“From this desk, seven and a half years ago, President Bush announced the beginning of military operations in Iraq. Much has changed since that night. A war to disarm a state became a fight against an insurgency. Terrorism and sectarian warfare threatened to tear Iraq apart. Thousands of Americans gave their lives; tens of thousands have been wounded. Our relations abroad were strained. Our unity at home was tested,” President Obama said in a speech last week declaring an end to Mission Iraq.
The US however, is to maintain a considerable non-combat presence in Iraq — even after the ‘pull-out.’
Imperial powers rarely keep their pledge to leave occupied lands, especially if oil is there to seduce them. Britain occupied Egypt in 1882 to safeguard the Suez Canal. It promised to leave within a few years, but the last British soldier left Egypt in 1956. Britain expelled the Ottoman Turks from Iraq in 1917-18 and promised to leave as soon as possible. But the lure of Iraq’s oil did not permit them and so the last British soldier left only in1959. And it may not be too different today.
As the US ‘combat’ troops move out, ‘Big Oil’ is moving in. The rush is on for Iraqi oil. And the American ‘non-combat’ military presence would be there in Iraq to reassure the US companies that their investments are safe, covered and protected.
A July report from the US government’s Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction says oil production in Iraq is currently about 2.4 million barrels per day. The goal, by 2017 is to produce 12 million barrels per day. This is tall order and may not be possible, without the active presence of ‘Big Oil’ in Iraq.
There’s a pile of oil money pouring into Iraq right now.
Since last year, the Iraqi government has awarded 11 development deals to various consortia. More investment is on the way. Iraq’s Oil Ministry is planning to build four new refineries that will nearly double the country’s refining capacity. Oil services firms like Weatherford International and Schlumberger are expanding their operations in the country. Earlier this month Halliburton won a deal to drill 15 wells in the Basra province in southern Iraq, though the financial terms have not been disclosed — yet.
Iraqi oil is too big a catch to overlook. And it has been so from the very beginning too.
Oil and war in Iraq have remained inextricably intertwined. Despite the initial camouflage, it has been a widely held belief that the entire Iraq campaign was for oil.
In the months after the war, in June 2003, a leading White House hawk, Paul Wolfowitz, the then deputy defense secretary, conceded oil was the main reason for military action against Iraq. When asked why a nuclear power such as North Korea was being treated differently from Iraq, where hardly any weapons of mass destruction had been found, he pointed out: “Let’s look at it simply. The most important difference between North Korea and Iraq is that economically, we just had no choice in Iraq. The country swims on a sea of oil.”
Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan also spilled the beans when he declared in his memoirs: ‘The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World’ that the prime motive for the war in Iraq was oil.
“I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil,” he said.
Labour politician and former UK environment minister Michael Meacher also admitted it was basically to secure oil interests.
When asked whether the war in Iraq was about oil he said: “The connection is 100%. It is absolutely overwhelming.”
And then he conceded: “It was principally, totally and comprehensively to do with oil. This was about assuming control over the Middle East and over Iraq, the second largest producer in the Middle East. It was about securing as much as possible of the remaining supplies of oil.”
But did the war achieve the (unstated) objectives?
Ian Rutledge, writing in the Financial Times on April 11, 2005 underlined: “The US appears to have fought a war for oil in the Middle East, and lost it. The consequences of that defeat are now plain for all to see.”
And the consequences, even from an energy perspective, are not that promising to say the least. In October 2004, USA Today reported that the US-led invasion “resulted in the loss of an average of 2 million barrels a day of Iraqi oil from world markets.”
And this resulted in considerable tightening of the markets — with prices spiraling to $147 a barrel in summer 2008.
Oil economist Dr. Mamdouh Salameh, who advises both the World Bank and the UN Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO), told The Independent on Sunday, that had their been no war on Iraq, the price of oil would never have crossed the $40 mark.
The Iraq war increased energy costs by a staggering $6 trillion, he underlined.
When the US overthrew Saddam Hussein seven years ago, it had pinned its hopes on Iraq’s vast but underdeveloped oil resources, calculating that petroleum-fueled prosperity fed by a wave of foreign investment would give Iraqis the tools and motivation to build a modern, Western-oriented state.
But even this goal remains a speck on the horizon.
Today, Iraq pumps less oil than it did under Saddam. Iraqis are stalemated in forming a new government nearly six months after national elections.
And the country’s political divisions, aggravated by the struggle for control of Iraq’s oil potential, have led to fears that it could erupt in civil war, revert to a dictatorship or split along religious and ethnic fault lines.
A stable Iraq is still a far cry. It has been a disaster on every count — the energy world being no exception!
