Riches keep the US in Iraq

Proposing the parliamentary motion for war in 2003, Tony Blair denied the "false claim" that "we want to seize" Iraq's oil revenues. He said the money should be put into a trust fund, run by the UN, for the Iraqis, but the idea came to nothing. The same year Colin Powell, then Secretary of State, said: "It cost a great deal of money to prosecute this war. But the oil of the Iraqi people belongs to the Iraqi people; it is their wealth, it will be used for their benefit. So we did not do it for oil."

Joshua Holland  has chronicled  the  maneuvering over Iraq's oil:

Bush's Petro-Cartel Almost Has Iraq's Oil

By Joshua Holland, AlterNet. Posted October 16, 2006.

The strategic reasons for the United States' invasion of Iraq , to gain control of its oil resources have been covered  in the preceding articles. Another aspect of what has driven US  foreign policy, and which may keep us in Iraq, is  the  power of the the military-industrial complex.

"The military-industrial complex [would] cause military spending to be driven not by national-security needs but by a network of weapons makers, lobbyists and elected officials." - Dwight D Eisenhower

"It is crucially important that public attention is shifted away from the confining official narrative of the war, parroted by the corporate media and political pundits, to the economic crimes that have been committed because of this war, both in Iraq and in the United States.... the American people are sidetracked into a debate over the grim consequences of a "premature" withdrawal of US troops from Iraq: further deterioration of the raging civil war, the unraveling of the "fledgling democracy", the resultant serious blow to the power and prestige of the United States, and the like. " - Ismael Hossein-zadeh

Riches keep the US in Iraq
By Ismael Hossein-zadeh

[Ismael Hossein-zadeh is a professor of economics at Drake University, Des Moines, Iowa. He is the author of the newly published book The Political Economy of US Militarism. ]

...."Neither the Iraq Study Group nor other establishment critics of the Iraq war are calling for the withdrawal of US troops from that country. To the extent that the ISG and the new US Congress purport to inject some "realism" into Iraq policy, such projected modifications do not seem to amount to more than changing the drivers of the US war machine without changing its destination, or objectives: control of Iraq's political and economic policies.

In light of the fact that by now almost all of the factions of the ruling circles, including the White House and the neo-conservative warmongers, acknowledge the failure of the Iraq war, why, then, do they balk at the idea of pulling the troops out of that country?

Perhaps the shortest path to a relatively satisfactory answer would be to follow the money. Not everyone is losing in Iraq. Indeed, while the Bush administration's wars of choice have brought unnecessary death, destruction and disaster to millions, including many from the Unites States, they have also brought fortunes and prosperity to war profiteers. At the heart of the reluctance to withdraw from Iraq lies the profiteers' unwillingness to give up further fortunes and spoils of war.

Pentagon contractors constitute the overwhelming majority of these profiteers. They include not only giant manufacturing contractors such as Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Boeing, but also a complex maze of more than 100,000 service contractors and subcontractors such as private army or security corporations and "reconstruction" firms. These contractors of both deconstruction and "reconstruction", whose profits come mainly from the US Treasury, have handsomely profited from the Bush administration's wars of choice.

A time-honored proverb maintains that wars abroad are often continuations of wars at home. Accordingly, recent US wars abroad seem to be largely reflections of domestic fights over national resources, or public finance. Opponents of social spending are using the escalating Pentagon budget (in combination with drastic tax cuts for the wealthy) as a cynical and roundabout way of redistributing national income in favor of the wealthy. As this combination of increasing military spending and decreasing tax liabilities of the wealthy creates wide gaps in the federal budget, it then justifies the slashing of non-military public spending - a subtle and insidious policy of reversing the New Deal reforms, a policy that, incidentally, started under president Ronald Reagan.

Meanwhile, the American people are sidetracked into a debate over the grim consequences of a "premature" withdrawal of US troops from Iraq: further deterioration of the raging civil war, the unraveling of the "fledgling democracy", the resultant serious blow to the power and prestige of the United States, and the like.

