With the terrible environmental catastrophe currently taking place in the Gulf, I thought some good anti-oil industry propaganda was needed. So here’s a website I came across with some good political art on the ecological, social, and imperial impact of global oil policy: Art Not Oil: A True Portrait of an Oil Company. Enjoy.
I only just came across this video from the website Big Think. It’s a few months old but remains relevant. Answering the question, “What is the best way forward in Iraq,” Chomsky rightly asserts that occupying forces never have rights, only responsibilities. He starts by pointing out how the Western intellectual and political class never discussed what might be the best option for the Soviet Union following its invasion of Afghanistan, or the best option for Saddam Hussein following his occupation of Kuwait. “But when the West invades another country,” Chomsky states, “all the values shift. The only question that arises is ‘What’s best for the aggressors?’”
Some of you might remember way back in late 2001 the widespread reports of Al-Qaeda’s vast and sophisticated cave complex in Afghanistan. We were led to believe bin Laden used his family’s construction enterprise to build a high-tech underground compound with “its own ventilation system and its own power, created by a hydro-electric generator. Its walls and floors are smooth and finished, and it extends about 315m beneath a solid mountain.” The article, written by Richard Lloyd Parry writing with the Independent (London) at the time, goes on to claim:
It is so well defended and concealed that – short of poison gas or a tactical nuclear weapon – it is completely immune to outside attack. And it is filled with heavily armed followers of Osama bin Laden, with a suicidal commitment to their cause, and with nothing left to lose.
Scary stuff indeed. Sounds like the lair of an evil genius from an Ian Fleming novel. The cave story was quickly picked up by other news outlets, though certain details changed – was the complex built by the bin Laden family or the US government in the 80s for the mujahideen fight against the Soviets? Journalist Edward Jay Epstein details how the story spread and finally reached its pinnacle in the US when the late Tim Russert unquestioningly accepted it as fact during an interview with Donald Rumsfeld on Meet the Press.
The following clip is from Adam Curtis’ excellent three-part documentary The Power of Nightmares, originally broadcast on the BBC in 2004. I highly recommend this film to anyone who hasn’t seen it. It’s (legally) available online for download or streaming at Archive.org. The clip begins with part of the interview with Rumsfeld on Meet the Press. Note how the former Secretary of Defense states matter-of-factly that there are many such complexes in the Afghan mountains, going beyond claims made in the original reports.
Curtis exposes how this was little more than blatant propaganda used to incite fear, to make the mostly British and American public think Al-Qaeda was indeed a grave threat that needed eradicating. This wasn’t some rag-tag bunch of terrorists with little support, these were advanced extremists that could only be handled with high tech weapons and massive military force. And it worked. This is at least in part how – with other similar stories – the US government justified increased military spending on advanced weaponry following 911, even though the perpetrators used box cutters and a little flight training to achieve the attack. The message and purpose was clear: we should simply cower in fear while allowing our leaders to protect us against such a tremendous threat, all the while expanding the military industrial complex.
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.
