DAMMAM, 13 July 2007 — The word is out, neither for the first nor the last time, oil was the casus belli for the war on Iraq. What Brendan Nelson, the Australian defense minister, said last week about the oil connection to the “coalition of the willing” in the adventure to Baghdad is by now an almost established fact. Very few now bother to counter or negate this impression. Yet for the otherwise very articulate Australian Prime Minister John Howard, it was still not convenient to speak out the truth — even four years and hundreds of thousands of deaths later — for reasons of politics indeed.

In the meantime, the new defense review released by the Australian government underlined that “resource security” in the Middle East was a priority. “Energy security is extremely important to all nations throughout the world, and of course, in protecting and securing Australia’s interests,” the Australian defense minister emphasized in a rather sudden burst of truth.

And when he stressed, “Obviously the Middle East itself, not only Iraq, but the entire region is an important supplier of energy, oil in particular, to the rest of the world,” he was not saying something very startling though. Everyone in the energy fraternity, from the Vienna-based International Energy Agency (IEA) to the Energy Information Administration (EIA) of the US and OPEC, all know this well and accept it as fact.

But Howard had to spring once again into action to defend a virtually indefensible position. What a difficult position to sustain really! While refuting his defense minister when he said, “We’re not there (in Iraq) because of oil and we didn’t go there because of oil, we don’t remain there because of oil,” many simply discarded it as more political rhetoric. What else could one say?

Following the top boss, Australian Treasurer Peter Costello also joined in the denial that Australian troops were primarily in Iraq to secure oil supplies. “We’re fighting for something much more important here than oil; this is about democracy and freedom in the Middle East,” he emphasized before reporters.

Almost in the same vein, Washington also rejected all assertions that it “invaded” Iraq for oil and nothing else but oil. It is now a well-known fact that Washington policy researchers were asked to generate blueprints to privatize Iraq’s oil wealth even before the invasion in 2003. And the current oil bill pending approval in the Iraqi Parliament is largely the fruit of that effort at the boardrooms of the major consulting houses in Boston and New York.

Current literature is filled with stories about how, long before the Sept. 11 attacks, the Bush administration made plans for the war on Iraq — for oil. Within days of the inception of the Bush administration, a serious debate started to rage within the US State Department on ways to overcome this national dependence. The battle was over setting a new American foreign policy to elevate US welfare internally and globally.

America today roughly needs 22 million oil barrels a day, more than 25 percent of the global total, to keep its economy on track. The recent declaration by US Defense Secretary Robert Gates that Washington needed to have a military presence in Iraq for decades is seen by many as a green signal to secure control of Iraqi energy resources and provide security to US oil majors readying to enter Baghdad as soon as the oil bill gets the parliamentary seal of approval in Iraq. It may be unfortunate and may be even a curse for the poor Iraqis, but the fact remains that Iraq boasts the second largest oil reserve in the world.

Ironically, the invasion of Iraq has done everything but ensure security of supply, or indeed stability of price. International oil prices are at historic highs, already toying with the mid-1970s price range once again. This is in part because of increased demand from China and other emerging Asian economies, but also because of disruptions to Iraq’s oil industry caused by the “invasion” of Baghdad.

In fact, because of the campaign of “shock and awe” that was unleashed on Baghdad, Iraq’s oil infrastructure has been damaged further, repeatedly by insurgent sabotage. During the current phase of the “illegal occupation,” corruption, theft, and widespread mismanagement have compounded the problems of energy infrastructure in energy-rich Iraq. The problem is such that no one — from Iyad Allawi to Nouri Al-Malki — seems able to control it.

Iraqi oil production for the first quarter of 2007 was just 1.95 million barrels of oil a day, well down on pre-invasion figures of three million barrels a day. Improvements to the Basra oil terminal in the Gulf have raised expectations that production might finally be on the rise, but such is the level of violence ravaging the country (and which the US too appears powerless to prevent) that such hopes appear far-fetched.

On has to underline that force and occupation cannot secure energy supplies to the energy-thirsty world. Energy security requires another set of dimensions. One has to understand that in the current global scenario, both producers and consumers have a symbiotic relationship: Both have an incentive to do business, a fact sometimes lost to friends in Washington, who have had access to cheap and plentiful oil for 150 years and want it to continue that way. The world has changed and is still changing and everyone needs to adapt to this transition.

Market forces would continue to dominate the energy markets. If the consumers need energy, the sellers and producers also need to sell. One cannot help but underline that this two-way, symbiotic relationship can only ensure energy security to the world.