The Centrality of Oil in the Decision to Invade Iraq in 2003.

The spurious notion that oil being a central objective in the invasion of Iraq was a "conspiracy theory"ought to refer only to those who have espoused ridiculous conspiracy theories-such as that Iraq was invaded to profit Halliburton and Cheney or else that 9/11 was a choreographed inside job to justify invading Afghanistan and Iraq.

Evidence is always important, despite most newspaper and TV news journalists failing to do their job by investigating the reality of what was at stake in Iraq .Explaining the reality of why Iraq was a resource war is not the same as offering arcane conspiracies. It was journalists that failed to correct the official version of events.

Indeed the absurd forms of conspiracy theory are not that much more absurd than the conspiracy of silence in much of the mainstream media about the central importance of oil, one admitted after the invasion by Paul Wolfowitz in Vanity Fair and who also in on record stating that WMD's were a pretext.

Wolfowitz stated,

The truth is that for reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S. government bureaucracy we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on which was weapons of mass destruction as the core reason....

...there have always been three fundamental concerns. One is weapons of mass destruction, the second is support for terrorism, the third is the criminal treatment of the Iraqi people. Actually I guess you could say there's a fourth overriding one which is the connection between the first two.

WMD were "the one issue that everyone could agree on" . By that Wolfowitz means that it was the one rationalisation that they would be able to sell as public diplomacy. He then later on a tour of Iraq claimed after the non-existence of WMD's was confirmed that it was now a "historical issue".

Neoconservatives and "liberal interventionists such as Thomas Friedmann expanded on Wolfowitz's portrayal of Iraq as an imminent threat to conflate terrorist threats from various regions in the Middle East with different causes into one seamless threat of which Saddam was just one part.

The issue of WMD's was a peripheral sideshow. The centrality of oil was revealed by Alan Greenspan, former head of the US Federal Reserve, who stated “I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil” .

The evidence is clear from what the main architects said about the Iraq invasion themselves.

Wolfowitz claimed in Vanity Fair that the geopolitical objectives were about withdrawing from Saudi Arabia, removing Saddam, installing a democracy and thus inaugurating a domino process as other states would thus feel compellled by an upsurge of pro-democracy activism to want the same as Iraq.

That control of Iraqi oil was essential if the revenue was to flow into the new model states coffers made it crucial but the claim that this would amount to a foreign policy of enlightened self interest, as claimed by Niall Ferguson in Colossus, was mistaken. ( Ferguson , however, dismissed the oil motive as a "conspiracy theory" too ).

On the contrary, little thought about the post-invasion plans reflected less of a "mistake" but the utter ruthlessness of the Bush II regime. The Oil Ministry was protected along with the oil infrastructure. Yet little or no investment was made in civilian infrastructure. There was no interest in nation building.

As Condaleeza Rice put it, the American forces were not in Iraq to help make sure children got safely to school. So the humanitarian intervention argument or enlightened interest case that was fervently adhered to by those advocating regime change such as Nick Cohen and Christopher Hitchens was false.

The reason for the failure of any post-invasion aftermath was not incompetence so much as a fervent belief that creating a secular market democracy would necessarily create of itself the conditions to get oil flowing again for the mutually beneficial interest of the USA, UK and, so it was claimed, Iraq.

All evidence that pointed to the contrary was ignored, mostly because Bush and Blair were prepared to gamble on being able to control the oil, maintain Western hegemony against an energy hungry China that had been flexing its military power in the Pacific before Afghanistan and Iraq.

Cheney thus got a geologist Louis Christian to work on surveying other sites in the south of Iraq that were not as yet tapped. Fears that Iraqi oil's drilling components were failing apart ( and once they do completely the wells are lost forever as any oil geologist knows ), meant that it was ever more necessary to remove Saddam.

The reason Iraq's oil husbandry was poor and failing to yield enough oil for the future projected increase in energy predicted by Cheney's task force was that sanctions had prevented the components getting through. The sanctions were set to cripple Iraq's potential oil producing capacity.

Cheney's advocacy of the Iraq War did not lie in the simple hunger for the profit he would make from having Halliburton involved in the reconstruction of Iraq's oil infrastructure. Conspiracy theories and paranoid focus on hidden hands and profiteers are irrelevant. As an oilman he looked at the diminishing oil capacity.

David Strahan in his The Last Oil Shock outlined in detail the fact that the sanctions by banning "dual use" equipment meant crucial chemicals water pumps could not get through. Experts working such as Paul Wood reporting to the UN Security Council claimed that,

" A sharp increase in production would severely damage oil-containing rocks and pipeline systems, and would be against accepted principles of "good oilfield husbandry"

A second report claimed,

"Poor oilfield husbandry has already resulted in an irreversible reduction in the ultimate recovery of oil from individual reservoirs. Crisis management will continue to exacerbate the permanent loss of huge reserves of oil"

Cheney became aware that inaction would possibly lead to up to half of Iraq's recoverable oil being permanently lost and with Saudi Arabia becoming more unstable and a major financer of Islamist charities that funded terrorism, Iraq as the third largest oil producer was targeted for regime change.

This was nothing to do with WMD's as what capacity Saddam had had been destroyed in the First Gulf War in 1990-91. Condaleeza Rice admitted that in the early days of the Bush II administration but the tune changed by 2001 when sanctions were found to be damaging Iraq's oil capacity.

That was a concern not only to Cheney but also Rice who had served on the board of Chevron for a decade and whose oil production had slid by 1998 donwards in consecutive years. Blair, close to BP, was also concerned about North Sea Oil peaking in 1999 and impact of the 2000 Fuel Protest.

