Why
Did We Invade Iraq Anyway?
By Michael Schwartz
31 October, 2007
Tomdispatch.com
Lately,
even Democratic candidates for president have been weighing in on why
the U.S. must maintain a long-term, powerful military presence in Iraq.
Hillary Clinton, for example, used phrases like protecting our "vital
national security interests" and preventing Iraq from becoming
a "petri dish for insurgents," in a major policy statement.
Barack Obama, in his most important speech on the subject, talked of
"maintaining our influence" and allowing "our troops
to strike directly at al Qaeda." These arguments, like the constantly
migrating justifications for invading Iraq, serially articulated by
the Bush administration, manage to be vaguely plausible (with an emphasis
on the "vaguely") and also strangely inconsistent (with an
emphasis on the "inconsistent").
That these justifications
for invading, or remaining, are unsatisfying is hardly surprising, given
the reluctance of American politicians to mention the approximately
$10-$30 trillion of oil lurking just beneath the surface of the Iraq
"debate" -- and not much further beneath the surface of Iraqi
soil. Obama, for example, did not mention oil at all in his speech,
while Clinton mentioned it twice in passing. President Bush and his
top officials and spokespeople have been just as reticent on the subject.
Why then did the U.S. invade
Iraq? Why is occupying Iraq so "vital" to those "national
security interests" of ours? None of this makes sense if you don't
have the patience to drill a little beneath the surface – and
into the past; if you don't take into account that, as former Deputy
Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz once put it, Iraq "floats on
a sea of oil"; and if you don't consider the decades-long U.S.
campaign to control, in some fashion, Middle East energy reservoirs.
If not, then you can't understand the incredible tenaciousness with
which George W. Bush and his top officials have pursued their Iraqi
dreams or why -- now that those dreams are clearly so many nightmares
-- even the Democrats can't give up the ghost.
The Rise of OPEC
The United States viewed
Middle Eastern oil as a precious prize long before the Iraq war. During
World War II, that interest had already sprung to life: When British
officials declared Middle Eastern oil "a vital prize for any power
interested in world influence or domination," American officials
agreed, calling it "a stupendous source of strategic power and
one of the greatest material prizes in world history."
This led to a scramble for
access during which the United States established itself as the preeminent
power of the future. Crucially, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt
successfully negotiated an "oil for protection" agreement
with King Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia. That was 1945. From then
on, the U.S. found itself actively (if often secretly) engaged in the
region. American agents were deeply involved in the overthrow of a democratically
elected Iranian government in 1953 (to reverse the nationalization of
Iran's oil fields), as well as in the fateful establishment of a Baathist
Party dictatorship in Iraq in the early 1960s (to prevent the ascendancy
of leftists who, it was feared, would align the country with the Soviet
Union, putting the country's oil in hock to the Soviet bloc).
U.S. influence in the Middle
East began to wane in the 1970s, when the Organization of the Petroleum
Exporting Countries (OPEC) was first formed to coordinate the production
and pricing of oil on a worldwide basis. OPEC's power was consolidated
as various countries created their own oil companies, nationalized their
oil holdings, and wrested decision-making away from the "Seven
Sisters," the Western oil giants -- among them Shell, Texaco, and
Standard Oil of New Jersey -- that had previously dominated exploration,
extraction, and sales of black gold.
With all the key oil exporters
on board, OPEC began deciding just how much oil would be extracted and
sold onto international markets. Once the group established that all
members would follow collective decisions -- because even a single major
dissenter might fatally undermine the ability to turn the energy "spigot"
on or off -- it could use the threat of production restrictions, or
the promise of expansion, to bargain with its most powerful trading
partners. In effect, a new power bloc had emerged on the international
scene that could -- in some circumstances -- exact tangible concessions
even from the United States and the Soviet Union, the two superpowers
of the time.
Though the United States
was largely self-sufficient in oil when OPEC was first formed, the American
economy was still dependent on trading partners, particularly Japan
and Europe, which themselves were dependent on Middle Eastern oil. The
oil crises of the early 1970s, including the sometimes endless gas lines
in the U.S., demonstrated OPEC's potential.
It was in this context that
the American alliance with the Saudi royal family first became so crucial.
