Why the US is in Iraq

The president defines a permanent occupation and it is about the oil

In the wake of US Representative John Murtha's quite reasonable call to stop the killing and maiming in Iraq on a rapid timetable, President Bush has begun a sweeping war propaganda campaign. The White House released a ``Victory'' strategy outline and the president began a series of rallying speeeches, the first of which was delivered from Annapolis last Wednesday.

Of course, the Bush strategy is laden with fantasy. I'll just refer to Murtha, the only elected establishment figure, respected by the US military itself, who has come out telling it like it really is in Iraq. Here is how Sy Hersh analyzed the truth of Murtha's position in an interview with Amy Goodman on Tuesday's Democracy Now!:

And so, for Murtha to suddenly say it's over, as he did three weeks ago or two weeks ago, as I wrote in this article, it drove the White House crazy. They were beyond mad, as somebody said to me, because they know that the generals are talking to him. So here you have a case where we don't have -- you know, the generals are terrified pretty much, as they always are. That's just the nature of the game. But they don't speak truth to power. They're not telling the American people exactly what's going on, and they're clearly not telling the White House, because the White House doesn't want to hear.

So Murtha's message is a message, really, from a -- you can consider it a message from a lot of generals on active duty today. This is what they think, at least a significant percentage of them, I assure you. This is, I’m not over-dramatizing this. It's a shot across the bow. They don't think it's doable. You can't tell that to this President. He doesn't want to hear it. But you can say it to Murtha, you can say it to Inouye, you can say it to Stevens.

Despite this deep pessimism evidently emanating from the US military itself, President Bush has set forth his ``victory'' agenda in such a way that the US would never leave Iraq. The way President Bush defines ``victory'' -- ``defeating the multi-headed enemy in Iraq -- and ensuring that it cannot threaten Iraq's democratic gains once we leave'' -- in fact ensures permanent US troop presence because the ``democratic gains'' are all defined in terms of US advantage. Gains for the US in Iraq hardly represent the true will of the Iraqi people, so the fight against the ``multi-headed enemy'' is really a fight against most of the Iraqi population. It is clear that the bulk of the Iraqi population never will accept US control of their economy and resources -- making the need for direct US enforcement of its ``gains'' permanent.

If real information can be located, it is not hard to discern just how deep this opposition by Iraqis to US control of their country runs. According to a secret poll commissioned by the British Ministry of Defense and obtained by the Telegraph of London, 82 percent of Iraqis are ``strongly opposed'' to the presence of foreign troops in their country. Not only that, 45 per cent of people feel attacks on those troops are justified.

Just a few weeks ago, even the American puppets inside the Iraqi government along with Sunni opposition figures agreed to language in a communiqué at last month's Cairo Conference sponsored by the Arab League recognizing ``the legitimate right of all peoples to resistance''. Furthermore, the sentiment that the war should be settled and foreign troops should be removed from Iraq was widely shared by conference participants and Baathist operatives (who were excluded from the conference but were present nonetheless).

There would seem to have been a diplomatic opening there for extirpating the US from Iraq with at least a chance of some sort of reconciliation and avoidance of civil war. But as with Murtha's proposal, the White House rejected the Cairo conference. Is it seen within the White House and some quarters of the Pentagon not to be in US interest to stop the violence in Iraq through US withdrawal and strong diplomacy? Without the US present, as Murtha I believe correctly suggests, the Iraqi forces would stand up on their own and could handle these matters without the bloodshed predicted all throughout the US media and governmental establishment.

Why UNSCR 1637?
Meanwhile, a month ago (November 8) the US ran Resolution 1637 through the UN Security Council. This went almost entirely unreported in US media. The main provisions in this resolution maintain the rapidly-narrowing ``multinational'' force (Italy, South Korea, and other formerly-willing coalition members are flying the coop in droves), and the DFI (Development Fund for Iraq). That buttons things up nicely ahead of the December 15 parliamentary elections, requiring a positive act by the new government in order for it to request removal of US troops and saves the embarrassing spectacle of a parliamentary vote requesting presence of the chiefly-American force – against the wishes of 82% of the Iraqi people.

The DFI has been the container for Iraqi oil revenue since May 2003 and was used by the US occupation administration (the CPA, or Coalition Provisional Authority) as a giant $20 billion slush fund that pales the much-celebrated Oil-for-Food program scandal. The underlying policy behind obtaining such a Security Council resolution would not seem to be an intention to leave Iraq anytime soon.

It is about the oil
Ananlysis of the real motivations behind the US attack, invasion, conquest, looting and indefinite occupation of Iraq leads to oil. While the White House Iraq ``Victory'' outline does have a few mentions of oil in its ``Progress on the Economic Track'' section, they are cursory and based on touting production numbers merely for propaganda effect:

Oil production increased from an average of 1.58 million barrels per day in 2003, to an average of 2.25 million barrels per day in 2004. Iraq presently is producing on average 2.1 million barrels per day, a slight decrease due to terrorist attacks on infrastructure, dilapidated and insufficient infrastructure, and poor maintenance practices. We are helping the Iraqis address each challenge so the country can have a dependable income stream....

Even with this progress, Iraq continues to face multiple challenges in the economic sphere, including: Facilitating investment in Iraq's oil sector to increase production from the current 2.1 million barrels per day to more than 5 million per day....

What the Bush ``Victory'' outline forgets to mention is that currently there are highly secretive negotiations being pushed for oil production sharing agreements or PSAs. A stunning new report from a UK group associated with the Institute for Policy Studies explains in great detail how a massive theft of control of Iraq's oil is being planned and executed as the touted ``democratic'' elections are being used to legitimate US ``gains'' from the process:

In October 2005, a new Constitution was accepted in a referendum of the Iraqi population. Like much of the Constitution, the oil policy section is open to some interpretation. Apparently referring to fields not currently in production, it states:

``The federal government and the governments of the producing regions and provinces together will draw up the necessary strategic policies to develop oil and gas wealth to bring the greatest benefit for the Iraqi people, relying on the most modern techniques of market principles and encouraging investment''...

...The debate over oil ``privatisation'' in Iraq has often been misleading due to the technical nature of the term, which refers to legal ownership of oil reserves. This has allowed governments and companies to deny that “privatisation” is taking place. Meanwhile, important practical questions, of public versus private control over oil development and revenues, have not been addressed.

The development model being promoted in Iraq, and supported by key figures in the Oil Ministry, is based on contracts known as production sharing agreements (PSAs), which have existed in the oil industry since the late 1960s. Oil experts agree that their purpose is largely political: technically they keep legal ownership of oil reserves in state hands (3), while practically delivering oil companies the same results as the concession agreements they replaced.

Running to hundreds of pages of complex legal and financial language and generally subject to commercial confidentiality provisions, PSAs are effectively immune from public scrutiny and lock governments into economic terms that cannot be altered for decades.

In Iraq’s case, these contracts could be signed while the government is new and weak, the security situation dire, and the country still under military occupation. As such the terms are likely to be highly unfavourable, but could persist for up to 40 years.

Furthermore, PSAs generally exempt foreign oil companies from any new laws that might affect their profits. And the contracts often stipulate that disputes are heard not in the country’s own courts but in international investment tribunals, which make their decisions on commercial grounds and do not consider the national interest or other national laws. Iraq could be surrendering its democracy as soon as it achieves it.

There should be no doubt about why the US faces an insurgency in Iraq. And like the situation of the mid-20th century when foreign oil companies held concessions to Iraq's oil on draconian terms, the insurgency is permanent as long as the US insists upon keeping its chokehold.