If you want to understand his tricks, watch the conjuror’s other hand, the one that he is not waving around while the other is attracting your attention. One of the few things to be said in favor of his blundering American presidency is that, as a conjuror, George Bush has not been too bad even if the underlying trick has actually been deplorable.
Bush’s prestidigitation over Iraq has served up a series of different distractions. The first was false threat about the imminence of terrible destruction from Saddam’s imaginary stockpile of nuclear and biological weapons of mass destruction. We know now the WMD reason was an utter falsehood. For his second trick Bush fabricated the link between Saddam and Al-Qaeda so successfully that one poll showed a majority of Americans believing Saddam played a role in the 9/11 attacks. But we know now that this too was a lie; Saddam viewed Al-Qaeda as a threat to his own Baathist dictatorship. Al-Qaeda has exploited the chaos in Iraq that Bush ushered in. For his third trick Bush assured us that he was going to pull a sweet perfumed flower of democracy from his hat, which would be a radiantly blooming example to the rest of the region. Or as Bush put it in his second inaugural speech: America would spread “the fire of freedom” to the “darkest corners of our world”. The Iraqis bravely made it to the polls twice, even under terrorist threats, but the “fire of freedom” Bush has promised has been supplanted by actual fires.
The key distraction in this latest bit of the presidential flimflam came when he announced US political, economic, and security engagement would extend beyond his presidency to protect vital American interests in the region. That is what he calls “enduring relationship.”
So what are those interests and what have all of Bush’s tricks tried to conceal? Oil.
Oilman Bush, along with his oilman vice president and his big-business backers, has always wanted to control Iraq’s vast oil supplies. He still wants the Maliki government to privatize the oil industry and agree to so-called “profit-sharing agreements” — one of the so-called “benchmarks” of progress that even the Democrats in the US support — which would be a crass violation of any sovereignty an ideal and plural Iraqi government should have. He wants US troops to stay to protect US capital and the for-profit, postwar reconstruction that floods in, administered through sketchy no-bid contracts that encourage wasteful spending that guarantees profits for the contractors, which would no doubt be dominated by the usual suspects.
And why does corporate America want power and influence over Iraqi oil? The conjuring hand that we are not supposed to be watching desires to limit the access of the Indian and Chinese economies to the hydrocarbon lifeblood of their burgeoning growth. In this way America can defend its economic dominance against its two greatest challengers. Abracadabra and presto!