With the largest petroleum reserves on the planet and the largest production
capacity among OPEC members, Saudi Arabia was usually able to shape
the cartel's policies to conform to its wishes. In response to this
simple but essential fact, successive American presidents strengthened
the Rooseveltian alliance, deepening economic and military relationships
between the two countries. The Saudis, in turn, could normally be depended
upon to use their leverage within OPEC to fit the group's actions into
the broader aims of U.S. policy. In other words, Washington gained favorable
OPEC policies mainly by arming, and propping up a Saudi regime that
was chronically fragile.
Backed by a tiny elite that
used immense oil revenues to service its own narrow interests, the Saudi
royals subjected their impoverished population to an oppressively authoritarian
regime. Not surprisingly, then, the "alliance" required increasing
infusions of American military aid as well political support in situations
that were often uncomfortable, sometimes untenable, for Washington.
On its part, in an era of growing nationalism, the Saudis found overt
pro-American policies difficult to sustain, given the pressures and
proclivities of its OPEC partners and its own population.
The Neocons Seize the Unipolar
Moment
The key year in the Middle
East would be 1979, when Iranians, who had lost their government to
an American and British inspired coup in 1953, poured into the streets.
The American-backed Shah's brutal regime fell to a popular revolution;
American diplomats were taken hostage by Iranian student demonstrators;
and Ayatollah Khomeini and the mullahs took power. The Iranian revolution
added a combustible new element to an already complex and unstable equation.
It was, in a sense, the match lit near the pipeline. A regime hostile
to Washington, and not particularly amenable to Saudi pressure, had
now become an active member of OPEC, aspiring to use the organization
to challenge American economic hegemony.
It was at this moment, not
surprisingly, that the militarization of American Middle Eastern policy
came out of the shadows. In 1980, President Jimmy Carter -- before his
Habitat for Humanity days -- enunciated what would become known as the
"Carter Doctrine": that Persian Gulf oil was "vital"
to American national interests and that the U.S. would use "any
means necessary, including military force" to sustain access to
it. To assure that "access," he announced the creation of
a Rapid Deployment Joint Task Force, a new military command structure
that would be able to deliver personnel from all the armed services,
together with state-of-the-art military equipment, to any location in
the Middle East at top speed.
Nurtured and expanded by
succeeding presidents, this evolved into the United States Central Command
(Centcom), which ended up in charge of all U.S. military activity in
the Middle East and surrounding regions. It would prove the military
foundation for the Gulf War of 1990, which rolled back Saddam Hussein's
occupation of Kuwait, and therefore prevented him from gaining control
of that country's oil reserves. Though it was not emphasized at the
time, that first Gulf War was a crystalline application of the Carter
Doctrine -- that "any means necessary, including military force,"
should be used to guarantee American access to Middle Eastern oil. That
war, in turn, convinced a shaky Saudi royal family -- that saw Iraqi
troops reach its border – to accept an ongoing American military
presence within the country, a development meant to facilitate future
applications of the Carter Doctrine, but which would have devastating
unintended consequences.
The peaceful disintegration
of the Soviet Union at almost the same moment seemed to signal that
Washington now had uncontested global military supremacy, triggering
a debate within American policy circles about how to utilize and preserve
what Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer first called the
"unipolar moment." Future members of the administration of
Bush the younger were especially fierce advocates for making aggressive
use of this military superiority to enhance U.S. power everywhere, but
especially in the Middle East. They eventually formed a policy advocacy
group, The Project for a New American Century, to develop, and lobby
for, their views. The group, whose membership included Dick Cheney,
Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and dozens of other key individuals
who would hold important positions in the executive branch after George
W. Bush took office, wrote an open letter to President Clinton in 1998
urging him to turn his "administration's attention to implementing
a strategy for removing Saddam's regime from power." They cited
both the Iraqi dictator's military belligerence and his control over
"a significant portion of the world's supply of oil."
