|
|
An informed person is harder to control. What is the crisis? Iraq has always been a key player in the Middle East oil market, and was the original source of Middle Eastern oil. A 1947 planning document entitled “United States Petroleum Policy” states: the US should seek the “removal or modification of existent barriers to the expansion of American foreign oil operations” and to “…promote…the entry of additional American firms into all phases of foreign oil operations.” Until the mid-1950s the main “barrier” in Iraq was Britain, for whom oil was a prime reward of its colonization of much of the region. In fact, when Standard Oil of California secured the first Western oil concession in Saudi Arabia in 1932, a much bigger and more powerful consortium was on the scene to try to block the deal - the Iraq Petroleum Company (IPC). The British-dominated IPC did not believe that oil would be found in Saudi Arabia (the general consensus of opinion at the time), and they already had more oil than they knew how to handle in Iraq, so they allowed the US a toe-hold in the Arabian peninsula. The IPC, made up of the fore-runner companies to BP (British Petrol), Shell, Total of France, and Exxon, actually suppressed news of oil discoveries in Iraq and held down oil production by various devices in order to keep prices up. These restrictive practices, begun in the 1930s, continued into the 1960s, as the US Senate Subcommittee on Multinational Corporations found in 1974. An internal IPC survey document from 1967 made clear that the company had discovered vast oil reservoirs, but had “plugged these wells and did not classify them at all because the availability of such information would have made the companies” bargaining position with Iraq more troublesome. But foreign oil interests have an enemy: nationalism, i.e. tendencies of leaders or populaces to want the benefits from their resources for themselves. For some time the Arab nationalists were led by Egyptian President Nasser, long an inspiration in the Arab world for his defiance of Western neocolonialism. Libya first became a US enemy in 1969. Western oil companies in Libya had been supplying Europe with oil which was valuable for its proximity and low-sulfur content. IPC was governing its production in accordance with the overall world-wide interests of the participating companies and not solely in accordance with the interests of Iraq”. Andreas Lowenfeld noted that “This of course has been one of the principal charges of the government of Iraq against IPC”. The conflict between the corporations and the government came to a head in 1972, when Iraq decided to nationalized the property of the IPC. After a painful battle, the IPC finally signed the nationalization agreement on February 28, 1973, receiving compensation from Baghdad but without buyback arrangements (buyback is an arrangement whereby companies have the right to buy a large percentage of oil at a favorable price) neither for US neither for British companies (though there was for France). The move was immensely popular: vice president Saddam Hussein summarized it as “our wealth returned to us.” Now, the surviving members of the IPC cartel, three of the world’s largest public companies, BP, Shell, and ExxonMobil, have indicated that they may exploit the fall of Saddam Hussein with a fight for their old possessions in Iraq, arguing that that the compensation/nationalization deal they agreed to in 1973 was signed under duress. Professor Thomas Walde, formerly the principal UN interregional adviser on oil and gas law, has observed of the oil companies, “If I were their adviser, I would develop this into a bargaining chip with the new government. It would play a role in the race for getting new titles.” So there are great prizes at stake, both in terms of contracts for reconstructing the Iraqi oil industry, and for developing new concessions in the original source of Middle Eastern oil - with phenomenal profits on the horizon. Also, the second American-Iraqi war will be the culmination of a process that began a half-century ago when the United States for the first time employed its Central Intelligence Agency secretly and illegally to overthrow a democratically elected government. The 1953 CIA-engineered coup d’état against Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadeq of Iran started a chain of events that included Ayatollah Khomeini’s revolution of 1979 against the Shah and his patron, the United States. This revolution destroyed one of the “twin pillars” of American strategy in the Persian Gulf -- cultivation of authoritarian, undemocratic client states in Saudi Arabia and Iran as sources of oil and bulwarks against Soviet influence. The Islamic revolution in Iran demanded a major reorientation of American foreign policy in the area. In that same year, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan and the United States covertly began to arm anti-Soviet Afghanis, as well as Osama bin Laden. This set in motion a complex series of realignments that would ultimately lead veterans of the anti-Soviet Afghan resistance to organize the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, against New York and Washington. After the 1979 revolution in Iran, the United States decided to back the sworn opponent of the Islamic clerics who had come to power there -- namely, Iraq’s secular tyrant Saddam Hussein. In September 1980, Saddam invaded Iran. When it looked like Iran might defeat him, the Reagan administration covertly began to supply him with satellite intelligence and weapons, including precursors for development of biological weapons and the basic ingredients for the chemical agents he used, in President Bush’s memorable words, “to gas his own people.” The Iraq-Iran war ended with a ghastly loss of life on both sides.
|
