luck.
(Reach Sherwood Ross at [email protected])
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