Nothing is more stupefying than the illusion of commenters and "anti-war" protesters continue to spout forth a silly view of Blair as some smiley faced psychopath who dragged Britain into a war that was at once criminal and against its interests.That Iraq turned out to be a catastrophe and has not actually succeeded in getting more oil out of Iraq has led some to then try and spin it that Blair's vanity was to blame and the needlessness of the conflict means he has 'blood on his hands'.
Whilst he does and a strong case can be made for putting him on trial for breaking international law and 'lying' to the people of Britain, I do not share the view of those like New Labour MP Diane Abbot who writes,
Blair's support for Bush has made him fabulously popular in America, particularly corporate America, and he is now making millions out of that popularity.
It would be unfair to ascribe his support for the war to an anticipation of this lucrative outcome. But what does seem true is that, for Blair, standing on a podium shoulder to shoulder with the swaggering George Bush was dizzying stuff. So dizzying that everything else was subordinated.
The disastrous humanitarian results for the people of Iraq were also something that did not apparently concern Blair overmuch. In the end, it was all about Blair.
I knew at the time that it was an illegal and misconceived war and was proud to vote against it.
Well, its good Abbott voted against it but it's not true that the war was all about Blair it reflects the collective failure of Parliament and the entire British political class and media to hold the executive power to scrutiny and account.
The reason is that the UK needs the oil in Iraq. This drove Blair into war in Iraq as David Strahan makes clear,
....there is still only a remarkably vague understanding of the real reason behind the invasion. True, evidence of the intense interest of the international oil companies continues to build.
Both BP and Shell have assessed the condition of oilfields for the Iraqi government in the hope of securing major deals when conditions improve, Chevron has a team waiting over the border in Kuwait, and only last week ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson said in London "We look forward to the day when we can partner with Iraq to develop that resource potential."
But despite the oil major's undoubted interest and influence, the decision to attack was not taken in the boardroom. Iraq was indeed all about oil, but in a sense that transcends the interests of individual corporations, however large.
Blair too had reason to be anxious about oil: British North Sea output had peaked in 1999 and has been falling ever since,while the petrol protests of 2000 had made the importance of maintaining the fuel supply excruciatingly obvious.
The British government has never conducted its own assessment of when global oil production will peak, at least not one it has made public, and despite being urged to as part of its 2006 Energy Review. But it is significant that two of Blair's closest advisors believe the event will happen by around 2015.
Britain and America's shared energy fears were secretly formalised during the planning for Iraq. It is widely accepted that Blair's commitment to support the attack dates back to his summit with Bush at Crawford in April 2002. The Times headline was typical that weekend: Iraq Action Is Delayed But Certain.
What is less well known is that at the same summit Blair proposed and Bush agreed to set up the US-UK Energy Dialogue, a permanent diplomatic liason dedicated to ?energy security and diversity?. No announcement was made, and the Dialogue's existence was only later exposed through a US Freedom of Information enquiry.
Iraq was evidently not just about corporate greed but strategic desperation.
Abbot evades the big picture because as Freud said "people cannot bear too much reality". The exclusive focus on Blair is comforting: it means that without devious leaders and a dissembling Establishment we can continue our addiction to EasyJet, wasteful consumerism and 'the great car economy'.
Over 1 million people are dead in Iraq because Western consumers do not want to change their lifestyles.
That includes probably most of the anti-war types who enjoy stimulating their adrenals at Ballardian style anti-war marches that acheive nothing but the illusion that change and to feel some kind of emotion and oceanic feeling, what Milan Kundera called the kitsch of the Grand March
As Tolstoy once said,
Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.Now people do not like being told that they share responsibility for the fact that their lifestyles might have something to do with the reason both the US and UK governments invaded Iraq.
The issue of criminality is seperate from the fact that both Bush and Blair must have known there was a risk. They did not take action because they just crave war. For some that's just too complicated to take on board,
The hypocrisy that fakes the idea that somehow what Blair and the entire matrix of corporate oil interests and geostrategy that underpins Western development is somehow completely disconnected to 'what the people really want' needs to be challenged.
People want to maintain the living standards they are accustomed to. To be told in the future they will have to use public transport or to ration oil is not something politicians in a democracy want to do.
As the text from Strahan I cited and other experts who have researched the problem know, the invasion of Iraq is precisely about stable or falling oil prices in the long term and staving off the spectre off a systemic shock through Peak Oil.