Two years later, the group
issued a ringing policy statement that would be the guiding text for
the new administration. Entitled Rebuilding America's Defenses, it advocated
what would become known as a Rumsfeldian-style transformation of the
Pentagon. U.S. military preeminence was to be utilized to "secure
and expand'' American influence globally and possibly, in the cases
of North Korea and Iraq, used "to remove these regimes from power
and conduct post-combat stability operations." (The document even
commented on the problem of defusing American domestic resistance to
such an aggressive stance, noting ominously that public approval could
not be obtained without "some catastrophic and catalyzing event
-- like a new Pearl Harbor.")
Saddam's Iraq and Oil on
the Brain
The second Bush administration
ascended to the presidency just as American influence in the Middle
East looked to be on the decline. Despite victory in the first Gulf
War and the fall of the Soviet Union, American influence over OPEC and
oil policies seemed under threat. That sucking sound everyone suddenly
heard was a tremendous increase in the global demand for oil. With fears
rising that, in the very near future, such demand could put a strain
on OPEC's resources, member states began negotiating ever more vigorously
for a range of concessions and expanded political power in exchange
for expanded energy production. By this time, of course, the United
States had joined the ranks of the energy deficient and dependent, as
imported oil surged past the 50% mark.
In the meantime, key ally
Saudi Arabia was further weakened by the rise of al-Qaeda, which took
as its main goal the overthrow of the royal family, and its key target
-- think of those unintended consequences -- the American troops triumphantly
stationed at permanent bases in the country after Gulf War I. They seemed
to confirm the accusations of Osama bin Laden and other Saudi dissidents
that the royal family had indeed become little but a tool of American
imperialism. This, in turn, made the Saudi royals increasingly reluctant
hosts for those troops and ever more hesitant supporters of pro-American
policies within OPEC.
The situation was complicated
further by what was obvious to any observer: The potential future leverage
that both Iraq and Iran might wield in OPEC. With the second and third
largest oil reserves on the planet -- Iran also had the second largest
reserves of natural gas -- their influence seemed bound to rise. Iraq's,
in particular, would be amplified substantially as soon as Saddam Hussein's
regime was freed from severe limitations imposed by post-war UN sanctions,
which prevented it from either developing new oil fields or upgrading
its deteriorating energy infrastructure. Though the leaders of the two
countries were enemies, having fought a bitter war in the 1980s, they
could agree, at least, on energy policies aimed at thwarting American
desires or demands -- a position only strengthened in 1998 when the
citizens of Venezuela, the most important OPEC member outside the Middle
East, elected the decidedly anti-American Hugo Chavez as president.
In other words, in January 2001, the new administration in Washington
could look forward to negotiating oil policy not only with a reluctant
Saudi royal family, but also a coterie of hostile powers in a strengthened
OPEC.
It is hardly surprising,
then, that the new administration, bent on unipolarity anyway and dreaming
of a global Pax Americana, wasted no time implementing the aggressive
policies advocated in the PNAC manifesto. According to then Secretary
of the Treasury Paul O'Neill in his memoir The Price of Loyalty, Iraq
was much on the mind of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld at the first
meeting of the National Security Council on January 30, 2001, seven
months before the 9/11 attacks. At that meeting, Rumsfeld argued that
the Clinton administration's Middle Eastern focus on Israel-Palestine
should be unceremoniously dumped. "[W]hat we really want to think
about," he reportedly said, "is going after Saddam."
Regime change in Iraq, he argued, would allow the U.S. to enhance the
situation of the pro-American Kurds, redirect Iraq toward a market economy,
and guarantee a favorable oil policy.
The adjudication of Rumsfeld's
recommendation was shuffled off to the mysterious National Energy Policy
Development Group that Vice President Cheney convened as soon as Bush
took occupancy of the Oval Office. This task force quickly decided that
enhanced American influence over the production and sale of Middle East
oil should be "a primary focus of U.S. international energy policy,"
relegating both the development of alternative energy sources and domestic
energy conservation measures to secondary, or even tertiary, status.
A central goal of the administration's Middle East focus would be to
convince, or coerce, states in that region "to open up areas of
their energy sectors to foreign investment"; that is, to replace
government control of the oil spigot -- the linchpin of OPEC power --
with decision-making by multinational oil companies headquartered in
the West and responsive to U.S. policy needs. If such a program could
be extended even to a substantial minority of Middle Eastern oil fields,
it would prevent coordinated decision-making and constrain, if not break,
the power of OPEC. This was a theoretically enticing way to staunch
the loss of American power in the region and truly turn the Bush years
into a new unipolar moment in the Middle East.
Having determined its goals,
the Task Force began laying out a more detailed strategy. According
to Jane Mayer of the New Yorker, the most significant innovation was
to be a close collaboration between Cheney's energy crew and the National
Security Council (NSC). The NSC evidently agreed "to cooperate
fully with the Energy Task Force as it considered the 'melding' of two
seemingly unrelated areas of policy: 'the review of operational policies
towards rogue states,' such as Iraq, and 'actions regarding the capture
of new and existing oil and gas fields.'"
Though all these deliberations
were secret, enough of what was going on has emerged in these last years
to demonstrate that the "melding" process was successful.
By March of 2001, according to O'Neill, who was a member of both the
NSC and the task force:
"Actual plans.... were already being discussed to take over Iraq
and occupy it -- complete with disposition of oil fields, peacekeeping
forces, and war crimes tribunals -- carrying forward an unspoken doctrine
of preemptive war."
O'Neill also reported that,
by the time of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon,
the plan for conquering Iraq had been developed and that Secretary of
Defense Rumsfeld indeed urged just such an attack at the first National
Security Council meeting convened to discuss how the U.S. should react
to the disaster. After several days of discussion, an attack on Iraq
was postponed until after al-Qaeda had been wiped out and the Taliban
driven from power in Afghanistan. It took only until January 2002 --
three months of largely successful fighting in Afghanistan -- before
the "administration focus was returning to Iraq." It wasn't
until November 2002, though, that O'Neill heard the President himself
endorse the invasion plans, which took place the following March 20th.
The Logic of Regime Change
With this background, it's
easier to understand the recent brief, but highly significant, flurry
of controversy over a single sentence in The Age of Turbulence, the
bestselling, over-500-page memoir by longtime Federal Reserve Chairman
Alan Greenspan. He wrote simply, as if this were utterly self-evident:
"I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge
what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil." As the
first major government official to make such a statement, he was asked
repeatedly to explain his thinking, particularly since his comment was
immediately repudiated by various government officials, including White
House spokesman Tony Fratto, who labeled it "Georgetown cocktail
party analysis."
His subsequent comments elaborated
on a brief explanation in the memoir: "It should be obvious that
as long as the United States is beholden to potentially unfriendly sources
of oil and gas, we are vulnerable to economic crises over which we have
little control." Since former ally Saddam Hussein was, by then,
unremittingly unfriendly, Greenspan felt that (as he told Washington
Post reporter Bob Woodward) "taking Saddam out was essential"
in order to make "certain that the existing system [of oil markets]
continues to work." In an interview at Democracy Now! he elaborated
on this point, explaining that his support for ousting Hussein had "nothing
to do with the weapons of mass destruction," but rather with the
economic "threat he could create to the rest of the world"
through his control over key oil reserves in the Persian Gulf region.
Greenspan's argument echoes
the logic expressed by the Project for a New American Century and other
advocates of aggressive military solutions to the threat of OPEC power.
He was concerned that Saddam Hussein, once an ally, but by then a sworn
enemy of U.S. interests in the Middle East, would control key oil flows.
That, in turn, might allow him to exercise economic, and so political,
leverage over the United States and its allies.
The former Fed chief then
elaborated further, arguing that the threat of Saddam could be eliminated
"by one means or another" -- either by "getting him out
of office or getting him out of the control position he was in."
Replacing Saddam with a friendly, pro-American government seemed, of
course, like such a no-brainer. Why have a guy like that in a "control
position" over oil, after all? (And think of the possibility of
taking those embarrassing troops out of Saudi Arabia and stationing
them at large permanent bases in nearby, well-situated, oil-rich Iraq.)
Better by far, as the Cheney Energy Task put it, "to open up areas
of [Iraq's] energy sectors to foreign investment." Like the Task
Force members, Greenspan believed that removing oil -- not just from
Saddam's control, but from the control of any Iraqi government -- would
permanently remove the threat that it or a broken OPEC could continue
to wield economic leverage over the United States.
Revealingly enough, Greenspan
saw the invasion of Iraq as a generically conservative action -- a return,
if anything, to the status quo ante that would preserve unencumbered
American access to sufficient Middle Eastern oil. With whole new energy-devouring
economies coming on line in Asia, continued American access seemed to
require stripping key Middle Eastern nations of the economic and political
power that scarcity had already begun to confer. In other words, Greenspan's
conservative urge implied exactly the revolutionary changes in the political
and economic equation that the Bush administration would begin to test
out so disastrously in Iraq in March 2003. It's also worth remembering
that Iraq was only considered a first pit stop, an easy mark for invasion
and occupation. PNAC-nurtured eyes were already turning to Iran by then
as indicated by the classic prewar neocon quip, "Everyone wants
to go to Baghdad. Real men want to go to Tehran."
And beyond this set of radical
changes in the Middle East lay another set for the rest of the world.
In the twenty-first century, expanding energy demand will, sooner or
later (probably sooner), outdistance production. The goal of unfettered
American access to sufficient Middle Eastern oil would, if achieved
and sustained, deprive other countries of sufficient oil, or require
them to satisfy U.S. demands in order to access it. In other words,
Greenspan's conservative effort to preserve American access implied
a dramatic increase in American leverage over all countries that depended
on oil for their economic welfare; that is, a radical transformation
of the global balance of power.
Notice that these ambitions,
and the actions taken to implement them, rested on a vision of an imperial
America that should, could, and would play a uniquely dominant, problem-solving
role in world affairs. All other countries would, of course, continue
to be "vulnerable to economic crises" over which they would
have "little control." Only the United States had the essential
right to threaten, or simply apply, overwhelming military power to the
"problem" of energy; only it had the right to subdue any country
that attempted to create -- or exploit -- an energy crisis, or that
simply had the potential and animus to do so.
None of this was lost on
the unipolar-minded officials who made the decision to invade Iraq --
and were more ready than any previous administration to spell out, shock-and-awe
style, a new stronger version of the Carter Doctrine for the planet.
According to Treasury Secretary O'Neill, Rumsfeld offered a vision of
the grandiosity of these goals at the first Bush administration National
Security Council meeting:
"Imagine what the region would look like without Saddam and with
a regime that's aligned with U.S. interests. It would change everything
in the region and beyond."
An even more grandiose vision
was offered to the New York Times by presidential speech writer David
Frum a few days later:
"An American-led overthrow of Saddam Hussein, and the replacement
of the radical Baathist dictatorship with a new government more closely
aligned with the United States, would put America more wholly in charge
of the region than any power since the Ottomans, or maybe even the Romans."
As worldwide demand for hydrocarbons
soared, the United States was left with three policy choices: It could
try to combine alternative energy sources with rigorous conservation
to reduce or eliminate a significant portion of energy imports; it could
accept the leverage conferred on OPEC by the energy crunch and attempt
to negotiate for an adequate share of what might soon enough become
an inadequate supply; or it could use its military power in an effort
to coerce Middle East suppliers into satisfying American requirements
at the expense of everyone else. Beginning with Jimmy Carter, five U.S.
presidents chose the coercive strategy, with George W. Bush finally
deciding that violent, preemptive regime change was needed to make it
work. The other options remain unexplored.
[Note: This commentary --
and most of the useful work on the role of oil in Middle East and world
politics -- rests on the remarkable evidential and analytic foundation
provided by Michael Klare's indispensable book, Blood
and Oil,The Dangers and Consequences of America's Growing Dependency
on Imported Petroleum. Readers who seek a full understanding
of these issues should start with that text.]
Michael Schwartz,
Professor of Sociology and Founding Director of the Undergraduate College
of Global Studies at Stony Brook University, has written extensively
on popular protest and insurgency, and on American business and government
dynamics. His books include Radical Protest and Social Structure and
Social Policy and The Conservative Agenda (edited, with Clarence Lo).
His work on Iraq has appeared on numerous Internet sites, including
Tomdispatch, Asia Times, Mother Jones, and ZNET; and in print in Cities,
Contexts, Against the Current, and Z Magazine. His email address is
[email protected].
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