It’s the Oil
October 26th, 2007Via: London Review of Books:
Iraq is ‘unwinnable’, a ‘quagmire’, a ‘fiasco’: so goes the received opinion. But there is good reason to think that, from the Bush-Cheney perspective, it is none of these things. Indeed, the US may be ‘stuck’ precisely where Bush et al want it to be, which is why there is no ‘exit strategy’.
Iraq has 115 billion barrels of known oil reserves. That is more than five times the total in the United States. And, because of its long isolation, it is the least explored of the world’s oil-rich nations. A mere two thousand wells have been drilled across the entire country; in Texas alone there are a million. It has been estimated, by the Council on Foreign Relations, that Iraq may have a further 220 billion barrels of undiscovered oil; another study puts the figure at 300 billion. If these estimates are anywhere close to the mark, US forces are now sitting on one quarter of the world’s oil resources. The value of Iraqi oil, largely light crude with low production costs, would be of the order of $30 trillion at today’s prices. For purposes of comparison, the projected total cost of the US invasion/occupation is around $1 trillion.
Who will get Iraq’s oil? One of the Bush administration’s ‘benchmarks’ for the Iraqi government is the passage of a law to distribute oil revenues. The draft law that the US has written for the Iraqi congress would cede nearly all the oil to Western companies. The Iraq National Oil Company would retain control of 17 of Iraq’s 80 existing oilfields, leaving the rest – including all yet to be discovered oil – under foreign corporate control for 30 years. ‘The foreign companies would not have to invest their earnings in the Iraqi economy,’ the analyst Antonia Juhasz wrote in the New York Times in March, after the draft law was leaked. ‘They could even ride out Iraq’s current “instability†by signing contracts now, while the Iraqi government is at its weakest, and then wait at least two years before even setting foot in the country.’ As negotiations over the oil law stalled in September, the provincial government in Kurdistan simply signed a separate deal with the Dallas-based Hunt Oil Company, headed by a close political ally of President Bush.
How will the US maintain hegemony over Iraqi oil? By establishing permanent military bases in Iraq. Five self-sufficient ‘super-bases’ are in various stages of completion. All are well away from the urban areas where most casualties have occurred. There has been precious little reporting on these bases in the American press, whose dwindling corps of correspondents in Iraq cannot move around freely because of the dangerous conditions. (It takes a brave reporter to leave the Green Zone without a military escort.) In February last year, the Washington Post reporter Thomas Ricks described one such facility, the Balad Air Base, forty miles north of Baghdad. A piece of (well-fortified) American suburbia in the middle of the Iraqi desert, Balad has fast-food joints, a miniature golf course, a football field, a cinema and distinct neighbourhoods – among them, ‘KBR-land’, named after the Halliburton subsidiary that has done most of the construction work at the base. Although few of the 20,000 American troops stationed there have ever had any contact with an Iraqi, the runway at the base is one of the world’s busiest. ‘We are behind only Heathrow right now,’ an air force commander told Ricks.
The Defense Department was initially coy about these bases. In 2003, Donald Rumsfeld said: ‘I have never, that I can recall, heard the subject of a permanent base in Iraq discussed in any meeting.’ But this summer the Bush administration began to talk openly about stationing American troops in Iraq for years, even decades, to come. Several visitors to the White House have told the New York Times that the president himself has become fond of referring to the ‘Korea model’. When the House of Representatives voted to bar funding for ‘permanent bases’ in Iraq, the new term of choice became ‘enduring bases’, as if three or four decades wasn’t effectively an eternity.
Research Credit: GH
Cessation of hostilities with Germany at the end of WWII: 1945.
And yet, Germany remains an occupied nation.
The US military may “relocate” to different environs as it suits their strategic needs, but will not leave any site voluntarily until forced, i.e.: Saigon.
There are no — and have never been any — plans to depart the occupied Mesopotamian lands.
Why people even bother to quote Rumsfeld for the sake of proving him a liar is beyond me. His lips are moving, therefore he’s telling a lie. Just like his old drinking buddy Reichsführer Cheney, the lizard will say whatever he feels like saying whenever he feels like saying it. Always has, always will. Each obviously feels that he is well and truly above the law. And judging by recent history, they are — for now. Until their paymasters retire them for a new set of rooks.
“His lips are moving, therefore he’s telling a lie.”
Spot on.
