This Looming
War Isn't About Chemical Warheads or Human Rights: It's About Oil
By Robert Fisk
I was sitting on the floor of an old concrete house in the suburbs of
Amman this week, stuffing into my mouth vast heaps of lamb and boiled
rice soaked in melted butter. The elderly, bearded, robed men from Maan
the most Islamist and disobedient city in Jordan sat around
me, plunging their hands into the meat and soaked rice, urging me to
eat more and more of the great pile until I felt constrained to point
out that we Brits had eaten so much of the Middle East these past 100
years that we were no longer hungry. There was a muttering of prayers
until an old man replied. "The Americans eat us now," he said.
Through the open door, where
rain splashed on the paving stones, a sharp east wind howled in from
the east, from the Jordanian and Iraqi deserts. Every man in the room
believed President Bush wanted Iraqi oil. Indeed, every Arab I've met
in the past six months believes that this and this alone
explains his enthusiasm for invading Iraq. Many Israelis think the same.
So do I. Once an American regime is installed in Baghdad, our oil companies
will have access to 112 billion barrels of oil. With unproven reserves,
we might actually end up controlling almost a quarter of the world's
total reserves. And this forthcoming war isn't about oil?
The US Department of Energy
announced at the beginning of this month that by 2025, US oil imports
will account for perhaps 70 per cent of total US domestic demand. (It
was 55 per cent two years ago.) As Michael Renner of the Worldwatch
Institute put it bleakly this week, "US oil deposits are increasingly
depleted, and many other non-Opec fields are beginning to run dry. The
bulk of future supplies will have to come from the Gulf region."
No wonder the whole Bush energy policy is based on the increasing consumption
of oil. Some 70 per cent of the world's proven oil reserves are in the
Middle East. And this forthcoming war isn't about oil?
Take a look at the statistics
on the ratio of reserve to oil production the number of years
that reserves of oil will last at current production rates compiled
by Jeremy Rifkin in Hydrogen Economy. In the US, where more than 60
per cent of the recoverable oil has already been produced, the ratio
is just 10 years, as it is in Norway. In Canada, it is 8:1. In Iran,
it is 53:1, in Saudi Arabia 55:1, in the United Arab Emirates 75:1.
In Kuwait, it's 116:1. But in Iraq, it's 526:1. And this forthcoming
war isn't about oil?
Even if Donald Rumsfeld's
hearty handshake with Saddam Hussein in 1983 just after the Great
Father Figure had started using gas against his opponents didn't
show how little the present master of the Pentagon cares about human
rights or crimes against humanity, along comes Joost Hilterman's analysis
of what was really going on in the Pentagon back in the late 1980s.
Hilterman, who is preparing
a devastating book on the US and Iraq, has dug through piles of declassified
US government documents only to discover that after Saddam gassed
6,800 Kurdish Iraqis at Halabja (that's well over twice the total of
the World Trade Center dead of 11 September 2001) the Pentagon set out
to defend Saddam by partially blaming Iran for the atrocity.
A newly declassified State
Department document proves that the idea was dreamed up by the Pentagon
who had all along backed Saddam and states that US diplomats
received instructions to push the line of Iran's culpability, but not
to discuss details. No details, of course, because the story was a lie.
This, remember, followed five years after US National Security Decision
Directive 114 concluded in 1983, the same year as Rumsfeld's
friendly visit to Baghdad gave formal sanction to billions of
dollars in loan guarantees and other credits to Baghdad. And this forthcoming
war is about human rights?
Back in 1997, in the years
of the Clinton administration, Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and a bunch of
other right-wing men most involved in the oil business
created the Project for the New American Century, a lobby group demanding
"regime change" in Iraq. In a 1998 letter to President Clinton,
they called for the removal of Saddam from power. In a letter to Newt
Gingrich, who was then Speaker of the House, they wrote that "we
should establish and maintain a strong US military presence in the region,
and be prepared to use that force to protect our vital interests [sic]
in the Gulf and, if necessary, to help remove Saddam from power".
The signatories of one or
both letters included Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, now Rumsfeld's Pentagon
deputy, John Bolton, now under-secretary of state for arms control,
and Richard Armitage, Colin Powell's under-secretary at the State Department
who called last year for America to take up its "blood debt"
with the Lebanese Hizbollah. They also included Richard Perle, a former
assistant secretary of defense, currently chairman of the defense science
board, and Zalmay Khalilzad, the former Unocal Corporation oil industry
consultant who became US special envoy to Afghanistan where Unocal
tried to cut a deal with the Taliban for a gas pipeline across Afghan
territory and who now, miracle of miracles, has been appointed
a special Bush official for you guessed it Iraq.
The signatories also included
our old friend Elliott Abrams, one of the most pro-Sharon of pro-Israeli
US officials, who was convicted for his part in the Iran-Contra scandal.
Abrams it was who compared Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon
held "personally responsible" by an Israeli commission for
the slaughter of 1,700 Palestinian civilians in the 1982 Sabra and Chatila
massacre to (wait for it) Winston Churchill. So this forthcoming
war the whole shooting match, along with that concern for "vital
interests" (i.e. oil) in the Gulf was concocted five years
ago, by men like Cheney and Khalilzad who were oil men to their manicured
fingertips.
In fact, I'm getting heartily
sick of hearing the Second World War being dug up yet again to justify
another killing field. It's not long ago that Bush was happy to be portrayed
as Churchill standing up to the appeasement of the no-war-in Iraq brigade.
In fact, Bush's whole strategy with the odious and Stalinist-style Korea
regime the "excellent" talks which US diplomats insist
they are having with the Dear Leader's Korea which very definitely does
have weapons of mass destruction reeks of the worst kind of Chamberlain-like
appeasement. Even though Saddam and Bush deserve each other, Saddam
is not Hitler. And Bush is certainly no Churchill. But now we are told
that the UN inspectors have found what might be the vital evidence to
go to war: 11 empty chemical warheads that just may be 20 years old.
The world went to war 88
years ago because an archduke was assassinated in Sarajevo. The world
went to war 63 years ago because a Nazi dictator invaded Poland. But
for 11 empty warheads? Give me oil any day. Even the old men sitting
around the feast of mutton and rice would agree with that.
Published on Saturday, January
18, 2003 by the lndependent/UK