Long before the war in Iraq actually started, the Bush administration had plans for getting rid of Saddam and gaining access to Iraq's rich oil fields, the second largest proven reserves in the world. Bush I had hoped that the Iraqi people would rise up and depose Saddam after the first Gulf War, but no such luck. After that Saddam started making oil deals with France, China and Russia to develop the immense untapped reserves effectively isolating the US as far as any oil dealings in Iraq were concerned.
With American oil reserves dwindling, American oil companies wanted access to Iraqi oil, and started to campaign through proxies at right wing think tanks for the overthrow of Saddam.
When the Bush team of former oil company executives came to power in 2000, they immediately started planning to get rid of Saddam Hussein and take over Iraq's oil.
This is from an article by Greg Palast entitled "Secret US Plans for Iraq's Oil,":
The Bush administration made plans for war and for Iraq's oil before the 9/11 attacks sparking a policy battle between neo-cons and Big Oil, BBC's Newsnight has revealed.
Two years ago today - when President George Bush announced US, British and Allied forces would begin to bomb Baghdad - protesters claimed the US had a secret plan for Iraq's oil once Saddam had been conquered.
In fact there were two conflicting plans, setting off a hidden policy war between neo-conservatives at the Pentagon, on one side, versus a combination of "Big Oil" executives and US State Department "pragmatists."
"Big Oil" appears to have won. The latest plan, obtained by Newsnight from the US State Department was, we learned, drafted with the help of American oil industry consultants.
Insiders told Newsnight that planning began "within weeks" of Bush's first taking office in 2001, long before the September 11th attack on the US.
An Iraqi-born oil industry consultant Falah Aljibury says he took part in the secret meetings in California, Washington and the Middle East. He described a State Department plan for a forced coup d'etat.
Mr. Aljibury himself told Newsnight that he interviewed potential successors to Saddam Hussein on behalf of the Bush administration.
And there is more:
It was a prize that the first oil presidency -- the president, vice president and national security adviser are all former oil execs -- lusted after long before the attacks of 9/11. The Washington Post reported that even as the Bush transition team prepared to take power in 2001, changing Iraq's regime and seizing its oil were already on the table:
Early discussions among the administration's national security "principals" -- Cheney, Powell, Tenet and national security adviser Condoleezza Rice -- and their deputies focused on how to weaken Hussein diplomatically. But Deputy Defense Secretary Wolfowitz proposed sending in the military to seize Iraq's southern oil fields and establish the area as a foothold from which opposition groups could overthrow Hussein.
Former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill told author Ron Suskind that Dick Cheney also supported an invasion of Iraq before Sept. 11, and the New Yorker's Jane Mayer reported on a top secret National Security Council document dating back seven months before the terror attacks that gave some insight into the vice president's thinking:
It directed the N.S.C. staff to cooperate fully with [Cheney's secretive] Energy Task Force as it considered the "melding" of two seemingly unrelated areas of policy: "the review of operational policies towards rogue states," such as Iraq, and "actions regarding the capture of new and existing oil and gas fields."
In her new book, “The Bush Agenda,” Antonia Juhasz detailed how, six months before the invasion, the administration brought in a group of oil executives to advise them on Iraqi oil policy (this occurred as President Bush was telling the American people that he had no intention of going to war). The State Department also set up a consulting group under the "Future of Iraq Project" called the "Oil and Energy Working Group." After some back and forth among the various consultants, a consensus was reached that Iraq's oil "should be opened to international oil companies as quickly as possible after the war."
In fact plans to remove Saddam went back to 1992, the last year of the Bush I administration when it became obvious that the Iraqi people were not going to remove Saddam by themselves.
According to the "Defense Planning Guidance" (DPG) written by Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Zalamy Khalizad, Scooter Libby, Eric Edelman and Colin Powell - six men who served Bush I and II, most worked in the Reagan administration as well - the objective of the United States in the Middle East is "to remain the predominant outside power in the region and preserve U.S. and Western access to the region's oil." Many of this group reunited in 1997 to form the Project for the New American Century (PNAC).
Saddam had displeased American oil interests by keeping the US out of Iraqi oil dealings after the Gulf war of 1991 under Bush I. Instead he had cut deals with France, Russia and China. This incensed American oil executives who through proxies began calling for the removal of Saddam. With three former oil executives in place after the 2000 election - Bush, a former executive of Harken oil, Cheney of Halliburton and Secretary of State, Condoleeza Rice, a former executive of ChevronTexaco - a team was in place to carry out these demands. The prize: proven oil reserves of over 112 billion barrels second only to Saudi Arabia; potential reserves of over 100 billion barrels more. By way of comparison, US reserves totaled only 22 billion barrels.
