“Oil has literally made foreign and security policy for decades…it…provoked the division of the Middle East after WW1; aroused Germany and Japan to extend their tentacles beyond their borders; the Arab oil embargo; Iran vs Iraq; the Gulf War. This is all clear.”

Bill Richardson, U.S. Secretary of Energy, 1999

“[The invasion of Iraq]… has nothing to do with oil, literally nothing to do with oil.”

Donald Rumsfeld, Nov 2002

“Let me deal with the conspiracy theory that this is somehow to do with oil. There is no way whatever if oil were the issue that it would not be infintely simpler to cut a deal with Saddam.”

Tony Blair to the House of Commons, 2003

“Every single empire, in its official discourse has said that is it not like all the others. That its circumstances are special , that it has a mission to enlighten, civilize, bring order and democracy, and that it uses force only as a last resort.”

Edward Said

Kevin Phillips is a former Republican strategist, (chief analyst on Nixon’s 1968 campaign) now bitterly opposed to the house of Bush and the religious right’s power in the
Republican Party. In his magisterial work “American Theocracy: the peril and politics of radical religion, oil, and borrowed money in the 21st century” (2006) Phillips argues
that every empire has been brought down by a combination of imperial over-reach , militant religion, ballooning debt and diminishing resources. Each of the modern world
powers depended on its leading command of an emerging energy technology regime – the Dutch water and wind power, the British coal and the US oil. And each
develops inertial forces that mitigate against it dominating the next historically emergent energy regime (such as the US built environments dependence on cars). For Phillips
it is not simply that American empire depends on oil, rather:

“…The Bush administration knew that the peak oil crisis probably posed strategic dangers far beyond those publicly acknowledged. The dollar’s role as the world’s reserve
currency was also tied to oil”. [p.69]

“…a final decision to invade Iraq seems to have been made in early 2001, for reasons that had been mounting since 1997. During the election year and 2001, five political
and policy end games – all felt by important constituencies to be pressing or even desperate [were] underway in what was historically an extraordinary convergence.”

Five Endgames

“The first was the rising preoccupation on the part of oil geologists and among some thinkers in Washington that not only had American oil peaked but global oil production outside OPEC might be within five to ten years of doing so…this demanded action.

[Secondly] The American oil giants [with] slackening new discoveries…feared that their futures depended on whether U.S or foreign firms gained access to the huge, barely tapped, and pivotal reserves of Iraq. Huge profits were at stake. [The sanctions on Iraq had crippled development of the oil fields meaning that they had been under exploited; before the war Saddam’s consessions for development in a post-sanctions regime were to Russia, China and France].

[Third] a handful of Americans, aware of the interplay of oil and currency flows, worried about OPEC’s potential threat to the dollar. Their fear was that should the cartel decide to end the American currency’s virtual monopoly on oil pricing, the dollar would plummet sending shudders through the US economy and its overextended debt structure. Indeed, Iraqi, Iranian and Venezuelan currency maneuvers were already visible as the dollar sagged in late 2002.

Fourth, Phillips cites the 2002 Office of Net Assessment report (An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and Its Implications for United States National Security) on abrupt climate change as demonstration of awareness in the US military-industrial complex of the security threats of climate change – “immediate crisis planning was recommended”. This is an interesting point – the Bush junta’s public intransigence on climate change and Gore’s visionary advocacy has lured us into the misapprehension that the recognition of the reality of climate change has an implicit politics.

James Lovelock’s interventions in the energy debate are a timely reminder that this is not so. Writing in the Observer (11/06/06) Lovelock adopts a position we might come to know as “eco-nationalism” of “national survivalism”:

“Why should we sacrifice ourselves for the rest of the world when everyone else is going to keep on doing what they have always been doing? In a wonderful world, we would all co-operate. But life is not like that.”

