- This Looming War Isn't About Chemical Warheads
- or Human Rights: It's About Oil
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- Along with the concern for 'vital interests' in the Gulf,
this war was concocted five years ago by oil men such as Dick Cheney.
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- I was sitting on the floor of an old concrete house in
the suburbs of Amman this week, stuffing into my mouth vast heaps of lamb
and boiled rice soaked in melted butter. The elderly, bearded, robed men
from Maan ö the most Islamist and disobedient city in Jordan ö
sat around me, plunging their hands into the meat and soaked rice, urging
me to eat more and more of the great pile until I felt constrained to point
out that we Brits had eaten so much of the Middle East these past 100 years
that we were no longer hungry. There was a muttering of prayers until an
old man replied. "The Americans eat us now," he said.
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- Through the open door, where rain splashed on the paving
stones, a sharp east wind howled in from the east, from the Jordanian and
Iraqi deserts. Every man in the room believed President Bush wanted Iraqi
oil. Indeed, every Arab I've met in the past six months believes that this
ö and this alone ö explains his enthusiasm for invading Iraq.
Many Israelis think the same. So do I. Once an American regime is installed
in Baghdad, our oil companies will have access to 112 billion barrels of
oil. With unproven reserves, we might actually end up controlling almost
a quarter of the world's total reserves. And this forthcoming war isn't
about oil?
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- The US Department of Energy announced at the beginning
of this month that by 2025, US oil imports will account for perhaps 70
per cent of total US domestic demand. (It was 55 per cent two years ago.)
As Michael Renner of the Worldwatch Institute put it bleakly this week,
"US oil deposits are increasingly depleted, and many other non-Opec
fields are beginning to run dry. The bulk of future supplies will have
to come from the Gulf region." No wonder the whole Bush energy policy
is based on the increasing consumption of oil. Some 70 per cent of the
world's proven oil reserves are in the Middle East. And this forthcoming
war isn't about oil?
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- Take a look at the statistics on the ratio of reserve
to oil production ö the number of years that reserves of oil will
last at current production rates ö compiled by Jeremy Rifkin in Hydrogen
Economy. In the US, where more than 60 per cent of the recoverable oil
has already been produced, the ratio is just 10 years, as it is in Norway.
In Canada, it is 8:1. In Iran, it is 53:1, in Saudi Arabia 55:1, in the
United Arab Emirates 75:1. In Kuwait, it's 116:1. But in Iraq, it's 526:1.
And this forthcoming war isn't about oil?
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- Even if Donald Rumsfeld's hearty handshake with Saddam
Hussein in 1983 ö just after the Great Father Figure had started using
gas against his opponents ö didn't show how little the present master
of the Pentagon cares about human rights or crimes against humanity, along
comes Joost Hilterman's analysis of what was really going on in the Pentagon
back in the late 1980s.
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- Hilterman, who is preparing a devastating book on the
US and Iraq, has dug through piles of declassified US government documents
ö only to discover that after Saddam gassed 6,800 Kurdish Iraqis at
Halabja (that's well over twice the total of the World Trade Center dead
of 11 September 2001) the Pentagon set out to defend Saddam by partially
blaming Iran for the atrocity.
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- A newly declassified State Department document proves
that the idea was dreamed up by the Pentagon ö who had all along backed
Saddam ö and states that US diplomats received instructions to push
the line of Iran's culpability, but not to discuss details. No details,
of course, because the story was a lie. This, remember, followed five years
after US National Security Decision Directive 114 ö concluded in 1983,
the same year as Rumsfeld's friendly visit to Baghdad ö gave formal
sanction to billions of dollars in loan guarantees and other credits to
Baghdad. And this forthcoming war is about human rights?
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- Back in 1997, in the years of the Clinton administration,
Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and a bunch of other right-wing men ö most involved
in the oil business ö created the Project for the New American Century,
a lobby group demanding "regime change" in Iraq. In a 1998 letter
to President Clinton, they called for the removal of Saddam from power.
In a letter to Newt Gingrich, who was then Speaker of the House, they wrote
that "we should establish and maintain a strong US military presence
in the region, and be prepared to use that force to protect our vital interests
[sic] in the Gulf ö and, if necessary, to help remove Saddam from
power".
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- The signatories of one or both letters included Rumsfeld,
Paul Wolfowitz, now Rumsfeld's Pentagon deputy, John Bolton, now under-secretary
of state for arms control, and Richard Armitage, Colin Powell's under-secretary
at the State Department ö who called last year for America to take
up its "blood debt" with the Lebanese Hizbollah. They also included
Richard Perle, a former assistant secretary of defense, currently chairman
of the defense science board, and Zalmay Khalilzad, the former Unocal Corporation
oil industry consultant who became US special envoy to Afghanistan ö
where Unocal tried to cut a deal with the Taliban for a gas pipeline across
Afghan territory ö and who now, miracle of miracles, has been appointed
a special Bush official for ö you guessed it ö Iraq.
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- The signatories also included our old friend Elliott
Abrams, one of the most pro-Sharon of pro-Israeli US officials, who was
convicted for his part in the Iran-Contra scandal. Abrams it was who compared
Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon ö held "personally responsible"
by an Israeli commission for the slaughter of 1,700 Palestinian civilians
in the 1982 Sabra and Chatila massacre ö to (wait for it) Winston
Churchill. So this forthcoming war ö the whole shooting match, along
with that concern for "vital interests" (i.e. oil) in the Gulf
ö was concocted five years ago, by men like Cheney and Khalilzad who
were oil men to their manicured fingertips.
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- In fact, I'm getting heartily sick of hearing the Second
World War being dug up yet again to justify another killing field. It's
not long ago that Bush was happy to be portrayed as Churchill standing
up to the appeasement of the no-war-in Iraq brigade. In fact, Bush's whole
strategy with the odious and Stalinist-style Korea regime ö the "excellent"
talks which US diplomats insist they are having with the Dear Leader's
Korea which very definitely does have weapons of mass destruction ö
reeks of the worst kind of Chamberlain-like appeasement. Even though Saddam
and Bush deserve each other, Saddam is not Hitler. And Bush is certainly
no Churchill. But now we are told that the UN inspectors have found what
might be the vital evidence to go to war: 11 empty chemical warheads that
just may be 20 years old.
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- The world went to war 88 years ago because an archduke
was assassinated in Sarajevo. The world went to war 63 years ago because
a Nazi dictator invaded Poland. But for 11 empty warheads? Give me oil
any day. Even the old men sitting around the feast of mutton and rice would
agree with that.
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- © 2003 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd
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