Not only that, Saddam could sell his oil to China as well. To control the oil was important and the invasion was not directly concerned with big oil corporations making a profit ( another evasion-its only the greedy oil barons execs etc etc ).
Face facts: if you drive an SUV, fly EasyJet or use far too much oil then get used to the dead and dying in places where the pathological competition for oil is set to make the C21st an epoch of Resource Wars, authoritarian governments and terrorism.
Finding alternatives and changing the way we think about our energy intensive lifestyles is as imoprtant as opposing what Blair did. Note that Britains North Sea oil began to run out and note the effect the high price of fuel had on opposition to New Labour in 2000
The West needs and is overdependent upon oil in highly dangerous places and some of the nations who have assisted the USA, the "coalition of the willing"This included at various stages, Spain, Bulgaria, Poland, Italy, Romania, Moldova, Georgia, The Czech Republic, Ukraine, Slovakia, Singapore, Azerbaijan, Japan, Tonga, Macedonia, Albania, El Salvador, Portugal, The Netherlands, Hungary, New Zealand, Thailand etc .
But the occupation of Iraq was all about Blair. Right ? Then why did they assist ? Because they liked Blair, because his Tone was just so convincing ? Or perhaps they has a stake in Iraqi oil and wanted to join in, if European, in advancing NATO's 'credibility' as an organisation enforcing energy security.
Oil supplies are declining inexorably in most nations. Any person with a rudimentary knowledge would grasp that fact. And Western and 'developed nations' know that which is why they were so willing to help once the USA went in.
There is a need to challenge the infantile lynch mob mentality. Blair should be tried for breaking international law but nobody should pretend that state actors are not willing to bend the rules all the time where pipeline interests or oil is concerned.
Or that continued oil and gas underpins the very fabric of consumer existence in the developed world and that in most contemporary struggles whether between Russia and the West, the "Colour Revolutions" ( In Iraq was the Purple Revolution in 2005 ) and China for control of Eurasia are not about control of oil supplies.
Holding Blair to account is one thing. It isn't an either-or question . But also holding that the lifestyle that the vast majority of people in the West take for granted and which consumes far more oil than most other nations combined isn't driving the USA in particular is very foolish.
Its time to look at the big picture.
Many in the "coalition of the willing" were NATO states and did so as independent states but also because they believe that 'the West' ought to stay together and defend Western energy interests which is fast becoming the view of NATO ever more despite the Iraq War.
Thats the reason why 'New European' and those committed to expanding NATO figured so highly in the coalition of the willing'. People often don not get that. They think the USA and UK somehow operated 'without Europe' by which they mean Germany & France.
Yet a considerable number of states aspiring to NATO joined in the occupation of Iraq. Think of Poland, a most willing model pupil. There is barely a murmur in the streets of Warsaw about it. Nobody calling Kwasniewski a war criminal.
But all these states joined in to strengthen their profile as clients of the USA no less than Blair did when committing the UK, Why did all these states do so ? Because they just love war and slaughter so some can profit ? Or could there be energy security behind it ?
There is nothing different from my position than when e.g Orwell criticised those who criticised the Empire but at bottom would not have much interest in it being reduced to an insignificant island where we all ate herrings and potatoes.
The problem is that radicals comp too much on the words of Chomsky, who only briefly deals with oil interests in so far as they relate to the corporate greed of Halliburton though in What We Says Goes ( 2007 ) he seems to think the crashing effects of Peak Oil might be good.
That is of course if the mutual competitions for resources has not triggered off a destabilised the globe, as the doctrine of pre-emption is all about that, though Chomsky denies Iraq is about this and only ever about the USA's Imperial elites.
This critique is threadbare now as his formative experiences were in an age of abundance when the West was pre-eminent.
Focused primarily on US actions only, Chomsky as a radical critic of Vietnam understand geopolitics but refuses to accept the truth of Bertrand Russell's observation that most people can happily ignore imperial policies abroad if it brings wealth to the majority of people.
But the main geostrategic reason was the need for stable or falling oil prices, the growing instability of Saudi Arabia, the need to control oil in the face of China's ascendency as well as looming Peak Oil and the fact that the sanctions had destroyed Iraq's oil producing capacity.
Historians will still be debating this in years to come but it seems to me that the idea that oil is not central and that Blair is just serving the interests of a certain class of greedy corporations is way oversimplified and a way of rationalising complex events.
Yes, greed plays its part but more disturbing questions need to be asked. As Micheal T Klare does in Blood and Oil when he sees the USA's push for oil as inherent in the way the US consumer society has developed around excessive use of oil and the car especially the SUV.
