No Blood for... er... um...: The Oil Majors Take a Little Sip of the Ol'
Patrimony
By Tom Engelhardt
Created Jun 23 2008 - 9:06am
More than five years after the invasion of Iraq -- just in case you were
still waiting -- the oil giants finally hit the front page.
Last Thursday, the New York Times led [1] with this headline: "Deals with
Iraq Are Set to Bring Oil Giants Back." (Subhead: "Rare No-bid Contracts,
A
Foothold for Western Companies Seeking Future Rewards.") And who were
these
four giants? ExxonMobil, Shell, the French company Total and BP (formerly
British Petroleum). What these firms got were mere "service contracts" --
as
in servicing Iraq's oil fields -- not the sort of "production sharing
agreements" that President Bush's representatives in Baghdad once dreamed
of, and that would have left them in charge of those fields. Still, it was
clearly a start. The Times re****ter, Andrew E. Kramer, added this little
detail: "[The contracts] include a provision that could allow the
companies
to reap large profits at today's prices: the [Iraqi oil] ministry and
companies are negotiating payment in oil rather than cash." And here's the
curious thing, exactly these four giants "lost their concessions in Iraq"
back in 1972 when that country's oil was nationalized. Hmmm.
You'd think the Times might have slapped some kind of "we wuz wrong" label
on the piece. I mean, remember when the mainstream media, the Times
included, seconded the idea that Bush's invasion, whatever it was about --
weapons of mass destruction or terrorism or liberation or democracy or bad
dictators or. well, no matter -- you could be sure of one thing: it wasn't
about oil. "Oil" wasn't a word worth including in serious re****ting on the
invasion and its aftermath, not even after it turned out that American
troops entering Baghdad guarded only the Oil [2] and Interior Ministries,
while the rest of the city was looted. Even then -- and ever after -- the
idea that the Bush administration might have the slightest urge to control
Iraqi oil (or the flow of Middle Eastern oil via a well-garrisoned Iraq)
wasn't worth spending a few paragraphs of valuable newsprint on.
I always thought that, if Iraq's main product had been video games,
sometime
in the last five years the Times (and other major papers) would have had
really tough, thoughtful pieces, asking really tough, thoughtful
questions,
about the effects of the invasion and ensuing chaos on our children's
lives
and the like. But oil, well... After all, with global demand [3] for
energy
on the rise, why would anybody want to invade, conquer, occupy, and
garrison
a country that, as Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz once
observed
[4], "floats on a sea of oil"?
And let's be fair. At the time of the impending invasion, reasonable
people
couldn't possibly have imagined that it had anything to do with oil, not
while George W. Bush was politely ignoring the subject, except when
referring obliquely to Iraq's "patrimony" [5] of "natural resources."
Forget
that our President had had an 11-year [6] career in the energy business
(and
had been Arbusto-ed [7]); or that his Vice President had been the CEO of a
giant energy services cor****ation, Halliburton -- retiring during the
presidential campaign of 2000 with a $34 million severance package [8]; or
that, back in those distant years, he had not hesitated to talk about the
necessity of getting a tad more oil into the international pipeline. (As
he
told [9] an oil industry crowd back in 1999, "By some estimates there will
be an average of two percent annual growth in global oil demand over the
years ahead along with conservatively a three percent natural decline in
production from existing reserves. That means by 2010 we will need on the
order of an additional fifty million barrels a day. So where is the oil
going to come from?" Where indeed? He then answered his own question:
"While
many regions of the world offer great oil op****tunities, the Middle East,
with two-thirds of the world's oil and the lowest cost, is still where the
prize ultimately lies.")
Or how about the President's national security advisor, who was on the
board
of Chevron and had a double-hulled oil tanker, the Condoleezza Rice, named
[10] after her in the oh-so-innocent 1990s. Forget as well the Veep's
secret
energy task force of 2000 (also starring ExxonMobil and pals) which
recommended [11] that the new administration turn its good offices to
convincing Middle Eastern countries "to open up areas of their energy
sectors to foreign investment." Forget it all and be fair.
After all, the only people who thought that oil might have something to do
with the invasion of Iraq weren't on the Times staff. They weren't, in
fact,
in the mainstream at all. And, to put things into context, depending on
your
estimates, there were only somewhere between 11 million and 30 million of
them marching around in the streets of cities and towns all over the
planet
before the invasion, carrying signs that said [12] ludicrous, easily
dismissible things like: "No Blood for Oil," "How did USA's oil get under
Iraq's sand?" and "Don't trade lives for oil!"
Let's face it: Among those who counted, they -- with their simpleminded
slogans on hand-lettered placards -- just didn't count at all. Not when
everyone who was anyone knew that the world was a much, much, much subtler
and much, much more complicated place. No blood for oil? Sure, it was
short
and snappy and easy enough to get on a sign, but also about as absurdly
reductionist, as unsubtle, as uncomplicated as possible.
