A response to Martin Kettle's Guardian piece The real problem was Blair's policy to America, not Iraq"He was not wrong about intervention. It was his political judgment that went badly awry. If only this was Chilcot's focus"
Kettle, a Blairite, trots out the usual mantra of Blair's "mistake". It was not. Iraq was an intentional and pre-planned war based on neoconservative ideology, lack of democratic accountability, the role of spin and energy security i.e OIL
To say Blair got the national interest wrong over Iraq, and that Iraq was the pivotal error of his premiership, is true. But to say such things now feels like weirdly perverse understatement. The level of hyperbole has been raised so high, and the level of Blair-hatred is so intense in some quarters, that anyone who says "Yes, but" about Blair and his era struggles to make themselves heard, much less have themselves taken seriously.
Yet heard we should be. And heard we probably still are – by rather more people than some may credit – the further one journeys away from medialand self-absorption and the rantings of parts of the blogosphere, I suspect. Only 29% of voters think Iraq was Blair's fault, said a PoliticsHome poll last night. The issue plays less in the hard-grind Britain that elected Blair and his party three times and that – who knows? – might even elect him again if it had the chance. I'd certainly back him to give it as good a shot as the other fellow, anyway.
The "high politics" surrounding the decision to go to war are, of course as important as the attention paid to them by Martin Kettle and Chris Ames. But the level of denial about the central role of energy security is still relevant in the statements and evidence we have of why Blair went to war.
David Strahan has documented this in his The Last Oil Shock and the discussions Blair had with the Bush administration over the problem of energy security.
In The Last Oil Shock, the CIA was also well aware of Iraq's unique value, having secretly paid for new maps of its petroleum geology to be drawn as early as 1998. Cheney also knew, fretting publicly about global oil depletion at a speech in London the following year, where he noted that the Middle East with two thirds of the world's oil and lowest cost is still where the prize ultimately lies.
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. In a speech last year Sir David Manning ?
Blair's chief foreign policy advisor in the run-up to Iraq ? noted the growing consensus that the peak would come at some point between 2010 and 2020?, while chief scientific advisor Sir David King told me emphatically in 2005, ?ten years or less?. So while the government refuses to engage with peak oil publicly, the idea has clearly penetrated policymaking at the highest levels.
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.
Both governments continue to refuse to release minutes of meetings between ministers and officials held under the Dialogue, but among some papers that have been released, one dated February 2003 notes that to meet projected world demand, oil production in the Middle East would have to double by 2030 to over 50 million barrels per day, and proposed ?a targeted study to examine the capital and investment requirements of key Gulf countries?.
So on the eve of the invasion British and American officials were secretly discussing how to raise oil production from the region and we are invited to believe this is mere coincidence. Iraq was evidently not just about corporate greed but strategic desperation.
This article was actually published in the Guardian on 26 June 2007. Leader writers, "political framers" and other windbags such as Kettle are there to simply maintain the illusion of impartiality. Yet the mainstream media has, as always, to be treated with scepticism ( no less that unofficial media and propaganda as well of course ).
This issue of energy security has to be addressed because, as John Gray has pointed out in Al Qaida and What it Means to be Modern, it is of seminal importance in what could end with a twenty first century full of resource wars such as Iraq and, of course, Afghanistan.Barely any media article in the newspapers mention oil seriously or the looming energy crisis.
The "no war for oil" stance of the StWC's shrill moralistic platitudes achieve nothing in the way of dealing with that nor of the fact that, though the leaders had no chance of "stopping it", Blair was also far more shaken by the protests in 2000 over oil prices led by hauliers, a protest now generally forgotten.
Blair, as any leader in the industrialised West, knows Britain's consumer economy depends upon a secure supply of oil.
Mere "outrage" is insufficient. As Michael T Klare points out in Blood and Oil, the American version of high octane capitalism that even most protesters benefit from as citizens of one of the largest economies in the world ensures that oil is central the way most Britons live: the great car economy, out of town supermarkets, cheap air travel etc.