Chomsky doesn't address these kinds of issue because like most progressives he believes that it isn't the depletion of a finite resource that causes wars but the nature of corporate power, the arms industry and so on, things that might be changed by democratic activism.
But I'm more pessimistic. It seems that democracy can also require that the happiness of the people requires consumerism and wastefulness to divert them from having to challenge what the men in control do because they know what's best.
And that means promoting a world of tourist travel, the liberation provided by the car etc all of which demands large and even increasing extraction of oil and which will generate pathological struggles and proxy wars between the Great Powers.
If you think Iraq is bad, then this is just a harbinger of things to come if alternatives to oil and conserving and curtailing excessive consumerism is not done. But that means telling people what they don't want to hear, that cheap flights are finished,that luxuries we have cannot continue.
There are no votes in it.
Western oil interests swarmed into Iraq after the US invasion. They supplied troops because they also wanted a slice of the pie as regards reconstruction and to get Iraqi oil pumping again to supply the insatiable needs of Western consumerism. They were not 'forced' nor 'bullied'.
Spanish oil interests were represented by Repsol and Italy by groups like Eni who competed to develop Iraqi oil fields.
And those states that objected to the invasion of Iraq like France did for realpolitik reasons not through principle and because prior to the invasion they already had interests there served well enough by Saddam. Once Saddam had been gone, it was business as usual.
Now France did so because it had oil interests and arms contracts suitably served by Saddam. One report in 2007 revealed,
Oil giants Total SA (TOT) and Chevron Corp. (CVX) have signed a services agreement that would lead to the two jointly exploring and developing hydrocarbons from one of Iraq's biggest oil fields once the country gets an oil law in place and security on the ground improves, people familiar with the deal say.
The two companies signed an agreement last year and are currently assessing above-ground conditions around Majnoon, Iraq's fourth biggest oil field, which sits near the border with Iran, and at least one other field in the south of Iraq, to see what development work is required
Total Oil is French. France sent no troops but its interests have been pursued vigorously since 2003.
"Oil supplywise" there is a difference. China is pursuing its oil interests across the globe without the hypocritical need to consider human rights a factor, like it does in Sudan for example.
As mentioned before, Chinese inroads on oil were another major factor driving the USA to war in Iraq and for Blair to follow, not least as North Sea Oil Peaked in 1999 and unlike Norway, Britain had not stored any for future use.
As for Germany, its history precluded involvement in the invasion but look at this report from February 2009,
"Iraq needs construction. Iraq needs investment. Iraq needs infrastructure," said Maliki's close adviser, Sadiq al Rikabi, who added that another high-ranking European official would arrive in the coming days. "We need to deal with industrialized nations to rebuild Iraq."
The latest in a growing list of countries Iraq has welcomed is Germany. On Tuesday, German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier made an unannounced visit to Baghdad, expressing an interest in bolstering ties between the nations as sectarian violence has diminished in the oil-producing country.
According to Maliki's office, Germany opened a "commercial services" office in Baghdad on Tuesday for entrepreneurs who are seeking to expand their businesses in Iraq. During his trip, Steinmeier plans to visit Kurdistan, a semiautonomous region in Iraq's north where Germany plans to open a consulate in its capital of Irbil.
Iraq's oil reserves in the north and the south, the third largest in the world, are certain to lure additional European investors.
Now Latin American states had no need to join in the Iraq War as Argentina has oil from Venezuela, one reason why pipelines have been built recently and negotiated between Chavez and Kirschner.
The Latin American nations have enough oil as do India and Pakistan from 'the stans' , from reserves they have but only until 2016 when they will not suffice. Again India has had no qualms in effectively collaborating with the new regime
India, together with Algeria, is for the second time seeking to develop a major oil field in Iraq.
Algeria's state-owned monopoly and Indian energy majors have been discussing the prospect of joint development of a field in Iraq. Executives said India's Oil and Natural Gas Corp. and Reliance Industries have sought to develop the Tuba oil field in southern Iraq.
The non-willing are most willing now that the USA and the UK have done the dirty work for them. They are all too willing to let previous misunderstandings be forgotten and to 'move on' and focus on the practical problems posed by the 'reconstruction effort' in Iraq.
Blair went in to Iraq not because of his own psychopathology but because he had created a delusional pseudo-reality in which lying served the higher purposes of history and of the Good and because he was pushed by geostrategic desperatio.
