Raad Alkadiri, an oil and gas industry advisor for PFC Energy, writing in the Washington Post, scoffs at the idea that the US invasion and occupation of Iraq had anything to do with oil. Despite his acknowledgment that “a number of international oil companies are on the brink of signing contracts with Iraq,” Mr. Alkadiri argues, “If the Iraq invasion was about oil, let the record show that that mission has been botched even worse than the war’s toughest critics claim the military expedition has been.”

He goes on to assert that since Iraqi production declined as an immediate result of the war, the entire affair therefore had little to do with energy resources. The obvious and immediate fallacy in this argument is that it assumes that greater access to oil, and hence increased production, is the primary goal of the industry rather than control over it. Increasing the global oil supply would result in lower prices and therefore lower profits. Tightly dictating production and keeping most of the profits out of Iraqi hands provides a much more advantageous result for the Western companies negotiating the terms of contract.

Investigative journalist Greg Palast has reported on this aspect of the Iraq strategy extensively over the last few years. After reviewing the British and American strategy since 1925 to limit Iraqi oil production, Palast writes in his 2006 book Armed Madhouse:

The decision to expand production has, for now, been kept out of Iraqi’s hands by the latest method of suppressing Iraq’s oil flow – the 2003 invasion and resistance to invasion. And it has been darn effective. Iraq’s output in 2003, 2004 and 2005 was less than produced under the restrictive Oil-for-Food Program. Whether by design or happenstance, this decline in output has resulted in tripling the profits of the five U.S. oil majors to $89 billion for a single year, 2005, compared to pre-invasion 2002. That suggests an interesting arithmetic equation. Big Oil’s profits are up $89 billion a year in the same period the oil industry boosted contributions to Mr. Bush’s reelection campaign to roughly $40 million.

And remember, these points were made back in the good old days when oil was at a minuscule price of about $60 per barrel rather than today’s $140. So contrary to Mr. Alkadiri’s point, decreased production is anything but proof the war never was about oil and in fact shows it most likely was.

As an advisor to the energy industries on issues of Iraq, it is not surprising Mr. Alkadiri also paints negotiations between oil and gas companies and the Iraqi government as a fair process initiated by a sovereign government, claiming Iraqi oil “ministry officials reached out directly to nine companies” (including the five majors of Exxon Mobil, Shell, BP, Total and Chevron) that are now poised to claim the prize. But should we assume a nation occupied by a foreign power can truly act independently in these types of negotiations? A recent New York Times report contradicts this assessment by revealing:

A group of American advisers led by a small State Department team played an integral part in drawing up contracts between the Iraqi government and five major Western oil companies to develop some of the largest fields in Iraq, American officials say.

Of course the administration denies these claims and prefers to argue Iraqis are free to establish any agreements they see as being in their own best interest. Yet if that were the case, it is an interesting coincidence these new no-bid contracts reverse agreements established under Saddam Hussein which opened development of reserves to, among others, Chinese, Russian and Indian firms. It just so happens this is completely in line with US strategic and military interests.

I won’t rehash it here but we now know the Bush administration and the oil industry was interested in dividing Iraq’s oil wealth before 9/11. Documents dated March 2001 from Cheney’s infamous Energy Task Force released as a result of a successful lawsuit filed under the Freedom of Information Act include a detailed map of Iraq’s oilfields, pipelines and oil related capacities. There are also charts and a list of international oil companies titled “Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield Contracts.” As is well known, the Task Force was a who’s who of industry insiders. SourceWatch has a comprehensive overview of the group, including its participants and what is known of documents and reports it produced.

So it seems odd to hear members of the political elite still arguing with a straight face that oil had nothing to do with the invasion and occupation of Iraq. In his wit and insight, Noam Chomsky as usual states it most plainly:

Doctrinal managers would like us to believe that the US and UK would have “liberated” Iraq even if its major exports were lettuce and pickles and the major energy resources of the world were in the South Pacific. It takes really impressive discipline “not to see” the obvious.

Following up on my last post regarding the mainstream media’s spin on Iraq and troop withdrawal, I came across this article from the Financial Times. While it does not mention time horizons it purports to describe how Iraqis are “divided” over the idea of a US military withdrawal from their country. Writing from Baghdad – likely not far from the Green Zone if even outside – the author claims “[m]ost Iraqis appear wary of setting any specific timetables for the withdrawal of US troops,” fearing doing so would destabilize the country and lead to civil war.

Yet the article offers but one quote from an Iraqi that is clearly against withdrawal. Of the remaining four quotes, only two are concerned with the issue of a troop pullout, one wants a drawdown in the number of US personnel, the other argues for a gradual withdrawal, no timetables mentioned. The remaining two Iraqis quoted are statements of support for Barack Obama, who has stated his intention of setting a timetable (what form that will actually take if he becomes president we have to wait and see).

This kind of anecdotal evidence abounds in media reports, while actual polling data is rarely mentioned. One such poll taken in early 2006 when the security situation was far more dire than today showed that 67% of Iraqis felt a six month withdrawal from that time would increase security, 70% wanted a timeline of either six months or two years, and 80% approved the Iraqi government calling for such a timeline.

