Iraq And The New Great Game

In the run-up to the Gulf War, government officials put forth a bewildering array of reasons for the war,culminating with Secretary of State Baker's fatuous claim that "it's about jobs."

In this coming war, perhaps the earliest and most consistently telegraphed since Cato the Elder's repeatedcalls for the destruction of Carthage, a similar confusion reigns. The same reflexively secretiveadministration that didn't want to disclose which companies it met with and for how long when formulating itsenergy policy has released at least four different plans for achieving "regime change" --widely-announced "covert" operations, the "Afghan strategy," "Gulf War lite,"and the "Baghdad/inside out option." It has also released numerous reports of generals, militarystrategists, and other insiders who oppose the war, to the point that people seriously wonder what's going on.

This confusion has reached such heights that many are beginning to call this a "Wag the Dog" war,an attempt to avoid a Republican disaster in the November elections. While the exact timing may be affected bydomestic considerations, the claim that they are the reason for the war itself is implausible when youconsider that there has been talk about war on Iraq ever since 9/11, at a time when the world was Bush'soyster. In fact, the war is simply a continuation of the "regime change" policy of over ten years'standing -- except that in the post-9/11 world the government believes that it can get away with anything byinvoking terrorism as a threat.

So what is really going on?

Let's start with what are not the reasons for the war. None of those put forth by the Bush administrationhold water.

Shortly after 9/11, there was an attempt to relate Iraq to the attacks. The original claim that MohammedAtta, one of the hijackers, met with Iraqi intelligence in Prague earlier in the year, quickly fell apart, asCzech officials engaged in an array of recantations and re-recantations. There are also allegations, recentlyresurrected, that Iraq had a terrorist training camp at Salman Pak, where Islamic fundamentalists were trainedin how to hijack planes. It's hard to argue against any of this simply because there's so little there there;in fact, for months the administration stopped claiming any connection, unthinkable had there been anyconcrete evidence. The best current argument for this connection is Donald Rumsfeld's dictum that "theabsence of evidence is not evidence of absence."

The main reason given for the war, of course, is the threat of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.

Scott Ritter, formerly one of the most hawkish of the U.N. weapons inspectors in Iraq, has statedrepeatedly that Iraq is "qualitatively disarmed;" although there's no way to account for every nutand bolt and gallon of biological growth medium in the country, it had (as of December 1998) no functionalcapacity to develop biological, chemical, or nuclear weapons. The common counter-argument is that Iraq couldacquire them and the longer we wait the greater the chances.

Given the widespread credulous acceptance of this argument, it's worth nothing that even the extremelyone-sided pro-war panel on the first day of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee's hearings on Iraq wasunable to produce any reason why Saddam would jeopardize his position by plotting an attack that would surelyinvite massive retribution. In fact, although he has used weapons of mass destruction before, most notablyagainst the Kurds (at which time he was aided and abetted by the United States), the most plausible scenarioin which he would use them again is under threat of American attack.

Beyond that, successive U.S. administrations have done all they could to sabotage arms control in Iraq andworldwide.

First, in December 1998, President Clinton pulled out the weapons inspectors preparatory to the"Desert Fox" bombing campaign -- even though he knew this meant the end of weapons inspections. Thisis normally reported in the press as the "expulsion" of the weapons inspectors.

Next, in a move that stunned and angered the international community, George W. Bush killed the proposedenforcement and verification mechanism for the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention -- in December 2001,after the threat of bioweapons attacks was particularly clear.

Passed in 1972, the convention has over 100 signatories, including Iraq and the United States. Because ofthe lack of an enforcement mechanism, countries were free to violate it, as did Iraq and the United States --both have attempted to weaponize anthrax, for example, as we found out when anthraxkilled six Americans in the fall of 2001.

In 1995, those signatories started negotiations to provide enforcement through mutual, intrusiveinspections. For six years, the U.S. government threw up constant roadblocks, finally terminatingnegotiations. The reason? Biological weapons inspections in the United States might imperil the profits ofbiotech companies. Of course, had the enforcement mechanism passed, it could have been used to press forinspections in Iraq.

Even worse, in March 2002, the United States removed Jose Bustani, head of the Organization to PreventChemical Weapons, from office. According to George Monbiot of the Guardian, it was because Bustani's effortsto include Iraq in the Chemical Weapons Convention (subjecting it to chemical weapons inspections) woulddeprive the United States of a casus belli.

There is consensus by arms control experts that weapons inspections in Iraq were extraordinarily effectivein finding and dismantling weapons of mass destruction. Clearly, the administration isn't really concernedabout this threat.

Constant protestations in the Senate hearings and elsewhere to the contrary, the administration is also notconcerned about democracy in Iraq.

Consider the U.S. reaction to the Iraqi intifada, the mass uprising of Iraqis after the Gulf War, inresponse to a call by George Bush, Sr., to the Iraqi people to overthrow Saddam. In February and March of1991, at the peak of that rebellion, Saddam's regime was seriously imperiled.