While most of Iraq's enterprises were privatized after the US took over in Iraq, the oil industry wasn't. This is so that the plans for the oil industry could fly under the radar and not raise any alarms. While 19th and 20th century colonialism involved direct take-overs of foreign assets, the plans for Iraq are that Iraqi oil will continue to be "owned" by the Iraqi people. In sum it looks like this: we'll respect your sovereignty and abide by your domestic laws -- as long as we can help you write those laws to guarantee our firms' profits. In fact that is exactly what has happened. Wording that gives tremendous profit making opportunities to those best positioned to "help" the Iraqi oil industry (which just happen to be big foreign oil corporations) has been written right into the Iraqi constitution in the same way that lobbyists write US laws and senators and congressmen put earmarks in at the last minute so that nobody gets to review them.
In her new book, “The Bush Agenda,” Antonia Juhasz explained the details:
The United States crafted a new oil law for Iraq that provided for production sharing agreements (PSAs), which are contractual terms between a government and a foreign corporation to explore for, produce and market oil. Production sharing agreements are not used by any country in the Middle East or, in fact, by any country that's truly wealthy in oil. They're used to entice investors into an area where the oil is expensive to produce or there isn't a lot of oil.
But Iraq's oil reserves are very easy and cheap to get to. You essentially just stick a pipe in the ground and you get oil. There's absolutely no reason for Iraq to enter into PSAs, but there's every reason for Western oil companies to want them -- they provide the best terms short of full privatization of the oil.
[It's estimated that] Iraq has 80 oil fields. Seventeen of them have been discovered. Under the new oil law -- written into the constitution -- those 17 will be under the control of the Iraqi national oil company.
All undiscovered oil fields are now open to the PSAs. That means, depending on how much oil there is in Iraq, foreign companies will have control over at least 64 percent of Iraq's oil and as much as 84 percent.
PSAs are the worst possible deals for countries; in Latin America some of the worst PSAs gave domestic governments royalties of just one percent of their natural gas revenues.
Iraq's permanent oil law is being written with the help of Bearingpoint Inc. under a contract from USAID. The Virginia-based company (which was KPMG until it changed its name after being embroiled in the Arthur Anderson accounting scandal) prepared a report for the Bush administration in 2003 that concluded "foreign participation [is] the most efficient way of developing the sector," according to Dow Jones. A USAID spokesman said the company "will be providing legal and regulatory advice in drafting the framework of petroleum and other energy-related legislation, including foreign investment."
The principles embedded in the transitional oil law can't be dismissed down the road by Iraq's legislature with a simple vote; they were built into the country's Constitution, a document that Iraqis approved without having a firm grip on its details. (Read more of the interview with Juhasz for some insight into how that happened.)
Chapter 4, Article 109, specifies that all new oil fields will be developed "relying on the most modern techniques of market principles and encouraging investment." While the constitutions of other energy-rich countries lay out principles regarding their resources, Iraq's is unique in specifying that future governments must develop the country's most valuable commodity in tandem with foreign multinationals.
Contrast that with other oil producers; Saudi Arabia's state oil company, Saudi Aramco, has a monopoly on oil production, and it enters into agreements with foreign companies for specific parts of the process. The Saudi government imposes a special tax on foreign energy companies' revenues from those processes and invests the windfall from high oil prices in education and infrastructure.
Under Iraq's new laws, those kinds of policies -- common among oil-producing countries -- are prohibited.
The "100 laws" established by L. Paul Bremer head of the Coalition Provisional Authority have been written right into the Iraqi Constitution - such laws as those that allow foreign corporations to take 100% of their profits out of the country, establishing ridiculously low taxes on corporations of 15%, not allowing cases to be brought against foreign contractors in Iraqi courts, making them effectively above the law, not requiring the hiring of Iraqi citizens for the rebuilding of Iraq etc. etc.
The same company that's helping draft Iraq's permanent oil law, BearingPoint Inc., planned Iraq's entire economy under a previous contract. All of the Bremer rules worked their way into the Iraqi Constitution as well; Chapter 6, Article 126, specifies that although the rest of the orders issued by the Transitional Authority are canceled, the "100 orders" remain on the books.
Bremer had considerable authority in Iraq to write laws that were "foreign corporation friendly."
"Order No. 39 allows for: (1) privatization of Iraq's 200 state-owned enterprises; (2) 100% foreign ownership of Iraqi businesses; (3) "national treatment" — which means no preferences for local over foreign businesses; (4) unrestricted, tax-free remittance of all profits and other funds; and (5) 40-year ownership licenses.
"Thus, it forbids Iraqis from receiving preference in the reconstruction while allowing foreign corporations — Halliburton and Bechtel, for example — to buy up Iraqi businesses, do all of the work and send all of their money home. They cannot be required to hire Iraqis or to reinvest their money in the Iraqi economy. They can take out their investments at any time and in any amount.
"Orders No. 57 and No. 77 ensure the implementation of the orders by placing U.S.-appointed auditors and inspector generals in every government ministry, with five-year terms and with sweeping authority over contracts, programs, employees and regulations.