I mean, really! And, worse yet, that thoughtless crew of demonstrators had
the nerve to suspect -- prospectively, not retrospectively -- the worst of
the Bush administration, even when their betters, men (and a few women)
with
so many years of experience in the ways of Wa****ngton and the world, were
ready to give its top officials the benefit of the doubt. Waving those
silly
signs, they actually expected bad things to happen. It didn't seem to
matter
to them that the President, Vice President, National Security Advisor, and
Secretary of Defense assured them no such thing was possible; assured
them,
in fact, that not to invade would lead [13] to mushroom clouds [14] over
American cities and Iraqi unmanned aerial vehicles [15] spraying bio- or
chemical weaponry along the east coast of the United States.
[16]No wonder those m***** of naïve demonstrators have been erased from
the
blackboard of history. No wonder, since the invasion, the Times hasn't
bothered to attend to them seriously again. No wonder, on the fifth
anniversary of the Bush administration's "cakewalk" to victory in Baghdad,
the newspaper's op-ed page turned to [17] L. Paul Bremer III, Richard
Perle,
and others from the crew that got us into Iraq, or cheered the
administration on, to comment on what had gone wrong, while skipping the
crew in the streets that got it right in the first place.
Now, with a barrel of crude selling at more than quadruple its prewar
price,
more than double [18] its price a mere year ago, the oil majors are
finally
moving in for the. well, let's not say "kill," let's just say that tasty
little sip of the ol' patrimony.
And, by the way, here's how Times re****ter Kramer, in a single paragraph,
managed to (barely) reintroduce those missing prewar demonstrators, while
sidling up to reality and history: "There was suspicion," he wrote, "among
many in the Arab world [notoriously suspicious types, of course] and among
parts of the American public that the United States had gone to war in
Iraq
precisely to secure the oil wealth these contracts seek to extract. The
Bush
administration has said that the war was necessary to combat terrorism. It
is not clear what role the United States played in awarding the contracts;
there are still American advisors to Iraq's Oil Ministry."
Arabs with suspicions and unidentified "parts" of the American public, all
in the same sentence. Still sounds dismissible to me. Well, you know those
types. They deserve no less. They're the sorts who might even be
suspicious
of "American advisors to Iraq's Oil Ministry," or, yet more absurdly, of
those "no-bid" contracts for the oil majors -- and just because it was in
the DNA of the Bush administration to award similar [19] no-bid contracts
to
cor****ate cronies like. uh. Halliburton [20]. But the odds are that "the
Iraqis" who awarded those contracts probably just knew a good idea when
they
saw one up close and personal over so many years.
And now, here we are. Sure, it's kinda thoughtless, kinda embarrassing,
and
yet so typical of ExxonMobil and Co. not to care about making all those
pundits and knowledgeable observers look really, really bad. What an
unfortunate coincidence, this story breaking just now, don't you think? I
mean, after all that blood, American and Iraqi, has been spilled, here
comes
the oil.
It's the sort of thing that could make suspicious Arabs even more so and
give a new life to some really dumb slogans in the U.S. But you know,
sometimes, if you're an oil giant, you just have to bite the bullet. After
all, there's still one heck of a lot of that patrimonial oil in Iraq's
ground. At more than $130 a barrel, someone has to get it out -- and why
not, as Kramer puts it, "western companies with experience managing large
projects"? I mean, after all these years, why not?
Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project [21], runs the
Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. The World According to TomDispatch:
America in the New Age of Empire [22] (Verso, 2008), a collection of some
of
the best pieces from his site, has just been published. Focusing on what
the
mainstream media hasn't covered, it is an alternative history of the mad
Bush years. A brief video in which Engelhardt discusses American
mega-bases
in Iraq can be viewed by clicking here [23].
[Note on further reading: In its follow-up piece on the "no-bid"
contracts,
the Wa****ngton Post added [24] a fifth oil giant, Chevron, to the list and
managed, as well, to include this already familiar paragraph: "A
higher-profile role for Western companies in Iraq's oil industry is likely
to revive speculation that the Iraq war was motivated by a desire to tap
into reserves that were controlled by foreigners until the 1960s, when the
industry was nationalized. The belief is widespread in the Arab world."
Like
some cameo role in a film, this cameo paragraph is evidently all that's
now
left of the largest prewar antiwar movement in history. For some good
background on the history of Western exploitation of Iraqi oil and its
subsequent nationalization, check out Juan Cole's "They're Baaack." [25]
at
his Informed Comment blog. (And, while you're at it, don't miss his recent
devastating description [26] of "the real state of Iraq.") A good source
to
consult for regular Iraqi oil news is Ben Lando's Iraq Oil Re****t [27].]
[Note for TomDispatch readers: It's worth mentioning that the missing
Iraqi
oil story wasn't missing online, and certainly not at TomDispatch. This
site's newest book, The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New
Age of Empire [28], has a section labeled "The Petro-Industrial Complex
and
its Discontents," including striking pieces by Michael Klare and Michael
Schwartz on our gasoholic Pentagon and the prize of Iraqi oil. Again, I
urge
readers to consider sup****ting TomDispatch and its efforts by picking up a
book that should, I think, be in any serious library of our mad age of
Bush
the Younger. -- Tom]
Copyright 2008 Tom Engelhardt
_______
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"A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their
spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their
government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are
suffering deeply in spirit,
and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public
debt. But if the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have
patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an op****tunity of winning
back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are
at
stake."
-Thomas Jefferson
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