A more recent poll [PDF] shows opinions have changed little since, demonstrating that as of March 2008 61% of Iraqis felt the US presence was making the security situation there worse and 69% claimed a complete withdrawal would either improve security or not change things at all. The numbers supporting the occupation are even worse, yet we are constantly led to believe through media reports such as this one in the Financial Times that Iraqis are torn between wanting to keep American troops in their country and having them leave.

If more news outlets would report the clear position of the people of Iraq – ironically from polling data often commissioned by the very news agencies that rarely use it – rather than confusing things with anectodal evidence, maybe taking a position demanding a full and timely withdrawal wouldn’t seem such a radical idea.

According to Wikipedia a time horizon is a term used in economics describing “a fixed point of time in the future at which point certain processes will be evaluated or assumed to end.” Well as Johndroe makes clear we can’t assume that the US military presence or even current troop levels will end when we reach the time horizon. No, that would obviously be a fiction. Or even better, a science fiction because doesn’t it all sound like some bad sci-fi novel or film? Just think about it: The Time Horizon, where language itself breaks the laws of physics, forming out of nothing from the mouths of PR saavy politicians and repeated unquestioningly by their media robots to have any meaning intended. Wow! That would be scary.

An upcoming book by investigative journalist Jane Mayer details how the Bush administration ignored a 2002 CIA report on Guantanamo Bay which stated that up to one third of all prisoners held there were innocent of any wrongdoing. The book, The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals, also shows that a secret Red Cross report finished in 2007 deemed techniques used by CIA operatives against suspected Al Qaeda members as “categorically” torture.

Mayer writes, according to the New York Times who along with the Washington Post obtained an advance copy of the book, that the Red Cross “warned that the abuse constituted war crimes, placing the highest officials in the U.S. government in jeopardy of being prosecuted.” Perhaps in a truly just world this would happen. But I wouldn’t count on it, at least not in the United States, where lawlessness like this when committed by the powerful is merely seen to be a political difference at best and rewarded or justified at worst.

The Washington Post goes into further detail about the CIA report on Guantanamo:

The classified CIA report described by Mayer was prepared in the summer of 2002 by a senior CIA analyst who was invited to the prison camp in Cuba to help Defense Department officials grapple with a major problem: They were gleaning very little useful information from the roughly 600 detainees in custody at the time. After a study involving dozens of detainees, the analyst came up with an answer: A large fraction of them “had no connection with terrorism whatsoever,” Mayer writes, citing officials familiar with the report. Many were essentially bystanders who had been swept up in dragnets or turned over to the U.S. military by bounty hunters. Previous published reports have described the CIA analyst’s visit but have not provided details of its findings.

According to Mayer, the analyst estimated that a full third of the camp’s detainees were there by mistake. When told of those findings, the top military commander at Guantanamo at the time, Major Gen. Michael Dunlavey, not only agreed with the assessment but suggested that an even higher percentage of detentions — up to half – were in error. Later, an academic study by Seton Hall University Law School concluded that 55 percent of detainees had never engaged in hostile acts against the United States, and only 8 percent had any association with al-Qaeda.

What was the administration’s response to these assessments? Apparently Vice President Cheney’s staff director David Addington simply stated “The president has determined that they are ALL enemy combatants. We are not going to revisit it.” And that was that. What the dear leader says is true is all that matters. Damn the facts. If our imperial president calls torture simply a humane form of interrogation, then that’s what it is. And if innocent people illegally held – and possibly subject to these interrogation techniques – are deemed “enemy combatants,” that’s what they are. Case closed.

None of this is really a surprise. As Glenn Greenwald points out:

This is what a country becomes when it decides that it will not live under the rule of law, when it communicates to its political leaders that they are free to do whatever they want — including breaking our laws — and there will be no consequences. There are two choices and only two choices for every country — live under the rule of law or live under the rule of men. We’ve collectively decided that our most powerful political leaders are not bound by our laws — that when they break the law, there will be no consequences.

Truer words couldn’t have been spoken. As we see now impeachment is “off the table” according to the Democrats. The President’s illegal surveillance program has been sanctioned by the so-called opposition who at one time was outraged by it and pledged to hold those resposible to account. But no. All attempts at standing by principle and the rule of law are bound to fail in such a climate. In a futile effort, Rep. Dennis Kucinich from Ohio is trying to force a vote on impeachment. His original 35 articles now slimmed down to one: the well known fact that Bush knowingly “deceived” Congress and the American people “into believing Iraq had weapons of mass destruction in order to get lawmakers to back a U.S.-led invasion of the country.”

You’ve got to hand it to Kucinich, he won’t quit or backdown. Unfortunately for us there are far too few people of principle like him in Washington, and any realistic chance of this administration being held to account is dwindling fast.

As many of you have probably heard, a group calling themselves the Presidential Memorial Commission of San Francisco is working to change the name of the San Francisco Oceanside Water Pollution Control Plant to the George W. Bush Sewage Plant. They are lobbying to have the initiative placed on the ballot this coming election. As this article from the International Herald Tribune notes: “Republicans in a city that voted 83 percent Democratic in 2004 are not thrilled with the idea.” No doubt. I’m sure they’ll pass the measure. And the best part of it all:

The renaming would take effect on Jan. 20, when a new president is sworn in. And regardless of the measure’s outcome, supporters plan to commemorate the inaugural with a “synchronized flush” of hundreds of thousands of toilets that would send a flood of water toward the plant.