Abbot can makes noises about US corporations because it makes gullible voters feel good: it means that there was no overriding necessity from the point of view of oil that pushed Blair into Iraq.
And , of course, that does not mean the action was not illegal or just criminal but actors like Blair can rationalise their actions according to a number of factors and the one that both he and his haters can't accept is oil as a strategic necessity not just because of corporate greed.
When oil is conceded as a motive it is just rationalised as the greed of 'Them' , the oil barons and Cheney etc . Never that the energy that fuels the lifestyles of most anti-war protestors comes from procuring oil from far off ravaged lands.
Blair isn't some cackling matinee villain. He pursued a policy which was designed to secure the energy security of Britain and the West the subsequent collusion of states that initially opposed the invasion just proves that this need is not exclusive to the UK
So whilst Blair is ultimately responsible for the committing the UK to an illegal invasion, let's not pretend it was against the interests of most people in Britain. It was in our name and in our interests as defined by the fetish for the Great Car Economy.
The fact that our interests might require great crimes to be committed is too unpalatable for the majority of simple minded people to accept: perhaps they need to ease their consciences by blaming Blair alone.
Criminal invasion, rigged elections force, fraud and collusion with dictatorships are all necessitated if we want SUV's, the dream of ever infinitely growing economies and a world of ever more consumer comfort.
Accept it, internalise it, and then think not only of how to reform the political system and bring Blair to accountability but also about how to campaign for alternatives to oil and about switching to a low oil intensive lifestyle.
The bile towards Blair is justified but it does partly have much to do with people not like being lied to and because he epitomised what seems wrong with a Britain dominated by slimy and oily corporate spin.
But the if the spin is there to cover over the divide between democratic ideals and the grubby reality of the way the global economy and neoliberal turbo-capitalism has made democracy a folk ritual lets be honest why.
It is because there is something in humans that can contrive to ignore the suffering which makes our comfort possible. In global terms 'we' are the aristocracy and they in Iraq or in other oil colonies are the wretched.
A lot of protesters who cite one million do not really give a fig about dead Iraqis. They just like the statistic in order to hammer home polemics against a slimy Blair they hate.
The wise philosopher Alan Watts on witnessing the hysterical self righteousness of some anti-Vietnam protestors was moved to write that they,'hate the hatred of hating-three instead of one'.
Outrage is easy and comes as cheap as many would wish the the oil to be. Doing the legal footwork in bringing Blair to book is more difficult as is any major reconsideration that the existence we live in the West is fraudulent and based on illusions bred by excessive consumerism.
Many anti-war types sense the emptiness of it and need creeds to fight for and people to hate because they have no constructive alternatives to the present order with regards energy.Even Green humanists put it down to global inequality not overpopulation.
As militant progressives they fail to see conflicts like Iraq arising from clashing needs over resources that are caused by the sheer strain consumer existence puts on the world or the egotism of the idea of 'the individual'.
In fact, even opponents of the war share a militant apocalyptic creed that if only the existing system were overthrown, if only these criminals and capitalists were vanquished then there would be no need to invade Iraq.
Perhaps. But the need then would still be to tell consumers that the lifestyle they enjoy is not compatible with peace on earth and that war and terror in the West has only been displaced elsewhere by insatiable materialism.
Creeds like Marxism are materialistic: they tell people that people everywhere can have it all if only these set of exploiters and evil politicians and liars like Blair are cast down from power.It will not
This is Utopian. There are too many people on the earth for Western style comforts to be pursued by every nation and somehow nations have to agree in some way about how to develop sensibly.
The earth will be wracked with war and killing until the crack of doom because people are chasing this illusory goal of progress which is being undermined by the competition for diminishing resources.
Anti-war types have little chance of affecting politicians or public opinion.They might if "anti-war" leaders were really anti-war or anti-conflict as opposed to being in the tradition of Marxist-Leninists who espouse 'revolutionary defeatism', people like George Galloway, Kate Hudson, and Andrew Murray.
The StWC simply espouses slogans, gets people outraged to no effect than to then try and indoctrinate people to accept militant political views and apocalyptic creeds like Islamism which will merely up the ante over the clash over resources and create more bloodshed.
Any successful anti-war movement must first expel these people, reveal their agenda and reject them as demagogues who sway only by replacing one form of callous hypocrisy with psychotic nihilism.
The leaders of the established anti-war movement put people off sustained support for constructive alternatives because they are nihilistic fanatics with an appetite for revolutionary destruction and violence.