He likens the “worthless, morally bankrupt” Kyoto treaty to the Munich treaty of 1938. The nation needs to hunker down for survival in the face of the coming onslaught. His advocacy for nuclear power is not from the point of view of reducing carbon emissions – the game is up already and we shouldn’t worry about our own coal power stations marginal contribution – it is energy security – “We have run out of time, it’s as simple as that.” Similarly US awareness of the threat can be another justification for asserting
hegemony over remaining hydrocarbon supplies. To the Pentagon mindset melting artic ice cover demands a militarisation of the arctic (and the US is already disputing Canada’s claims of naval sovereignty over what will one day be the ice free North West passage).

The fifth end game was very different – as the millennium came and went , 40% or more of American Christians told pollsters that they expected the biblical prophesies of Armageddon to come true. Apocalyptic Pentecostalism had become by this time perhaps the single most powerful constituency in the American electorate. For them the invasion of Iraq was part of the end times narrative.

“…the Republican coalition included 70 to 80 percent of all three constituencies – energy producers and conspicuous energy consumers; upper bracket wealth holders and
financiers; and fundamentalist, Pentecostal and evangelical Christians.”

Each of these groups responded to different motivations and different language. The Bush-Cheney junta managed to mesh these interests into a domestic “Invade Iraq” constituency.

But of course there is a much longer history of US, and before that British, imperial interest in Iraq and it’s oil.

The two Iraq wars in perspective

In “Iraq and the International Oil System: Why America Went to War in the Gulf” (2004) Pelletiere maps out how, despite initial appearances, both the Iraq wars on 1991 and 2003 were no more and no less than aggressive imperial wars for the control of global oil. That in 1993 the US was content to destroy the Iraqi army, devastate its civilian infrastructure and condemn it to a decade of crippling economic blockade and punitive air strikes, whereas in 2003 it had the far more ambitious goal of occupation, appropriation of its oil and the estblishment of a client state, is indicative both of how the previous twelve years had seen a rapid escalation of the oil depletion crisis and how 9/11 had liberated the US to engage in a policy of direct imperial intervention.

As Kevin Phillips put it:

“In retrospect, the two Iraq wars of 1991 and 2003 displayed striking parallels…Both invasions were lubricated by deceits.”

Former CIA desk officer Pelletiere says that the behaviour of the US and British in run up to both wars bore a disturbing similarity to the “technique previously pioneered (or at least made famous by) the National Socialists in Germany; this was the so-called Big Lie” used to launch World War II.

But surely the First Gulf War involved liberating a sovereign nation from the clutches of a mass murdering dictator who was prepared to gas his own people? Saddam’s troops were massing on the Saudi border - the Eastern Province oil reserves a day’s tank drive away - surely it was legitimate to save the world from a Saddam in control of the vast majority of middle Eastern oil reserves?

Pelletiere, the CIA’s senior Iraq specialist during the Iran-Iraq War, paints a rather different picture. He maintains that America decided to provoke war with Iraq’s due to Iraq’s relative victory in Iran-Iraq war. Whilst Iraq had been used by the US and Saudis as a proxy to fight Iran, from the U.S. point of view Iraq had the potential to become a regional superpower that would eventually” have contested the west’s grip on the region.” and “that America’s occupation of Iraq is a bid to recoup what the oil companies lost when they were forced to disgorge in 1973 [as a result of the OPEC Revolution-]; that is, control over the world oil industry and beyond that control of the global economy.”

Iraq and Kuwait in historical perspective

This is a useful point for a brief historical examination of the creation of the Iraqi and Kuwaiti states - both artificial creatures designed by the West for their own ends in controlling Middle Eastern oil.

The following extracts are from David Klein’s Mechanisms of Western Domination: A Short History of Iraq and Kuwait

“As the victors of World War I, France and Britain dismantled the Ottoman Empire and the Arab nation for their own colonial purposes. The Iraq Petroleum Company was created in 1920 with 95% of the shares going to Britain, France, and the U.S. In order to weaken Arab nationalism, Britain blocked Iraqi access to the Persian Gulf by severing the territorial entity, “Kuwait” from the rest of Iraq in 1921 and 1922. This new British colony, Kuwait, was given artificial boundaries with no basis in history or geography. King Faisal I of the new Iraqi state ruled under British military oversight, but his administration never accepted the amputation of the Kuwait district and the denial of Iraqi access to the Persian Gulf. Attempts by Faisal to build a railway to Kuwait and port facilities on the Gulf were vetoed by Britain. These and other similar British colonial policies made Kuwait a focus of the Arab national movement in Iraq, and a symbol of Iraqi humiliation at the hands of the British.

