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Bush Comes Clean: It Was About the Oil
by Ted Rall
Thursday 24 April 2003
Corporate Vultures Swoop Into the Killing Fields
Iraq is going to hell. Shiites are killing Sunnis, Kurds are killing Arabs
and Islamists are killing secular Baathists. Baghdad, the cradle of human
civilization, has been left to looters and rapists. As in Beirut during the
'70s, neighborhood zones are separated by checkpoints manned by armed tribesmen.
The war has, however, managed to unite Iraqis in one respect: everyone loathes
the United States.
Some Iraqis hate us for deposing Saddam Hussein. No dictator remains in power
without the tacit support of at some of his subjects. Now that we've committed
the cardinal sin of conquest--getting rid of the old system without thinking up
a new one--even those who chafed under Saddam blame us for their present
misery.
Others resent our Pentagon-appointed pretender, 58-year-old banker/embezzler
Ahmed Chalabi. The State Department points out that Iraq's new puppet autocrat
has zero support among Iraqis, having lived abroad since 1958. But who knows?
Maybe he was a really popular kid.
Thousands of Iraqis have been reduced to poverty, raped and murdered by
rampaging goons as U.S. Marines stood around and watched. Wanna guess how long
it will take them to "get over it"? We watched the plunder of museums in Mosul
and Baghdad safe at home with our tisk-tisk dismay, but Iraqis will remain
outraged by the wanton devastation we wrought through war, permitted through
negligence and shrugged off through arrogance. ("We didn't allow it," Rumsfeld
shrugged. "It happened.") Imagine foreign troops sitting idly, laughing as
hooligans trashed the Smithsonian, stole the gold from Fort Knox and burned down
the Department of the Interior.
That was us in Iraq.
But let's forget this penny ante stuff. Let the real looting begin! George W.
Bush's bestest buddies, corporate executives at companies which donate money in
exchange for a few rounds of golf and a few million-dollar favors, are being
handed the keys to Iraq's oil fields.
Bush's brazen Genghis Khan act seems carefully calculated to confirm our
worst suspicions. First he appoints retired general Jay Garner, president of a
GOP-connected defense contractor, SYColeman Corp., as viceroy of occupied Iraq.
"The idea is we are in Iraq not as occupiers but as liberators, and here comes a
guy who has attachments to companies that provided the wherewithal for the
military assault on that country," marvels David Armstrong, a defense analyst at
the National Security News Service. A smart and/or decent president would have
picked a civilian for a civil administration post.
Then Bush slips a $680 million contract to the Bechtel Group, whose
Republican-oriented board includes such Reagan-era GOP luminaries as secretary
of state George Schulz and defense secretary Caspar Weinberger (the late William
Casey, Reagan's CIA director, was a Bechtel executive). The deal puts the
company in position to receive a big part of the $100 billion estimated total
cost of Iraqi reconstruction. According to the Center for Responsive Politics,
Bechtel gave Republican candidates, including Bush, about $765,000 in PAC, soft
money and individual campaign contributions between 1999 and 2002.
Finally, refusing to accept bids from potential competitors, Bush grants a
two-year, $490 million contract for Iraqi oil field repairs to Halliburton Co.,
the Houston-based company where Dick Cheney worked as CEO from 1995 to 2000. "It
will look a lot worse if Halliburton gets the USAID [Agency for International
Development] contract, too," Bathsheba Crocker, an Iraq specialist for the
Center for Strategic and International Studies, warned in March. "Then it really
starts looking bad." Guess what! Halliburton has since scored a piece of that
$600 million USAID contract.
Are we looking bad yet?
Only Bush's most intimate friends were invited to bid for these contracts.
Even businesses based in Great Britain, where Tony Blair risked his political
career to support Bush, have been excluded from a rigged process where only
U.S.-based, Republican-led, Bush-connected companies need apply.
Two senior Democratic Congressmen, Henry Waxman and John Dingell, are asking
the General Accounting Office to look into these sleazy kickback deals. "These
ties between the vice president and Halliburton have raised concerns about
whether the company has received favorable treatment from the administration,"
their letter reads. Well, duh. But don't count on appropriate action--like
impeachment proceedings--from the do-nothing Dems.
Bush's right-wing Gang of Four--Cheney, Rummy, Condi and Wolfy--saw Operation
Iraqi Freedom as a chance to line their buddies' pockets, emasculate the Muslim
world, place U.S. military bases in Russia's former sphere of influence and,
according to the experts, lower the price of oil by busting OPEC. "There will be
a substantial increase in Iraqi oil production [under U.S. occupation], and I
wouldn't be surprised if schemes emerged to weaken, if not destroy, OPEC," says
Jumberto Calderón, former energy minister of Venezuela. Former OPEC secretary
general Fadhil Chalabi (no relation to Ahmed) estimates that increased
exploration could potentially double Iraq's proven reserves, which would raise
production from 2.4 to 10 million barrels a day. Such Saudi-scale production
would "bring OPEC to its knees," says Chalabi. The cartel's member nations, ten
of 11 of them predominantly Muslim, would suffer staggering increases in poverty
as a result of falling oil revenues, plunging some into the political chaos that
breeds Islamist fundamentalism. Meanwhile, the people of Iraq, whose
self-flagellating Shias already make the evening news look like a rerun of
Iran's 1979 Islamic revolution, would starve as foreign infidels raked in
billions thanks to the oil beneath their land.
Time to dust off the duct tape.
Ted Rall is the author of "Gas War: The Truth Behind the American
Occupation of Afghanistan," an analysis of the underreported Trans-Afghanistan
Pipeline project and the real motivations behind the war on terrorism. Ordering
information is available at amazon.com and barnesandnoble.com.
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is
distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in
receiving the included information for research and educational
purposes.)
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