We Have Been HAD

I dislike making major quotes but could not resist this one!

"Few lies have wound up injuring Americans more—in everything from automobile gas tanks and winter heating bills to diminished U.S. global standing—than a rarely revisited three-year-old fib-fest involving George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, and Tony Blair. Since World War I, history is clear: the British and Americans have been pre-occupied with only one thing in Iraq—oil. Yet in 2003, as their troops again disembarked, the pretense was all about good and evil, democracy and freedom. The disastrous outcome of the unacknowledged Middle Eastern mission, the struggle for petroleum, has rarely been discussed.

In part, that's because a credulous press has swallowed an extraordinary fraud. Speaking on behalf of George W. Bush, then White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer insisted in February 2003, "If this had anything to do with oil, the position of the United States would be to lift the sanctions so the oil could flow. This is not about that. This is about saving lives by protecting the American people." In November 2002, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had likewise declared, "it has nothing to do with oil, literally nothing to do with oil." On the other side of the Atlantic, British Prime Minister Tony Blair told Parliament in early 2003, "Let me deal with the conspiracy theory that this has something to do with oil. There is no way whatever that if oil were the issue, it wouldn't be simpler to cut a deal with Saddam Hussein."

Horse manure. In the run-up to war, from Alberta to Texas, oilmen gossiped about the centrality of oil. Meetings of petroleum geologists buzzed about the so-called "peak oil" forecast that a dangerous top in global production was only a decade or two away. Specialized publications guesstimated how much taking over Iraqi oil could mean for profits and Exxon and Chevron. Polls of ordinary citizens from Europe to Latin America and the Mideast produced similar findings: people thought the invasion was about oil.

The Gulf War in 1991 certainly had been. When the first President Bush went into the Persian Gulf in force that year, it was indeed about petroleum. He openly stated, "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." The idea that Saddam Hussein was a second Hitler was a rhetorical embellishment. Back during the Cold War, even when Washington worried about the Soviet Union rolling into Iran and reaching the Persian Gulf, American concern arose out of the geopolitics of oil, not some abstract commitment to representative government and democracy

Vice President Dick Cheney, the one top official who avoided denying that oil had anything to do with the Iraq invasion, is precisely the man whose attentions must be examined to illustrate the depth of oil motivations. In 1999, when Cheney was still the head of Halliburton, the oil-services giant, he made a shrewd speech to the London Institute of Petroleum in which he gloomed over coming oil-supply problems: "By some estimates, there will be an average of two per cent annual growth in global oil demand over the years ahead along with conservatively a 3 percent natural decline in production from existing reserves. That means by 2010 we will need on the order of an additional 50 million barrels a day."

Those barrels would have to come largely from the Middle East, and a few years earlier the Wall Street Journal had reported an Anglo-American oil company consensus: that Iraq, specifically, was "the biggie" in terms of potential future reserves. During 2001, the energy task force that became Cheney's first major assignment as vice president spent much time poring over maps of the oilfields in Iraq and the rival nations—China, Russia, and France among them—to whom Saddam Hussein intended to give the concessions for development. Part of Cheney's mandate involved "actions regarding the capture of new and existing oil and gas fields."

This was getting down to the primal underpinnings of the 2003 invasion. According to Paul Roberts in his 2004 book The End of Oil, Cheney and his task-force colleagues

pored over maps of Iraqi oilfields to estimate how much Iraqi oil might be dumped quickly on the [post-invasion] market. Before the war, Iraq had been producing 3.5 million barrels a day, and many in the industry and the administration believed that the volume could easily be increased to 7 million by 2010. If so—and if Iraq [under U.S. control] could be convinced to ignore its OPEC quota and start producing at maximum capacity—the flood of new oil would effectively end OPEC's ability to control prices.

The Anglo-American firms, in turn, would be in the catbird's seat.

As for the supposed weapons of mass destruction, these had already played a crucial role. The United Nations sanctions imposed in the early 1990s included provisions that Saddam could not sign over development of the big Iraqi oilfields to foreign companies. On one hand, this gave the French, Russians, and Chinese an incentive to get Iraq out from under the sanctions. But on another, the key allegations that enabled the U.S. and Britain to keep sanctions in place were—what else?—Saddam's alleged weapons of mass destruction. Without WMD, the sanctions would have fallen away, and the rivals of the U.S. and Britain would have gotten the "biggie" oilfields. . .

Furthermore, the White House had to consider the huge religious and biblical element of the coalition that elected Bush in 2000. Newsweek polling back in 1999 found that 45 percent of American Christians believed in Armageddon and the end times, and almost as many thought that the Antichrist was already alive and on the earth. Because such beliefs concentrate among very pro-Bush evangelicals, fundamentalists, and Pentecostals, my estimate is that some 55 percent of the people who voted for Bush in 2000 would have told pollsters about believing in the end times and Armageddon.

This will strike many as an exaggeration, but the phenomenon is an important one. Richard Cizik of the National Association of Evangelicals noted in 2003 that since the break-up of the USSR, "evangelicals have substituted Islam for the Soviet Union. The Muslims have become the modern-day equivalent of the Evil Empire." According to University of Wisconsin historian Paul Boyer, by the 1990s many prophecy believers saw Saddam as the Antichrist or his forerunner, partly because Saddam was rebuilding the ancient evil city of Babylon. The Left Behind series by Tim LaHaye fictionalized the Rapture-Tribulation-Armageddon sequence so successfully that it sold a whopping 60 million copies in book and tape form. Most of the readers were Bush backers. . .

Politically, this confronted the White House with both a strategic dilemma and a parallel opportunity. On the plus side, the huge chunk of Bush voters would want to view the U.S. attempt to topple Saddam Hussein in terms of the war of good versus evil. Weapons of mass destruction were a prop but collateral to the larger biblical context. Invading Iraq would evoke that context because Saddam was one of the evil ones—maybe the Evil One, given his Babylon tie-in. Toppling him could aspire to biblical interpretation. Aiding Israel was also biblically vital. Bush had already carved out a related, overarching "good versus evil" posture with his heavily religious post-9/11 rhetoric. . .

In sum, the energy-related price of the administration's dishonesty and massive miscalculation in Iraq ought to be a central discussion point in this election year and again in 2008. The citizenry has to comprehend just how much is at stake and how the nation's future has been jeopardized."   

Kevin Phillips, July 2006