[In 1938] the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Iraq informed the British Ambassador in Baghdad that:

“The Ottoman-British Agreement of 1913 recognizes Kuwait as a District under the jurisdiction of the Province of Basra. Since sovereignty over Basra has been transferred from the Ottoman state to the Iraqi state, that sovereignty has to include Kuwait under the terms of the 1913 Agreement. Iraq has not recognized any change in the status of Kuwait.”

A popular uprising within Kuwait to reunify with Iraq erupted on March 10, 1939. The Kuwaiti Sheik, with British military support and “advisers,” crushed the uprising, and killed or imprisoned its participants. King Ghazi of Iraq publicly demanded the release of the prisoners and warned the Sheik to end the repression of the Free Kuwaiti Movement. Ghazi ignored warnings by Britain to discontinue such public statements, and on April 5, 1939, he was found dead. It was widely assumed that he was assassinated by British agents.

[In July 1958] The British Ambassador responded to the Iraqi government that Great Britain had “approved in principle” the unification of Kuwait and Iraq, but requested a meeting in London with the Iraqi and British Prime Ministers and other government officials. But this meeting never took place, because the Iraqi monarchy was overthrown on July 14, 1958 in a revolution led by General Abdel Karim Qassim. King Faisal II and Nuri es-Said were executed, and Britain immediately thereafter abrogated the agreement to return Kuwait to Iraq.

News of the coup triggered an uprising of the poor and dispossessed in Baghdad. The crowds attacked the British embassy and other targets. The U.S. did not initially respond to the coup, but the political upheaval of the subsequent popular uprising pushed the new regime further to the left than it had originally intended. The new government lifted the ban on the Iraqi Communist Party, and that modest step toward democracy in turn mobilized the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. CIA director AlanDulles assigned the job of incapacitating Qassim to the euphemistically named Technical Services Division (TDS) of the CIA. The head of the TDS in 1960, Stanley Gottlieb, initiated a program to assassinate Qassim. One failed assassination attempt in this context was made by Saddam Hussein.

Qassim continued to alienate the U.S. and Britain, and Britain further exacerbated relations by declaring its Kuwait colony free and independent in 1961. Qassim held a press conference on June 19, 1961 at which he declared that “Iraq regards Kuwait as an integral part of its territory.” Following that press conference, Britain quickly massed troops in Kuwait with naval support in the Gulf. Kuwait gained admission to the United Nations in 1963, the same year that Qassim was killed and his government overthrown in a CIA supported coup led by the Baath Party.
By 1965, Saddam Hussein’s cousin became Secretary General of the Baathist Party. In 1968 Saddam Hussein was made Deputy Secretary General and Saddam and his

Baathist supporters succeeded in seizing state power, all with CIA backing. What followed was a slaughter of the left, including the murder and torture of Iraqi Communist
Party members and trade unionists.

The Iran-Iraq War

Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Jimmy Carter’s National Security Adviser, proposed to Saddam Hussein that he invade Iran and annex Khuzistan, thereby providing Iraq
access to the Gulf through the narrow waterway, Shatt-al Arab. The U.S. hoped to use Iraq to counter the radicalism of the Khomeini regime in Iran from spreading to
oppressed peoples of the Emirates and to Saudi Arabia. Saddam Hussein was guaranteed financial backing in the form of loans from Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and other nations.

About half a million Iranians and Iraqis were killed in the Iran Iraq war, and unbeknownst to Hussein the U.S. and Israel also secretly armed the Iranians so as to weaken both Iran and Iraq. Pelletiere argues that after the “collapse of communism” the military-industrial complex feared that U.S. spending on arms might go down and that some of the money it was used to getting might actually be invested in programs benefiting the American people.

The neo-conservatives are part of this complex, argues Pelletiere, but they are not “the real movers and shakers” of U.S. policy– that honor goes to “All of the major defense
contractors, who, with their hefty donations, subsidize the conservative think tanks, and contribute to candidates to the Congress and for the Presidency” these are the real
powers behind the U.S. war policies: they get the billions spent on the military. The relative lack of power of the neo-cons in relation to US ‘ultra-establishment’ is bourne out
by the failure of the neocons to implement their plan of destroying OPEC. As we noted previously James Baker, master of the ultra-establishment, with oil company and Saudi
backing, put paid to that.

The Cheny-Rumsfeld ‘climate of fear’ in the early ’70s, Reagan’s continuing refusal of detente with the Soviets, the Star Wars program, the Iran-Iraq war, the First Gulf War
and the invasion of Iraq all have to be seen in the light of profit motive for the ‘defence’ industry. Whilst the invasion of Iraq is presented as entailing enormous ‘cost’ for the
US that ‘cost’ is profit cycled through the military-industrial complex.

President Ronald Reagan’s special envoy, Donald Rumsfeld visited Saddam Hussein once in late December 1983 and again in March 1984. These visits paved the way for
the normalization of relations between the U.S. and Iraq at a time when Saddam Hussein was using chemical weapons in his war against Iran. Iraq had been removed from
the U.S. State Department’s list of alleged sponsors of terrorism in 1982, and Iraq went on a buying spree to purchase weapons from U.S. and German companies. These
weapons were used in 1988 for attacks against the Kurds.

When Saddam Hussein launched his eight year war against Iran, Iraq had $40 billion in hard currency reserves. But by the end of the war, his nation was $80 billion in debt.
Iraq was pressed to repay the $80 billion to Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, with interest. While Iraq was distracted by its war, Kuwait had accumulated 900 square miles of Iraqi
territory by advancing its border with Iraq northward. This was presented to Iraq as a fait accompli and it gave Kuwait access to the Rumaila oil field. The Kuwaiti Sheik had
purchased the Santa Fe Drilling Corporation of Alhambra, California, for $2.3 billion and proceeded to use its slant drilling equipment to gain access to the Iraqi oil field.

Provoking Iraq

Having tied the two regional powers up in an eight year conflict with one another the US then set about manipulating the Iraqis into the invasion of Kuwait as a pretext for
total demolition of Iraq as a regional power.

(Again the following extracts are from David Klein’s Mechanisms of Western Domination: A Short History of Iraq and Kuwait

“The main source of earnings for Iraq was petroleum whose price fluctuated depending on international production levels. By 1990, Kuwait, under U.S. tutelage had increased
its oil production to undermine OPEC quotas thereby driving the price of Iraqi oil down from $28 per barrel to $11 per barrel and further ruining the Iraqi economy. Appeals
from Iraq, Iran, Libya, and other countries to the Emirates, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Egypt to stick to OPEC production levels were met with increased naval activity in the
Persian Gulf by the United States. In February 1990, Saddam Hussein spoke at the Amman summit on the relationship between oil production and the U.S. navy buildup
and warned that the Gulf people and the rest of the Arabs faced subordination to American interests.

Kuwait and the Emirates increased oil production, harming their own economic interests, but damaging Iraq’s even more so. Kuwait refused to relinquish Iraqi territory it had
acquired during the Iran Iraq war which Kuwait had helped finance. Kuwait also rejected production quotas and rejected appeals to cease pumping oil from Iraq’s Rumaila oil
reserve. It refused to forgo any of Iraq’s debt.

On September 18, 1990, the Iraqi Foreign Ministry published verbatim the transcripts of meetings between Saddam Hussein and high level U.S. officials. Knight-Ridder
columnist James McCartney acknowledged that the transcripts were not disputed by the U.S. State Department. U.S. Ambassador April Glaspie informed Hussein that,

“We have no opinion on…conflicts like your border disagreement with Kuwait.” She reiterated this position several times, and added, “Secretary of State James Baker has
directed our official spokesman to emphasize this instruction.” A week before Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, Baker’s spokesperson, Margaret Tutwiler and Assistant Secretary of
State John Kelly both stated publicly that “the United States was not obligated to come to Kuwait’s aid if it were attacked.” (Santa Barbara News-Press September 24, 1990).