"Order No. 17 grants foreign contractors, including private security firms, full immunity from Iraq's laws. Even if they, say, kill someone or cause an environmental disaster, the injured party cannot turn to the Iraqi legal system. Rather, the charges must be brought to U.S. courts.
"Order No. 40 allows foreign banks to purchase up to 50% of Iraqi banks.
"Order No. 49 drops the tax rate on corporations from a high of 40% to a flat 15%. The income tax rate is also capped at 15%.
"Order No. 12 (renewed on Feb. 24) suspends "all tariffs, customs duties, import taxes, licensing fees and similar surcharges for goods entering or leaving Iraq." This led to an immediate and dramatic inflow of cheap foreign consumer products — devastating local producers and sellers who were thoroughly unprepared to meet the challenge of their mammoth global competitors."
Juhasz describes the impact of U.S. policies on the Iraqi economy:
"The new economic laws have fundamentally transformed Iraq's economy, applying some of the most radical, sought-after corporate globalization policies in the world and overturning existing laws on trade, public services, banking, taxes, agriculture, investment, foreign ownership, media, and oil, among others. The new laws lock in sweeping advantages to U.S. corporations including greater U.S. access to, and corporate control of, Iraq's oil. And the benefits have already begun to flow. Between 2003 and 2004 alone, the value of U.S. imports of Iraqi oil increased by 86 percent and then increased again in the first three quarters of 2005."
With the PSAs the Iraqi government is obliged by law to turn over the entire exploration, drilling and infrastructure-building process to private companies in contracts that last twenty-five to forty years. Instead of just contracting out the rebuilding of Iraqi oil infrastructure, something the large oil companies would not be interested in, they are instead required to share the content of the production meaning the oil itself as part of the deal. The law states that the Iraqi government will control the developed oil fields of which there are presently only 17. However, all undeveloped oil fields numbering 63 at this time are to be developed by foreign corporations in accordance with the PSAs. And this is written right into the Iraqi constitution!
Thus, the goal is about to be realized which is control of Iraq's oil and the Iraqi economy. Iraq will be dominated by U.S. corporations, supported by the U.S. military. Ending the economic occupation of Iraq may be more difficult than ending the military occupation. The embedding of laws favoring foreign investment through the Bremer Orders and the Iraq Constitution will make it difficult to give Iraq back to the Iraqis. |
In 1998, well before the Bush administration took power, Chevron's CEO said: "Iraq possesses huge reserves of oil and gas - reserves I'd love Chevron to have access to." It looks like his love for oil will soon be requited.
Meanwhile the Bushes and the Saudis have a relationship that goes way back.
Never before in history has a president of the United States had such a close relationship with another foreign power as President Bush and his father have had with the Saudi royal family, the House of Saud. I have traced more than $1.4 billion in investments and contracts that went from the House of Saud over the past 20 years to companies in which the Bushes and their allies have had prominent positions -- Harken Energy, Halliburton, and the Carlyle Group among them.
Although the Saudis are Wahhabis, a Muslim sect that teaches their children from Day 1 to hate the west, the House of Bush and the House of Saud have much in common. Both are dancing on a tightrope, the Bushes to make you think that their main purpose is fighting terrorism while masking their real motive of controlling Iraqi oil, the Saudi Royal Family deflecting the anger of their impoverished citizenry away from themselves and against the west by giving them red meat Wahhabism and supporting terrorist organizations while their main interest is keeping all the oil profits for themselves and not sharing them with the riff raff.
This from Right Truth:
I have a sample of what text books in their home country teach about Americans, from Red State, "The Saudi Mask Slips":
So when an Islamic textbook, one that is widely distributed throughout the world thanks to the good offices of the House of Saud, says:
"As cited in Ibn Abbas: The apes are Jews, the people of the Sabbath; while the swine are the Christians, the infidels of the communion of Jesus."…
"Some of the people of the Sabbath were punished by being turned into apes and swine. Some of them were made to worship the devil, and not God, through consecration, sacrifice, prayer, appeals for help, and other types of worship. Some of the Jews worship the devil. Likewise, some members of this nation worship the devil, and not God."
These are just a few of the nuggets of wisdom contained in Saudi textbooks. ...
We’ve been told that they are a “fringe” element, yet what is referred to as wahhabism...is not fringe. It is the state religion of Saudi Arabia and, thanks to generous funding from our friends, the Saudis, it is the fastest growing sect in Islam. When viewed with its offshoots, salafism and qutbism it is also the most politically potent sect. I don’t propose to tell Muslims how to run their religion. ...I take at face value the instructional material used to teach their fifth graders:
"Whoever obeys the Prophet and accepts the oneness of God cannot maintain a loyal friendship with those who oppose God and His Prophet, even if they are his closest relatives."
Isn't it ironic - the ruling classes collaboratively going for the black gold while misleading their peoples either by pretending to fight against or support terrorism. It seems that terrorism is just a tool for both countries' ruling cliques.