Such concerns are secondary to the booming business of war profiteers and, more generally, to the lure or prospects of controlling Iraq's politics and economics. Powerful beneficiaries of war dividends, who are often indistinguishable from the policymakers who pushed for the invasion of Iraq, have been pocketing hundreds of billions of dollars by virtue of war. More than anything else, it is the pursuit and the safeguarding of those plentiful spoils of war that are keeping US troops in Iraq....

The rise of the fortunes of the major Pentagon contractors can be measured, in part, by the growth of the Pentagon budget since President George W Bush arrived in the White House. It has grown by more than 50%, from nearly US$300 billion in 2001 to almost $455 billion in 2007....

Private security contracting, a lucrative and rapidly growing industry, is a good example of the Pentagon's policy of outsourcing. These contractors operate on the periphery of US foreign policy by training foreign "security forces", or by "fighting terrorism". ... 

For example, in the same month (last October) that US forces lost a record number of soldiers in Iraq, and Iraq lost many more citizens, Halliburton announced that its third-quarter revenue had risen by 19% to $5.8 billion. ....

This led many critics to point out scornfully that when around the same time Vice President Dick Cheney told political commentator Rush Limbaugh that "if you look at the overall situation [in Iraq] they're doing remarkably well", he must have been talking about Halliburton....

The spoils of war and devastation in Iraq have been so attractive that an extremely large number of war profiteers have set up shop in that country to get a share of the booty: "There are about 100,000 government contractors operating in Iraq, not counting subcontractors, a total that is approaching the size of the US military force there, according to the military's first census of the growing population of civilians operating in the battlefield," reported the Washington Post in its December 5, 2006, issue....

The fact that powerful beneficiaries of war dividends flourish in an atmosphere of war and international convulsion should not come as a surprise to anyone. What is surprising is that, in the context of the recent US wars of choice, these beneficiaries have also acquired the power of promoting wars, often by manufacturing "external threats to our national interest". In other words, profit-driven beneficiaries of war have also evolved as warmakers, or contributors to warmaking.

The following is a sample of such unsavory business-political relationships, as reported by Walter F Roche and Ken Silverstein in a July 14, 2004, Los Angeles Times article titled "Advocates of war now profit from Iraq's reconstruction":
Former CIA director R James Woolsey is a prominent example of the phenomenon, mixing his business interests with what he contends are the country's strategic interests.
Neil Livingstone, a former Senate aide who has served as a Pentagon and State Department adviser and issued repeated public calls for [Saddam] Hussein's overthrow. He heads a Washington-based firm, GlobalOptions, Inc that provides contacts and consulting services to companies doing business in Iraq.
Randy Scheunemann, a former [defense secretary Donald] Rumsfeld adviser who helped draft the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998 authorizing $98 million in US aid to Iraqi exile groups. He was the  founding president of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq. Now he's helping former Soviet bloc states win business there.
Margaret Bartel, who managed federal money channeled to [Iraqi exile Ahmad] Chalabi's exile group, the Iraqi National Congress, including funds for its prewar intelligence program on Hussein's alleged weapons of mass destruction. She now heads a Washington-area consulting firm helping would-be investors find Iraqi partners.
K Riva Levinson, a Washington lobbyist and public relations specialist who received federal funds to drum up prewar support for the Iraqi National Congress. She has close ties to Bartel and now helps companies open doors in Iraq, in part through her contacts with the Iraqi National Congress.
Joe M Allbaugh, who managed Bush's 2000 campaign for the White House and later headed the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and Edward Rogers Jr, an aide to the first president [George H W] Bush, recently helped set up New Bridge Strategies and Diligence, LLC to promote business in postwar Iraq....
There are strong indications that these dubious relationships represent more than simple cases of sporadic or unrelated instances of some unscrupulous or rogue elements. Evidence shows that contracts for the "reconstruction" of Iraq were drawn long before the invasion and deconstruction of that country had started.

