| Author | Message | | Alpha | | Posted: Thu Mar 17, 2005 10:01 pm Post subject: SECRET U.S. PLANS FOR IRAQ'S OIL |
| SECRET U.S. PLANS FOR IRAQ'S OIL
By Greg Palast
Reporting for BBC Newsnight
17 March 2005
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 - now available at your local newsstand.
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Watch the above referenced 'Newsnight' segment via the following URL from 'Democracy Now':
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/03/21/1455245
Last edited by Alpha on Mon Mar 21, 2005 11:19 pm; edited 1 time in total | |  | | Alpha | | | | Alpha | | | | Alpha | | | | Alpha | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Thu Mar 24, 2005 10:28 pm Post subject: U.S. using anti-terror war to control world oil reserves |
| U.S. using anti-terror war to control world oil reserves
The primary motivation for the invasion of Iraq was for Israel, but the following article is still an interesting read as the Zionist neocons would like to control the oil as well via puppet regimes (like they had planned via Chalabi) and having private ownership of oil companies and similar:
U.S. using anti-terror war to control world oil reserves:
http://www.aljazeera.com/me.asp?service_ID=7422 | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Mon Sep 05, 2005 9:51 am Post subject: Bush’s implicit answer to Cindy Sheehan’s question |
| http://www.freepress.org/columns/display/5/2005/1204
Bush’s implicit answer to Cindy Sheehan’s question
September 4, 2005
President Bush has evaded Cindy Sheehan’s question, “What was the noble cause that my son died for?” But he provided a partial answer on the day that the New Orleans levees gave way.
The media coverage was scant and fleeting -- but we should not allow the nation’s Orwellian memory hole to swallow up a revealing statement in Bush’s speech at a naval air station near San Diego.
In the Aug. 30 speech, moments after condemning “a brutal campaign of terror in Iraq,” the president said: “If Zarqawi and bin Laden gain control of Iraq, they would create a new training ground for future terrorist attacks. They’d seize oil fields to fund their ambitions.” In other words, the U.S. war effort in Iraq must continue because control of Iraqi oil is at stake.
Would U.S. troops be in Iraq if that country didn’t have a drop of oil under its sand? Most politicians dodge that kind of question. And for years, the U.S. news media -- with few exceptions -- have elided the oily obvious. Such denials go back a long way.
* * * * * * * * * *
On Aug. 15, 1990 -- two weeks after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait -- President George H.W. Bush expressed great concern about oil as the Pentagon moved to deploy troops and weaponry to the Persian Gulf. Of course the confrontation was about “our own national security interests” along with ensuring “peace and stability,” but there was something more.
“We are also talking about maintaining access to energy resources that are key -- not just to the functioning of this country, but to the entire world,” the president said. “Our jobs, our way of life, our own freedom and the freedom of friendly countries around the world would all suffer if control of the world’s great oil reserves fell into the hands of Saddam Hussein,” he declared.
But by autumn the official story had shifted. Confronted by protesters while speaking at a fundraiser in Des Moines, the president had this rejoinder: “You know, some people never get the word. The fight isn’t about oil. The fight is about naked aggression that will not stand.” Addressing a Republican crowd in Vermont a week later, the first President Bush flatly said that “it isn’t oil that we’re concerned about. It is aggression. And this aggression is not going to stand.”
Papering over corporate interests with humanitarian ones is standard media operating procedure for presidents and their administrations along with many pundits. On the last day of November 2003, with U.S. troops occupying Iraq, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman gushed that “this war is the most important liberal, revolutionary U.S. democracy-building project since the Marshall Plan.” He lauded the war as “one of the noblest things this country has ever attempted abroad.” Friedman did not mention the estimated 112 billion barrels of untapped oil in Iraq.
The publicized arguments in favor of war do not usually include zeal to serve corporate interests. But once in a blue moon, politicians opt to openly illuminate such motives, as when -- during congressional debate in January 1991, a few days before the Gulf War began -- Senator Warren Rudman grounded the prevailing lofty arguments with a factor more crude. “Can anyone reasonably assert,” he asked, “that it would serve our interests to mortgage the production and pricing levels of nearly one-half of the world’s proven oil reserve to the whims of an ambitious tyrant? I think not.”