That dovetailed at the same time with a build up of ideological zeal from neoconservatives such as Paul Wolfowitz, John Bolton, Richard Perle who supported the Project for the New American Century and coalesced around various think tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute.

The oil objective was made clear in a PNAC open letter to President Clinton as early as 1998 which called for Saddam to be removed and conjectured that if Saddam acquired WMD's,

"the safety of American troops in the region, of our friends and allies like Israel and the moderate Arab states, and a significant portion of the world's supply of oil, will be put at risk"

The Cheney Energy Taskforce was convened expressly to look into the oil capacity of Iraq before 9/11 happened in February 2001 and which was found in some 39,000 disclosed documents, that they were forced to reveal under the FOI act, that some 36 energy representatives had lobbied for influence.

It was then that Louis Christian's geological map was revealed ( below ) with the new virgin oilfields in 9 slab blocks divided up the spoils amongst different oil companies from across the globe. The invasion of Iraq was not about benefiting US companies. It was to control Iraq and get supply increased.

At the Crawford Meeting in 2002 Bush and Blair had agreed to invade Iraq and had set up a permanent diplomatic liason team known as The US-UK Energy Dialogue which had as its main aim to get "energy security and diversity" and "mitigating the risks of increasing global reliance on Middle Eastern oil.

The next cliche that needs dispelling is Blair's contention before Iraq that

"If the oil had been our main concern we could probably cut a deal with Saddam tomorrow in relation to the oil. It's not the oil that matters but the weapons".

Not only was the statement on WMD false but also the assumption that Saddam would trust the US.

Saddam was hardly going to strike a deal with the UK and US and had sanctions been lifted, then it was France, Russia and China that would benefit, not least as they had already had their major companies positioned to attain a stake in the 9 virgin oilfields. This is the cynical reason for why France's Chirac opposed the Iraq War.

The USA and UK were interested in invasion for geopolitical advantage, control and energy security and not profit. Oil would be an essential part of that strategy also as It would also allow US and UK companies to get a share of the oil contracts and reconstruction work. As Strahan put it, ( p 29 Last Oil Shock )

'for the US-UK axis the conundrum was this: Iraqi production could only be raised if sanctions were lifted, but lifting sanctions would benefit their international rivals. It followed that the only way to raise Iraqi output , fend off the global peak oil threat and keep some kind of US-UK stake in the new Iraqi production was to depose Saddam

This is precisely why Iraqi exiles such as Dr Salah al-Sheikhly of the Iraqi National Accord and Chalabi were positioned into power once regime change was successfully secured and who would then reward American and European lobby groups, those who had helped install their clients.

Yet overwhelmingly the objective of the invasion of Iraq was to maintain control over Iraqi oil as a lever in bargaining with emerging new power blocks that threatened the USA's global hegemony. Strahan cites a despatch from Washington from the US Embassy in 2002 ( p 30 ) ,'

The British strongly support this dialogue with the US and want to use it to leverage US and UK influence on energy issues in Russia, the Caspian, and the Middle East....Officials report that the Prime Minister's office request regular updates on the preparatory work'

By' preparatory work' is meant the invasion that it was hoped would raise Iraqi oil production twofold by 2010. That has not happened. But that has no bearing on the centrality of oil in the invasion, a fact borne out in Michael Klare's Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet: How Scarce Energy is Creating a New World Order.

Klare emphasises the importance of strategic necessity in exercising ultimate control over Persian Gulf as "an American Lake" and preserving unhindered American access to petroleum supplies, something made explicit in the Carter Declaration of January 1980,

Let our position be absolutely clear: An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.

That was manifest in the decision to remove Saddam Hussein as well as the threats to Iran following the implosion of Iraq into sectarian conflict and the rise of Shia militias. Though Bush II's diplomacy was "catastrophic" according to Zbigniew Brzezinski, the strategic necessity of controlling the Persian Gulf unites leading figures both Republican and Democrat.

Indeed the last part of the Carter Declaration was worded by his National Security Adviser Brzezinski himself who opposed the invasion of Iraq as it would contradict the objective of controlling Afghanistan and isolating and encircling Iran as a priority, as well as getting the TAPI pipeline built.

This has represented a continuity dating back to 1979 when Brzezinski viewed Soviet Union's ambitions in the Middle East with distrust and reacted to the invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979 and the Iranian Revolution with the foreign policy of controlling Central Asia and in the process the Middle East by hemming in Iran.

To that extent, Brzezinski's policy of funnelling aid to the mujahadeen to fight the Soviet Union, to give it its own Vietnam and thus brought about both the collapse of the Cold War enemy. This subsequently would open up oil and gas rich Central Asian republics to US influence but bring about the failed state of Afghanistan and the growth of Al Qaida.

Yet as in Iraq, so too Afghanistan can be seen to exhibit the same problems where the protection of pipelines again insurgents diverts colossal sums of money away from economic redevelopment and undermines the ostensible political goals of bringing freedom and democracy.

Klare writes of the continuing problem of guarding the oil, that the decision to create a navy "command and control facility" in 2007 on top of an offshore Iraqi oil platform in the Persian Gulf to protect vital oil-loading terminals was,

"an unambiguous signal that the United States intends to play a direct role in defending Iraq's vulnerable oil infrastructure for years to come" ( p 188 )

The navy facility was designed with guard operations at two main terminals, Khawr Al Amaya and Al Basra which loads 2 million barrels of oil a day, some 2.4% of global demand. The USA retains some 4 of its existing mega-bases in Iraq to safeguard the oil for which the war was fought.

Bibliography.

David Strahan, The Last Oil Shock.

John Gray, Heresies: Against Progress and Other Illusions.

Michael Klare, Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet.