Deep Blade Archive
Cutting through the machinations and
effects of the U.S. empire
Issue #2
Posted 03/12/2003
Archive of 2003 War Resources
Archive of 1991 Gulf War Articles
911 Archive
Why War?
The role of oil
It is patently obvious that nothing U.S.
President George W. Bush or any other administration figure
says in public about its reasons for going to war can be
accepted as stated by a person who is thinking critically.
Presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq is irrelevant.
Otherwise possession of nuclear, biological or chemical weapons
would be a basis for attacking North Korea, or India, Pakistan,
or Israel, or even now-hostile France.
U.S. National Security Advisor Condoleeza
Rice belied this point in a March 9 interview with ABC’s This Week host
George Stephanopolous. Stephanopolous asked her if the attack
on Iraq would be called off if Saddam did disarm. She was
taken aback, as if she would never consider allowing that to
happen. Apparently war would go ahead even if the Iraqis turned
over their kitchen knives.
As a corollary, since a weapons threat
from Iraq is not really operative, present or even future
security has little to do with this war. In fact it is likely
to make the United States and many other countries less secure
for a very long time.
Amongst those of us convinced the
administration is not motivated by a weapons threat,
speculation is brisk about what is really driving the march to
war. Three related areas in which the search for reasons should
be concentrated are (1) control of oil; (2) demonstration of
U.S.power; and (3) transformation of the political
landscape.
The anti-war movement has been consistent
to point out that blood should not be spilt for oil. This is a
good sentiment. It on some level the best issue we have in
helping people understand the real reasons why the war is
happening. But I do depart company, slightly, with many in the
peace movement that the war is simply about a desire to seize
Iraqi oil. In fact, the U.S. could control all of the Iraqi oil
it wanted to without a war simply by allowing sanctions to be
lifted and cozying up with Saddam Hussein again. Furthermore,
division of the oil spoils clearly will not be an easy way for
U.S. and U.K. corporations to make a quick buck, though they
may be helped in the long run after French and Russian
concessions are displaced.
Furthermore, oil can’t be seen as
an immediate total solution for Iraq’s humanitarian and
financial needs. See, for example, a Washington Post dialogue
on the topic found here. (This
material is among the best business-oriented poo-pooings of the
oil motivation behind the war.)
But, this war is indeed about oil in
another sense, as oil has a key role in strategic planning. In
that regard, the war is a major piece of the puzzle for a
long-term project being executed by a small group of
ultra-hawks now installed in the White House, the highest
levels of the Pentagon, and the State Department. Iraq will
become a hub of U.S. bases. The oil reserves will guarantee
that the military will have plenty of fuel far into the future.
And it will become a lot easier for the U.S. to influence the
political landscape through oil allocation and the threat of
force.
Whether or not some profits from Iraqi
oil are placed in a U.N. trust and accrue to the Iraqi people
as Colin Powell rightly suggests they should, it is the
decision-making power about the oil that is most important to
U.S. planners. The installation at first of a U.S. military
viceroy and then a U.S. client government, democratic or not as
long as it is U.S.-compliant, is now seen as a key component in
achieving some very significant over-arching policy goals.
Re-alignment of the political landscape
of the Middle East and the significant demonstration effect
this will have on the world do have a lot to do with the
underlying reasons for this war. The underscore value of waging
it without direct provocation from Iraq will send a message
that will be read loud and clear in Iran, Syria, Jordan,
Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and throughout the world. This message
is that force might be a quick reply to any nation that runs
afoul of U.S. desires. Through war waged on this basis, the
United States will demonstrate for the first time in a major
action the quite explicit military doctrine known as
“full spectrum dominance,’ as it asserts its
hegemony over land, sea, air, and space, as well as
information. We should not diminish the demonstration effects
this war would have on the ability of the U.S. to preempt
future potential competitors.
To further understand the
administration’s political goals, we ought to pay
attention to the speech Bush gave before the American
Enterprise Institute on February 26, 2003. Here he discussed
liberating the people of Iraq and inspiring regional democracy.
Taking Bush literally on his desire to eliminate the tyrant
Saddam in order to bring the joys of American political freedom
is difficult to do given that American is fixing to drop an
awesome arsenal on top of millions of Iraqi civilians. What
kind of liberation follows incineration of a half-million to a
million people? Would America turn Iraq over to an Islamist
government that would be the likely post-war electoral result
in the majority-Shiite country? Doubt it! So Bush’s
message here really is a coded statement of hawk-preferred
speculative political transformations, behavioral presumptions
that could go badly wrong thus requiring continued application
of force, and what will be critical support for the brutal
solution Israel’s Sharon government appears to be
pursuing with regard to the Palestinian question.
Clues about how to read this code may be
found in the opinions and writings of administration officials.
There is a whole series of chain reactions that the ultra-hawks
are hoping for: a crackdown on and maybe an eviction of the
Palestinians that Israel will conduct with impunity during and
after the war, a breakdown of Syrian and Jordanian support for
the Palestinians as vital Iraqi oil will go to those countries
with new and different strings attached, and a decrease in
Saudi influence as Iraqi oil will now be in the U.S.-friendly
domain. Iran could very likely be the next target of force.
In a published article (“After Iraq:
The plan to remake the Middle East,” The New Yorker, February
17-24, 2003), Nicholas Lemann interviews and reviews the work
of a number of officials. In it, he describes policy
considerations in the writings of key State Department adviser,
David Wurmser, who wrote an influential book called
“Tyranny’s Ally: America’s Failure to Defeat
Saddam Hussein.”
Lemann presents Wurmser’s views on
the effect crushing Saddam will have on Iran:
“‘Launching a policy and resolutely carrying it
through until it razes Saddam's Ba'thism to the ground will
send terrifying shock waves into Teheran.’ In Wurmser's
scenario, a post-Saddam government in Iraq that includes
meaningful participation by Iraq's Shiite majority will remove
the Iranian mullahs' most powerful claim to legitimacy, which
is that they represent the only regional power center for
Shiites.”
Lemann continues, “One can easily
derive from Wurmser's book a crisp series of post-Saddam moves
across the chessboard of the Middle East. The regime in Iran
would either fall or be eased out of power by an alliance of
the radical students and the more moderate mullahs, with the
United States doing what it could to encourage the process.
After regime change, the United States would persuade Iran to
end its nuclear-weapons program and its support for terrorists
elsewhere in the Middle East, especially Hezbollah. Syria, now
surrounded by the pro-American powers of Turkey, the
reconfigured Iraq, Jordan, and Israel, and no longer dependent
on Saddam for oil, could be pressured to cooperate with efforts
to clean out Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and Hezbollah. As Syria
moved to a more pro-American stand, so would its client state,
Lebanon. That would leave Hezbollah, which has its headquarters
in Lebanon, without state support. The Palestinian Authority,
with most of its regional allies stripped away, would have no
choice but to renounce terrorism categorically. Saudi Arabia
would have much less sway over the United States because it
would no longer be America's only major source of oil and base
of military operations in the region, and so it might finally
be persuaded to stop funding Hamas and Al Qaeda through Islamic
charities.”
Here emerges a risky strategy that seems
to address in a totally convoluted manner the terrible
terrorism that mostly affects Israel. But beyond
Wurmser’s circumspect presentation of the effect of this
war is a more sinister possible future for the Palestinians.
And the peace movement has been too quiet about the Palestinian
issue as it relates to the war.
On this matter, former CIA political
analyst Bill Christison writes, “[Current] absence of
discussion makes it easier for Israel to slip its new proposal
for large-scale aid from the U.S. through Congress while
continuing its harsh and unjust actions in the West Bank and
Gaza. Furthermore, talk is continuing to mount in Israel of
‘transfer,’ that is, expelling the Palestinians in
the West Bank to Jordan, leaving the West Bank open to total
takeover by the Israelis. This transfer is an integral part of
the Middle East transformation that the peace movement seems
not to want to talk about. If the war comes, the peace
movement's present silence on the subject will also make it
easier for Israel actually to carry out the process of
‘transfer.’”
In summary, strategic military basing and
fuel supply, consolidated Middle East political leverage
through decision making about oil allocation, demonstration of
aggressive doctrines of preemption and global dominance, chain
reaction political realignment especially affecting Iran,
Syria, Jordan and Saudi Arabia, and a brutal Israeli crackdown
and possible eviction of the Palestinians are all effects of
this war that have been weighed in policy circles. Weapons of
mass destruction that may or may not be in Iraq are irrelevant
by comparison. The result of these considerations by Bush and
his administration has been a decision to deploy of an awesome
force now ready to strike Iraq. Most of these considerations
have been reported in various media, but are absent from the
headlines and front-page drumbeat war coverage. As a result,
the American people are woefully uninformed about underlying
motivations for the war.
In the short term, some Americans,
informed or not but usually not, like to feel powerful because
of the fact that we can dominate and destroy Iraq while
changing its government, occupying its lands, and rebuilding it
in our image at our president’s will. Many of these fine
Americans unfortunately swallow the pretexts hook line and
sinker. They are unaware of or willfully ignore the war’s
underlying motivations and potentially disastrous consequences.
Will it dawn on us some day that we have
allowed another disingenuous administration write yet another
sorry entry for the annals of U.S. history to be filed with
Vietnam and the human tragedy for civilians and soldiers alike
that that war represented? If the war can be stopped, this can
be prevented. Otherwise, I cry for my country.
Aftermath?
First installment of a series
What I am condemning is that one power,
with a President who has no foresight, who cannot think
properly, is now wanting to plunge the world into a holocaust.
I am happy that the people of the world - especially those of
the United States of America - are standing up and opposing
their own President.
Nelson Mandela
What is in store if against all the will
of a large majority of the world’s population, Bush
launches the war? Will, as Nelson Mandela suggests, world
holocaust ensue? Or will victory silence all of the anti-war
critics, as Bush and company believes it will, as a flowering
of democracy in the Middle East ushers in a golden age for the
whole world?
“Aftermath?” Will be a
continuing feature. It refers to speculation about how the
future will look after a U.S. attack on Iraq. I hope a day will
soon come when it does not make sense to talk about the
aftermath of a war that did not happen.
It is a big project Bush and company are
taking on here. They are counting on victory to shut up critics
like me and the rest of the peace movement. Maybe they will be
victorious. Or maybe it'll just look that way. Covering up the
truth of the carnage and putting a phony rosy face on the
aftermath will be a definite possibility.
Afghanistan may provide some clues. Marc
Kaufman's excellent investigation reported in the conservative Wall Street Journal reveals much of the truth about America's
"successful" role model for the rest of the Middle
East: Steady erosion of U.S. forces in Afghanistan and nightly
attacks on American and other international troops, the anarchy
in the cities outside Kabul, the warlords and drug trafficking,
and steadily increasing toll of murders are the order of the
day. Training camps have been set up inside Afghanistan again.
As Robert Fisk reports in a recent article for the UK
Independent, the latest battle between US forces and enemy
"remnants" near Spin Boldak in Kandahar province
involved Arab fighters. Hekmatyar's Hezb-i-Islami forces have
been "forging ties" with al-Qa'ida and the Taliban;
as did the mujahedin "terrorist remnants" did during
the winter of 1980, a year after the Soviet invasion. More
truth from Fisk includes stories about an American killed by a
newly placed landmine in Khost; 16 civilians blown up by
another newly placed mine outside Kandahar; grenades tossed at
Americans or international troops in Kabul; further reports of
rape and female classroom burnings in the north of Afghanistan.
Meanwhile American rebuilding aid is not forthcoming and the
provisional government flirts with collapse. Basically, the
U.S. is slowly abandoning the country. Is this the kind of
success we want to send tens of thousands of our young fighting
men and women to stage in Iraq? Now, this is not how I believe
Iraq will be treated, given the oil reserves. But expect the
face of the occupation to be a lot rosier than reality.
Another Wall
Street Journal report said that in
contingency planning for Iraq, the U.S. Agency for
International Development solicited proposals for various goods
and services including the seaports and airports projects,
schools, education and health services. Contracts up to $900
million could be issued. Five companies were asked to bid:
Houston-based Halliburton Co.’s Kellogg Brown and Root;
Bechtel Group of San Francisco; Fluor of Aliso Viejo,
California; Louis Berger Group of East Orange, New Jersey; and
Parsons Corp. of Pasadena, California, the paper said.
Halliburton was run by Vice President Dick Cheney for five
years until 2000. Big, well-connected U.S. companies appear to
be counting a lot of chickens long before they hatch.
“Guiding Principles for U.S.
Post-Conflict Policy in Iraq” is a report of an
Independent Working Group cosponsored by the Council on Foreign
Relations and the James A. Baker III Institute. Striking here
is the sensitivity to appearances. There is a deathly fear in
the halls of power that people will call imperialism by its
name.
One point of the Council vision for
post-war Iraq would, “Emphasize the leading role that the
Iraqi people must play in running Iraq and convey that the
United States has no desire to become the de facto ruler of
Iraq. To quote Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Iraq’s
future government ‘is not for the United States, indeed
not even for the United Nations to prescribe. It will be
something that’s distinctively Iraqi.’”
Dream on.... j