Equally ludicrous is the fact that no one in the mainstream [American] media seems to be able to put 2 and 2 together to get 4, as this piece does, and as anyone who isn’t highly invested in the emperor’s wardrobe does. OF COURSE we’re there for the oil! Mountains of evidence support that truth, and yet somehow the New York Times can keep a straight face when reporting about the latest occupation-justification du jour.
And that so many “well-educated” “well-informed” Americans buy into it… Surely historians — if humans survive — will call us the stupidest generation. And they’ll be right.
I remember in late 2002, I believe it was, when Viggo Mortensen on a talk show compared Blair to Saruman and Bush to Sauron. I was 15 at the time, and upon hearing this I remember thinking something like, “well I don’t like Bush, but that’s just absurd.”
Now I know better.
The New York Times doesn’t have a face, but it does have a wallet. That you expect anything but the latest social programming and a fresh round of from such a milieu has me concerned for you.
Not to mention tha grand irony there, perhaps unintentional, regarding “historians.”
Whose historians? On who’s payroll?
If “history is written by the victors”, to bend another old saw, then odds are good that whatever actually happens today will go largely missing in later reportage. They’ll extol whatever version they’re paid to extol. For the most part, in keeping with all of our highly romanticized (and largely fictional), mythologically-generated ideas and ideals, every bit of history we hoover up in this “Information Age” is to some degree or another revisionist.
Everybody has a slant. Even me. Mine is just non-systemic, anti-authoritarian and highly subject to incremental change as my reading reaches ever-darker corners of “unofficial” history. And I can’t thank Kev enough for the contemporary research that keeps my big picture informed, as my reading time is limited by my having taken on a one-man farm renovation project and all the day-to-day tasks implied therein.
I’ve avoided throwing my hat into the broader journalistic ring because I know that once I do, I will have painted a clear and unmistakable target on my back — and I like not being dead. Being an action-oriented sort, I tend link actions to words directly, and that can only end badly in this day and age. I’d rather live as far below the radar as possible and apply my energy to keeping gardens and forests and re-building local food networks and an ancient familial haven for the darker days ahead. Silence, exile, cunning and all that jazz.
So, though I may have my own spin, at least you know no one else is paying for me to lay it down here in this little backwater on the net, by way of keeping their well-funded argument in the mix.
And that’s the biggest difference between myself, Kevin and one Donald Rumsfeld.
Think about how it must feel to be able to get away with covering up, glossing over and/or driving home just the things Rumsfeld is KNOWN to have accomplished over the years. He was in the White House in the Nixon years, nuff said there. He was the point-man in the campaign that foisted the neuro-toxin aspartame off on the world.
How many of you reading this sentence consumed anything with NutraSweet in it today, just out of curiousity?
Sadly, what so much of it rolls back into is the greatest irony of all in the arrogant modern world: to be “well-educated” and “well-informed” is to be “well-trained”. Training is for seals, Navy or otherwise. Do the trick. Get a fish.
The real trick is to subsist solely on the manna of your own mind, which is no mean feat — perhaps even impossible — in this day and age. Deprogramming oneself is a never-ending chore, on constant guard against the subtle tentacles of the great monster. Ultimatley, every speck of the information you receive passes through largely transparent filtering processes educated into the atomized management units who make it possible to deny the very existence of the evil. To raise your voice and point at the elephant sitting in the middle of the room is social equivalent of hari kari.
What seems stupidity is ultimately just the best possible education. Now THAT is irony.
The real history of the late 19th and 20th centuries, the history of the Rumsfeld-class and their financiers, hidden away in who-knows-how-many unpublished manuscripts, suppressed books and mountains of classified documents, is the story of the slow, steady victory of aggregated power over the individual. It’s recorded out there, but in myriad oddly sized and shaped fragments scattered haphahazardly between the Quigleys and Pounds and Galleanos. The shape of the beast is so large as to remain uncertain, but the shadow it casts is unmistakable.
Humans will survive. How many and in what forms is an open question. The best true individuals can do with themselves today, here and now, is to find and build havens, islands of low-key sanity in unstrategic locations with prospects for good locally-suitable fertility. And never stop learning. Learning is not Education.
Fight and die if you wish. While I’m an expert marksman, I prefer a fighting chance.
“Fight and die if you wish. While I’m an expert marksman, I prefer a fighting chance.”
Jaysus! Somebody pinch me. I nominate this post for “Most likely to make Cryptogoner women weak in the knees”.