Iraq’s oil Alex Evans

November 1, 2007 | More on Climate and resource scarcity, Global system, Middle East and North Africa | No comments

At last, enough time to blog about Jim Holt’s terrific article on Iraq’s oil in the 18 October edition of the London Review of Books.  Here’s how he begins:

Iraq is ‘unwinnable’, a ‘quagmire’, a ‘fiasco’: so goes the received opinion. But there is good reason to think that, from the Bush-Cheney perspective, it is none of these things. Indeed, the US may be ‘stuck’ precisely where Bush et al want it to be, which is why there is no ‘exit strategy’.

Holt goes on to observe that as much as a quarter of the world’s remaining oil reserves may be in Iraq – and that Iraq’s new oil law (drafted by the US) would work strongly to American advantage.  Under the draft law, the Iraq National Oil Company would retain control of just 17 out of 80 oilfields, while the rest – including all yet-to-be-discovered oil – would remain under the control of foreign companies for the next thirty years. 

US hegemony in country, Holt goes on, would be maintained by five ’super-bases’, which are all already currently under construction. That these “enduring” bases are being built is not news – the Independent on Sunday broke the story in the UK back in April last year, when Andrew Buncombe wrote that:

Major Joseph Breasseale, a senior spokesman for the coalition forces’ headquarters in Iraq, told The Independent on Sunday: “The current plan is to reduce the coalition footprint into six consolidation bases – four of which are US. As we move in that direction, some other bases will have to grow to facilitate the closure [or] transfer of smaller bases.”

As Buncombe’s article observed back then, some of the largest bases under construction were in the middle of the desert, away from large urban centres.  I remember thinking at the time that pulling out of urban centres only made sense as part of a statebuilding strategy if the US was extremely confident of an improving security situation and of being able to hand control over to Iraqi security forces sooner rather than later - which clearly wasn’t the case.  But as garrisons for defending criticial oil infrastructure, on the other hand… on that count, the superbases would make much more sense.

Holt’s LRB article came only a month after Alan Greenspan’s comment in his newly published memoirs that the Iraq war was “largely about oil”.  (Greenspan subsequently clarified his comments in an interview with Bob Woodward for the Washington Post, when he said that “I was not saying that that’s the administration’s motive. I’m just saying that if somebody asked me, ‘Are we fortunate in taking out Saddam?’ I would say it was essential.”)

It’s remarkable that the debate over why the US went to war in Iraq is only now getting underway, four years after the conflict began.  As Holt quotes in his article,

Many people are still perplexed by exactly what moved Bush-Cheney to invade and occupy Iraq. In the 27 September issue of the New York Review of Books, Thomas Powers, one of the most astute watchers of the intelligence world, admitted to a degree of bafflement. ‘What’s particularly odd,’ he wrote, ‘is that there seems to be no sophisticated, professional, insiders’ version of the thinking that drove events.’

That’s exactly right.  For all that books like Woodward’s State of Denial give us a valuable insight into the extent of Administration incompetence and turf warfare in planning the war and its aftermath, what they don’t give us is a really surgical dissection of the path to war and the various possible motives.  What began with the charge that Saddam Hussein already had WMD then became the weaker charge that he could not be allowed to flout previous Security Council Resolutions on the issue; when it became apparent that there weren’t even live WMD programmes, the basis for intervention shifted again ex post to a humanitarian intervention.

The role of oil, on the other hand, never really got discussed seriously in the media.  When, back in January 2003, Colin Powell said: “The oil of Iraq belongs to the Iraqi people. Whatever form of custodianship there is … it will be held for and used for the people of Iraq”, I was surprised by how little debate ensued.  I remember arguing at an IPPR seminar in early 2003 that his words seemed evasive.  The question of who owns the oil was of secondary importance; the real question – as the race between China and the US for access to energy supplies in Africa showed very clearly – was who gets to buy it, and on what terms. 

There’s much more to discuss here, and here’s hoping that the apparent initial stirrings of a proper discussion of the role of oil in the path ro war in Iraq proves to be just that.  But for now, here’s Holt’s conclusion:

The occupation may seem horribly botched on the face of it, but the Bush administration’s cavalier attitude towards ‘nation-building’ has all but ensured that Iraq will end up as an American protectorate for the next few decades – a necessary condition for the extraction of its oil wealth.

If the US had managed to create a strong, democratic government in an Iraq effectively secured by its own army and police force, and had then departed, what would have stopped that government from taking control of its own oil, like every other regime in the Middle East? On the assumption that the Bush-Cheney strategy is oil-centred, the tactics – dissolving the army, de-Baathification, a final ‘surge’ that has hastened internal migration – could scarcely have been more effective.

The costs – a few billion dollars a month plus a few dozen American fatalities (a figure which will probably diminish, and which is in any case comparable to the number of US motorcyclists killed because of repealed helmet laws) – are negligible compared to $30 trillion in oil wealth, assured American geopolitical supremacy and cheap gas for voters. In terms of realpolitik, the invasion of Iraq is not a fiasco; it is a resounding success.

Still, there is reason to be sceptical of the picture I have drawn: it implies that a secret and highly ambitious plan turned out just the way its devisers foresaw, and that almost never happens.

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