Two days before the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, Assistant Secretary of State John Kelly testified before the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee that the United States has no
defense treaty relationship with any Gulf country.” The New York Daily News editorialized on September 29, 1990, “Small wonder Saddam concluded he could overrun
Kuwait. Bush and Co. gave him no reason to believe otherwise.”

On August 2, 1990, Iraqi forces invaded Kuwait and quickly gained control of the country.

Lies and Damned Lies

We are now all too aware that the invasion of Iraq was justified on the basis of a number of lies concerning intelligence. What is less well known is that the 1991 war on Iraq was also preceded by a propaganda campaign of bare faced lies.

The U.S. administration made the claim that the Iraqis had amassed troops and tanks along the Saudi border and were poised to invade the kingdom. This claim was widely
relayed by the main media. The only problem with these allegations was that they were utterly false. The former Soviet Union had provided satellite pictures, taken on
September 11 and 13, 1990, of the border (actually, they were selling the pictures for $1,500 each) that clearly indicated that no concentration of Iraqi troops and equipment
was in sight. Major news organizations like ABC News (Sam Donaldson) or The Washington Post (Bob Woodward) sat on the pictures and never used them. The only U.S. news organization that indeed published them was a regional paper, The St. Petersburg Times (Florida). Those pictures clearly showed, however, the concentration of U.S. troops on the Saudi side of the border! John R. MacArthur (and Ben Haig Bagdikian) documented this falsity in their book, “Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the
Gulf War,” University of California Press; reprint edition 1993

You may recall the testimony before Congress on October 10, 1990 of a 15-year old Kuwaiti woman, Nayirah (her last name was kept confidential). She had witnessed a terrifying deed by the Iraqi invaders of Kuwait. In her own words: ‘I volunteered at the al-Addan hospital. While I was there, I saw the Iraqi soldiers come into the hospital with guns, and go into the room where . . . babies were in incubators. They took the babies out of the incubators, took the incubators, and left the babies on the cold floor to die.’ The story about the 312 babies made the news with a vengeance. President Bush (that would be George I) repeated it. The line in the sand was drawn. Like Racak, it turned public opinion and Congress on the path of war. Months later we learned that Nayirah was the daughter of a Kuwaiti prince, Saud Nasir al-Sabah, Kuwait’s
Ambassador to the U.S. She had left Kuwait before the Iraqi invasion. The story had been entirely fabricated by the PR firm Hill & Knowlton. Tom Lantos, the California
Democrat who chaired the hearing was co-chair (with Republican Rep. John Porter) of the Congressional Human Rights Foundation that occupied free office space in Hill &
Knowlton’s Washington, DC office.”

Nor, despite being a matter of public record, is it widely known that the facts behind the atrocity of Halabja, the West’s iconic example of Saddam’s crimes against humanity, are far from certain.

Stephen C. Pelletiere examined the issue in “A War Crime or an Act of War?” New York Times, 31 January 2003:

“It was no surprise that President Bush, lacking smoking-gun evidence of Iraq’s weapons programs, used his State of the Union address to re-emphasize the moral case for
an invasion: “The dictator who is assembling the world’s most dangerous weapons has already used them on whole villages, leaving thousands of his own citizens dead,
blind or disfigured.”

The accusation that Iraq has used chemical weapons against its citizens is a familiar part of the debate. The piece of hard evidence most frequently brought up concerns the
gassing of Iraqi Kurds at the town of Halabja in March 1988, near the end of the eight-year Iran-Iraq war. President Bush himself has cited Iraq’s “gassing its own people,” specifically at Halabja, as a reason to topple Saddam Hussein.

But the truth is, all we know for certain is that Kurds were bombarded with poison gas that day at Halabja. We cannot say with any certainty that Iraqi chemical weapons
killed the Kurds. This is not the only distortion in the Halabja story.