One is reminded of George Orwell's criticism of those anti-imperialists who condemned it whilst continuing to enjoy the comforts of the fruits of Empire. When Orwell wrote, it was the working poor who missed out on the prosperity. These days those who shop at ASDA or Walmart are part of the reason for Iraq.
Such consumers are not guilty. They just do not understand as no journalist is really trying to make people understand the connection between their lives and consumption and the fact it depends on pursuing dangerous policies in the Middle East and in Central Asia. The task of journalists and public intellectuals ought to be to make educated citizens realise it.
In the Road to Wigan Pier, Orwell pointed out that the British standard of living at the time depended on inhabitants of other parts of the Empire living in abject poverty, otherwise it would be relegated to an obscure island living on herrings and potatoes. The same goes today with regards oil, not least as oil has replaced coal since 1945 as the major fossil fuel.
Needless to say, there is the need both to bring Blair to justice and accountability for lying over the "official reasons" for war in Iraq. Equally so, the opponents of the war need to make it clear that constructive alternatives are a matter of national emergency.For a collapse of the oil supply over night would be a catastrophe, though Chomsky thinks that is not so bad.
Screaming "no blood for oil" is simply outraged self righteousness. Any person who is honest knows Iraq was about oil. But reforming British democracy, putting Blair on trial and reducing the executive power of the Prime Minister are constructive steps that are needed. No screaming "No blood for oil" as if this is shocking news.
Britain needs a responsible civil society movement led by genuine democrats and concerned citizens. Not platform demagogues like George Galloway, a leftist shock jock who has made a lucrative media career from exploiting outrage over Iraq whilst working for Iran via Press TV a nation which has a bad human rights movement and oil interests as well.
Protesters need to act in a more mature fashion. There has been little evidence of this. The Iraq War protests in 2003 were Ballardian occasions for bored consumers to pretend that their lives could be made less mundane by protest over something. A lot of the protest had a kind of peculiar carnival atmosphere about it.
Without understanding the complications, the sheer scale of the overdependence upon oil and having no alternative than following a group of ex-Communists like Galloway, Kate Hudson et al played into the hands of those who regarded the war as a liberal interventionist crusade ( e.g Cohen).
The irony is that those who stress their "decent left" credentials are no more informed than the anti-war left: they just decided Britain right or wrong, spouted forth messianic moralistic guff no less than Blair and seven years later nothing substantial will have changed. Except further depletion of oil, the collapse of American power mired in debt and Afghanistan too.
The link to Strahan's journalism is real journalism of the investigative sort that is needed. John Pilger is past it and was always too eager to make overt propaganda points. Everything is a rerun of Vietnam as it is for Milne and the other "anti-imperialists" who laud Chavez but omit mention of Chavez's petroleum realpolitik.
The alliances Chavez has with Zimbabwe and Iran and Ken Livingstone's grovelling before China and the anti-US non-aligned block is also petroleum realpolitik. Anti-imperialists merely support others large power blocks in true Orwellian style of doublethink.
If, as Chomsky maintains, that change begins at home then that is acceptable but a degree of "tranferred nationalism" is creeping in, where the USA's and UK's "rapacious" desire for oil is all about BP, Chevron etc and not about propping up the living standards that ensure political legitimacy.
If Orwell is going to be claimed as some moral mentor by Pilger, then he ought actually to read Orwell a bit more closely whilst taking into account that the West is no longer as dominant as he thinks anyway. Precisely the insecurity , the fear of losing "hegemony" that by controlling oil that led to Iraq.
New thinking is necessary. Alternatives to oil and conservation of supplies need to be accepted as well as the harsh truth that people in the West cannot have their cake and eat it: more oil fuelled prosperity means more Islamist "blowback", entanglement in resource wars and authoritarianism at home.
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