A dozen years later, weeks before the invasion of Iraq, liberal Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen launched a barrage of invective against a member of Congress who had dared to identify oil as “the strongest incentive” for the impending war. Cohen was vitriolic. The first word of his column was “liar.” From there, he peppered his piece with references to Representative Dennis Kucinich as an “indomitable demagogue” and a “fool” who was “repeating a lie.”
But Cohen would have done well to reread a front page of his own newspaper. Five months earlier, on Sept. 15, 2002, a page-one Post story carried the headline “In Iraqi War Scenario, Oil Is Key Issue; U.S. Drillers Eye Huge Petroleum Pool.” In the article, Ahmad Chalabi, the exile leader of the U.S.-backed Iraqi National Congress, said that he favored the creation of a U.S.-led consortium to develop oil fields in a post-Saddam Iraq: “American companies will have a big shot at Iraqi oil.”
The same Post article quoted former CIA Director James Woolsey -- a Chalabi supporter who, according to a Legal Times story, had been on the payroll of Chalabi’s group. Woolsey said: “France and Russia have oil companies and interests in Iraq. They should be told that if they are of assistance in moving Iraq toward decent government, we’ll do the best we can to ensure that the new government and American companies work closely with them. If they throw in their lot with Saddam, it will be difficult to the point of impossible to persuade the new Iraqi government to work with them.”
As business pages had sometimes indicated, it was actually quite reasonable to identify oil as very important in U.S. policy toward Iraq. But in political news coverage, and among all but a few mainstream political pundits, such talk was in general disrepute.
On Wall Street, financial analysts were inclined to be much more candid than politicians or political reporters. “Think of Iraq as a military base with a very large oil reserve underneath,” said Fadel Gheit, an expert on the oil industry for Oppenheimer & Company. He added: “You can’t ask for better than that.” After more than a quarter century of tracking the oil business, Gheit commented: “Think of Iraq as virgin territory. ... It is the superstar of the future. That’s why Iraq becomes the most sought-after real estate on the face of the earth.”
A Toronto Star columnist and author, Linda McQuaig, cited internal documents that the Bush administration had used for policy formulation (papers not intended for public viewing but released due to a successful lawsuit). In spring 2001, high-ranking Bush officials and oil firm execs pored over a map showing details of “Exploration Blocks” and other intricacies of Iraq’s oil fields. Meeting in secret, the energy task force -- chaired by Vice President Dick Cheney -- had also examined a chart that featured information about 63 oil companies from 30 nations under the heading “Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfields.”
The documents, McQuaig wrote, “suggest that those who took part in the Cheney task force -- including senior oil company executives -- were very interested in Iraq’s oil and specifically in the danger of it falling into the hands of eager foreign oil companies, rather than into the rightful hands of eager U.S. oil companies. As the documents show, prior to the U.S. invasion, foreign oil companies were nicely positioned for future involvement in Iraq, while the major U.S. oil companies, after years of U.S.-Iraqi hostilities, were largely out of the picture.” Of course, for oil corporations based in the USA, that picture would drastically change after the invasion.
* * * * * * * * * *
On Aug. 30, 2005, less than a minute after declaring that if terrorists “gain control of Iraq” they would “seize oil fields to fund their ambitions,” President Bush vowed: “We will stay on the offensive. We will stand with the people of Iraq. And we will prevail.”
The next day, the Associated Press reported that “President Bush answered growing antiwar protests yesterday with a fresh reason for U.S. troops to continue fighting in Iraq: protection of the country’s vast oil fields, which he said would otherwise fall under the control of terrorist extremists.” The end of another AP dispatch noted: “A one-time oilman, Bush has rejected charges that the war in Iraq is a struggle to control the nation’s vast oil wealth. The president has avoided making links between the war and Iraq’s oil reserves, but the soaring cost of gasoline has focused attention on global petroleum sources.”
For years, war supporters have pooh-poohed slogans like “No Blood for Oil.” But let the record show: In a scripted speech, the president of the United States has cited Iraqi oil as a key reason for the U.S. military to keep killing in Iraq.
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This article is adapted from Norman Solomon’s new book “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.” For information, go to: www.WarMadeEasy.com | | | | Alpha | | | | | ©2002-2009 WarWithoutEnd.co.uk |