What is needed is something more alone the lines of the old Polish Solidarity, conscientious journalism, the use of law to bring people to account and persuasive intelligent leaders who don't spout stale platform rhetoric and hate fuelled rhetoric.
Moral persuasion, to infuse people with collective responsibility and protest that involves a certain measure of civil disobedience must take place. Anybody can spout anti-war slogans and then go home to their comforts.
Galloway is raking in money from his image as anti-war. He's a fake. As with people like Tariq Ali, they don't really care about dying Iraqis-they care about themselves, the kitsch of the Grand March, their role as heroic vanguards. They are self serving nincompoops.
This does not mean that those who oppose this war or who want a new foreign policy and energy alternatives are wrong. But there is going to be no mass movement for change if 'anti-war' movements are just trendy and led by idiots who use it to aggrandise their own careers.
But the wheat needs to be sifted fron the chaff. A principled anti-war movement must be based on clear alternatives to the present system with a clear sign that it knows what is at stake. The StWC just exploit outrage, A lot of sound and thunder signifying nothing.
Now certainly many people who opposed Iraq from the outset were fooled and the simplistic line is that Blair lied because he's just a liar or "Bliar" as opposed to lying in the cause of the 'ultimate truth' and which depends on deception.
Those who supported the war tended to overlook the official pretexts because the war was deemed just by History and to remove an Evil Dictator, so in the service of a Higher Cause a certain amount of being economical with the truth did not matter.
But people can convince themselves sincerely that untruths are not lies but part of an essential truth and like Blair see what they want to see and disregard evidence to the contrary and I think that's what Blair did because of his messianic belief in Good vs Evil.
It is possible to regard the dissimulation and spin as part of a rationalisation and that this was done because it was believed that by getting rid of Saddam and his 'threat', that oil would flow, reconstruction would happen and those killed would be quickly forgotten by the survivors.
In some ways this crude utilitarian logic is similar to the one outlined by Dostoevsky in Crime and Punishment-get rid of the old parasites and accept a number of dead in a premeditated act of calculated aggression and quick terror and the victims will be offset by the benefits brought to humanity.
The political classes believed that because of the 'success' in Yugoslavia and Afghanistan ( by 2003 the failure was not obvious ) that if there was only enough will, then the world could be transformed by consequential acts of state violence backed by good intentions.
Stating what 'is' doesn't mean that it 'ought' to be the case. But pinning down facts first is crucial for understanding and expediency has always tended to triumph over ethics and that does not necessarily reflect mere greed, as the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia proved.
One opponent objected to my case that,
But that is a matter of simple greed, not strategic necessity. The latter is merely a rationalisation or a propaganda lie to cover for the former. But systematic falsehood in politics, in order to justify violence for greedy ends, has always been with us, and long predates oil as a geopolitical concern. How do you think the Romans came to rule such an extensive empire?
Well, strategic necessity can include greed and in which case the vast majority of people in Britain are then greedy. People acquiesce in Empires because they can give enough people a stake in maintaining them and the Roman Empire is quite different from the US led world order of now.
For a start the economic order depends on oil. It is woven into the very way most people have decided is their idea of a good life of consumerism. Marxists can't accept this so they have to pretend that it's only Them, only the guilty elites who are complicit.
The radical opponent them claimed,
Our lifestyle does not depend upon controlling ME oil, and nor does our security, merely upon being able to buy it. And in almost any foreseeable circumstances we would be able to buy it, because those who control it want to gain money by selling it.
This delusionary drivel.
Current geopolitics is about control of diminishing supplies of oil and not about free market conditions for oil which do not apply to finite resources that are non-renewable. Marxists and neoliberals concur that normal market conditions apply. They do not.
Power depends on using control over the oil as a bargaining lever and to advance state interests against other states. That's what the invasion of Iraq was about. With the rise of China and the instability of Saudi Arabia, diversification and control are necessities.
Unable to grasp these elementary points, the radical ranter went on,
But had we not invaded Iraq, our lifestyles would be no worse now or in the foreseeable future (slightly better, in fact, without the trillions burnt up in Iraq).
Not really. Statesmen do not wait for the future to happen they try to determine it and that is the real meaning behind the concept of pre-emptive strikes. The fact that Iraq has hastened the problem of Peak Oil and reduced supply does not mean the authors of war intended that.
Which again is not a 'moral judgement' but just a statement that consequences can be different to the intended plans of those who make them. It has no relevance to the decision of Blair and Bush to go to war in 2003 which was still pushed by fears of Peak Oil & Chinese ascendency.
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