I am in a position to know because, as the Central Intelligence Agency’s senior political analyst on Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war, and as a professor at the Army War College
from 1988 to 2000, I was privy to much of the classified material that flowed through Washington having to do with the Persian Gulf. In addition, I headed a 1991 Army
investigation into how the Iraqis would fight a war against the United States; the classified version of the report went into great detail on the Halabja affair.

This much about the gassing at Halabja we undoubtedly know: it came about in the course of a battle between Iraqis and Iranians. Iraq used chemical weapons to try to kill
Iranians who had seized the town, which is in northern Iraq not far from the Iranian border. The Kurdish civilians who died had the misfortune to be caught up in that
exchange. But they were not Iraq’s main target.

And the story gets murkier: immediately after the battle the United States Defense Intelligence Agency investigated and produced a classified report, which it circulated
within the intelligence community on a need-to-know basis. That study asserted that it was Iranian gas that killed the Kurds, not Iraqi gas.

The agency did find that each side used gas against the other in the battle around Halabja. The condition of the dead Kurds’ bodies, however, indicated they had been killed
with a blood agent — that is, a cyanide-based gas — which Iran was known to use. The Iraqis, who are thought to have used mustard gas in the battle, are not known to
have possessed blood agents at the time.

These facts have long been in the public domain but, extraordinarily, as often as the Halabja affair is cited, they are rarely mentioned. A much-discussed article in The New
Yorker last March did not make reference to the Defense Intelligence Agency report or consider that Iranian gas might have killed the Kurds. On the rare occasions the
report is brought up, there is usually speculation, with no proof, that it was skewed out of American political favoritism toward Iraq in its war against Iran.

I am not trying to rehabilitate the character of Saddam Hussein. He has much to answer for in the area of human rights abuses. But accusing him of gassing his own people
at Halabja as an act of genocide is not correct, because as far as the information we have goes, all of the cases where gas was used involved battles. These were tragedies
of war. There may be justifications for invading Iraq, but Halabja is not one of them.”

The First Gulf War

Four days after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, on August 6, 1990, the United Nations Security Council passed Resolution 661, imposing comprehensive sanctions on Iraq and
creating a committee to monitor them.

On January 16, 1991, U.S. and other allied forces launched a devastating attack of Iraq and its armed forces in Kuwait.

Of the more than 500,000 U.S. troops engaged in the war, 148 died in battle, many from “friendly fire.” Total allied losses were minimal. By contrast, in June 1991, the U.S.
military reported more than 100,000 Iraqi soldiers killed, 300,000 wounded. Some human rights groups claimed a higher number of Iraqis killed in battle. According to Baghdad, civilian casualties numbered more than 35,000.

Former U.S. Attorney General, Ramsey Clark, and International Action Center have reported devastating effects of the U.S. and British bombing on the Iraqi civilian
population, including the use of depleted uranium from U.S. bombs that have led to cancer and unprecedented levels of birth defects in Iraq. More than 600,000 pounds of
depleted uranium was left in Iraq after the war (See the International Action Center web site: http://www.iacenter.org/depleted/du.htm).

That the U.S. intentionally targeted civilian infrastructure, including water treatment plants and that this would result in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis (mostly children under the age of five), is not in dispute.

“Several United States Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) documents clearly and thoroughly prove, in the words of one author, “beyond a doubt that, contrary to the Geneva

Convention, the U.S. government intentionally used sanctions against Iraq to degrade the country’s water supply after the Gulf War. The United States knew the cost that

civilian Iraqis, mostly children, would pay, and it went ahead anyway” (The Progressive, August 2001).”

High ranking U.S. Government officials were openly sanguine about the deaths of Iraqi children resulting from U.S. bombings and sanctions, as in this excerpt from an
interview by Leslie Stahl of Madeleine Albright, broadcast on 60 Minutes on 5/12/96 (http://www.fair.org/extra/0111/iraq.html):
Lesley Stahl on U.S. sanctions against Iraq: “We have heard that a half million children have died. I mean, that’s more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is this
price worth it?”

Secretary of State Madeleine Albright: “I think this is a very hard choice, but the price–we think the price is worth it.”