In a fascinating report for The Nation magazine titled "The rise of disaster capitalism", Naomi Klein describes such long-projected "rebuilding" schemes as follows:

"Last summer, in the lull of the August media doze, the Bush administration's doctrine of preventive war took a major leap forward. On August 5, 2004, the White House created the Office of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization, headed by former US ambassador to Ukraine Carlos Pascual. Its mandate is to draw up elaborate "post-conflict" plans for up to 25 countries that are not, as of yet, in conflict. According to Pascual, it will also be able to coordinate three full-scale reconstruction operations in different countries "at the same time", each lasting "five to seven years"....

Here we get a glimpse of the real reasons or forces behind the Bush administration's preemptive wars. As Klein puts it, "A government devoted to perpetual preemptive deconstruction now has a standing office of perpetual preemptive reconstruction." Klein also documents how (through Pascual's office) contractors drew "reconstruction" plans in close collaboration with various government agencies and how, at times, contracts were actually pre-approved and paper work completed long before an actual military strike....

No business model or entrepreneurial paradigm can adequately capture the nature of this kind of scheming and profiteering. Not even illicit businesses based on rent-seeking, corruption or theft can sufficiently describe the kind of nefarious business interests that lurk behind the Bush administration's preemptive wars.

Only a calculated imperial or colonial kind of exploitation, albeit a new form of colonialism or imperialism, can capture the essence of the war profiteering associated with the recent US wars of aggression....

Classical colonial or imperial powers roamed on the periphery of the capitalist center, "discovered" new territories and drained them of their riches and resources. Today, there are no new places on our planet to be "discovered". But there are many vulnerable sovereign countries whose governments can be overthrown, their infrastructures smashed to the ground, and fortunes made as a result (of both destruction and "reconstruction"). And herein lies the genius of a parasitically efficient market mechanism, as well as a major driving force behind the Bush administration's unprovoked unilateral wars of choice.

But not only does the new form of imperial or colonial aggression, driven largely by the powerful interests that are vested in the armaments industries and other war-based businesses, bring calamity to the vanquished, it is also detrimental and burdensome to the victor, namely the imperium and its citizens.

Contrary to the external military operations of past empires, which usually brought benefits not only to the imperial ruling classes but also (through "trickle-down" effects to their citizens), US military expeditions and operations of late are not justifiable even on the grounds of national economic gains.

Indeed, escalating US military expansions and aggressions have become ever more wasteful and cost-inefficient as they are hollowing out the public treasury, undermining social spending and accumulating national debt. Viewed in this light, the new form of imperialism can perhaps be called "parasitic" imperialism.

War profiteering is, of course, not new; it has always existed in the course of the history of warfare. What makes war profiteering in the context of the recent US wars of choice unique and extremely dangerous to world peace and stability, however, is that it has become a major driving force behind war and militarism.

This is key to an understanding of why the US ruling elite is reluctant to pull US troops out of Iraq. The reluctance or "difficulty" of leaving Iraq stems not so much from pulling 140,000 troops out of that country as it is from pulling out more than 100,000 contractors. As Josh Mitteldorf of the University of Arizona recently put it, "There are a lot of contractors making a fortune, and we don't want that money tap turned off, even though it is borrowed money, which our children and grandchildren will have to repay."

It follows that US troops will not be withdrawn from Iraq as long as anti-war voices are not raised beyond the premises and parameters of the official narrative or justification of the war: terrorism, democracy, civil war, stability, human rights, and the like. Anti-war forces need to extricate themselves from the largely diversionary and constraining debate over these secondary issues, and raise public consciousness of the scandalous economic interests that drive the war....

It is time to make a moral case for restoring Iraqi oil and other assets to the Iraqis. It is also time to make a moral case against the war profiteers' plundering of the US Treasury, or tax dollars. To paraphrase the late General Smedley D Butler, most wars could easily be ended - they might not even be started - if profits are taken out of them.

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/IA17Ak09.html