In order to save Saddam's regime, the U.S. military deliberately lifted the existing no-fly zone, allowingSaddam to use his helicopter gunships against the rebels; it seized arms depots so the rebels couldn't armthemselves; and it even allowed the Republican Guards safe passage through its ranks to put down the uprising.

At the time, Richard Haas of the State Department explained, "What we want is Saddam's regime withoutSaddam." In 1996, on ABC, Brent Scowcroft explained further that the United States did not want a populardemocratic movement that overthrew Saddam -- it wanted a palace coup.

When all the official justifications collapse, what is left is the same ugly three-letter word that hasalways been at the core of U.S. Middle East policy -- oil. It's important to clarify, however, that U.S.policy is neither simply about access to oil, which is how mainstream commentators frame it, nor is itcompletely dictated by oil companies, as some on the left claim.

Access to oil can be obtained by paying for it, as other countries do. The United States has a differentattitude because it is an empire, not merely a nation. On any given day, U.S. troops are in 140 countriesaround the world, with permanent bases in over half of those. After two decades of structural adjustment andone of "free trade," the United States has more control over the internal policies of othercountries than the elected governments of those countries. Although "globalization" was recently themore visible face of this imperial expansion, it always had a military underpinning -- and currently themilitary aspect is dominant.

This empire is predicated, like past empires, on political control for the purpose of economic control andresource and surplus extraction. Oil is the world's most important resource, and control of the flow andpricing of oil is a potent source of political power, as well as a significant source of profits. Oilcompanies, arms companies, and general corporate America are all intimately concerned with U.S. Middle Eastpolicy.

Iraq nationalized its oil in 1972, taking complete control over its own selling and pricing of oil and overthe use of oil revenues. Iraq's invasion of Kuwait put an end to that.

The sanctions imposed after that and maintained to this day have had many effects. In addition to causingthe death of over 500,000 children under the age of five (according to a UNICEF study), sanctions havepartially broken Iraqi control of Iraq's oil. Starting with a complete ban on oil sales, they were graduallymodified so that now there are no restrictions on sales. Iraq cannot make its own decisions about oilexploration and investment, nor until recently about repair of existing oil production facilities. Mostimportant, all revenues from oil sales are deposited in a bank account in New York administered by theSecurity Council. Money is disbursed from that account, only with the permission of the United States, andalmost exclusively to foreign corporations.

The sanctions have turned the Iraqi regime permanently against the United States. If they were lifted, thegovernment would make oil exploration deals with French and Russian companies, not American ones. Continuationof the sanctions is a constant political burden for the United States. The Bush administration wants a war toextricate itself from this stalemate, by replacing Saddam with a dictator who will makedeals with American companies and follow American dictates.

The Afghanistan war was the opening move in a potentially far-reaching gambit. It was not particularlyabout fighting terrorism -- it was planned before 9/11, and even U.S. government officials have concluded (ina June 16 New York Times article) that it may have made "rooting out" al-Qaeda more, not less,difficult, because of the geographic dispersion caused by the war. It was also not just about a natural gaspipeline through Afghanistan, although those plans seem to be going forward. It also got the U.S. militaryinto all seven "stans," including potentially oil-and-gas-rich Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan.

If Bush gets his Iraq war, given Russia's rapprochement with NATO, there will also be a complete militaryencirclement of Iran, the other part of the "axis of evil" (North Korea was thrown in for ballast).At that point, Iran will find it increasingly difficult not to accede to U.S. wishes.

ExxonMobil, Shell, and other companies are currently negotiating with Saudi Arabia to do natural gasexploration. Although the Saudis say they will never allow foreign corporations to get their hands on crudeoil, this is an important beginning.

According to "The New Oil War," an article in the March/April 2002 issue of Foreign Affairs, OPECcountries have not increased their pumping capacity in over twenty years. This is the natural consequence,though the article doesn't say it, of the dual U.S. policy of propping up corrupt feudal elites that use therevenues from oil sales to invest in U.S. and European corporations instead of investing them in their owneconomies and of "containment" (i.e., targeting for destruction) those few countries, like Iraq andIran, that do try to develop their internal economies. Over the next twenty years, world requirements forMiddle East oil are expected to double.

The United States seeks nothing less than the establishment of complete control over all significantsources of oil, especially of the Middle East, which holds roughly two thirds of the world's proven reserves.The twin requirements of U.S. imperial control and the constant feeding of an industrial system based onever-increasing levels of fossil fuel consumption dovetail with the systematic attempts of the United Statesto keep Middle Eastern countries from developing independent economies to set the stage for large-scalere-colonization, through war, "covert" action, and economic coercion.

This war is not about minor domestic squabbles between Democrats and Republicans, but about a very ugly NewWorld Order, in which innocents in the Middle East, Central Asia, and in the United States pay for theimperial dreams of an increasingly detached American elite.

Rahul Mahajan is a member of the Nowar Collective and the Green Party candidate for Governor of Texas. His book, "TheNew Crusade: America's War on Terrorism," (Monthly Review Press, April 2002) has been described as"mandatory reading for anyone who wants to get a handle on the war on terrorism." He is currentlywriting a book on Iraq titled "Axis of Lies: Myths and Reality about the U.S. War on Iraq."

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