Iraq & Vietnam: US gets what it wants

See previous posts: Look who's back in charge of Iraqi oil, Why the US is in Iraq, and from last spring, Chalabi holding Iraq oil portfolio

I can recommend a new post about Pentagon swindler Ahmed Chalabi and US designs on control of Iraqi oil Rodger Payne put up yesterday. In ``Oil big shot'' He reviews pre-war reporting on how US military intervention would lead to a ``bonanza for American oil companies long banished from Iraq.''

Rodger asks, ``Could it be that they've gotten what they wanted all along?''

Reminds me of something Chomsky has said about the US in Vietnam, in relation to what is now happening in Iraq.

NOAM CHOMSKY (January 2005): Well, I don't think that Vietnam was a mistake; I think it was a success. This is somewhere where I disagree with just about everyone, including the left, right, friends and so on.

...the primary concern was the one that shows up in virtually all intervention: Guatemala, Indonesia, Nicaragua, Cuba, Chile, just about everywhere you look at. The concern is independent nationalism which is unacceptable in itself because it extricates some part of the world that the US wants to dominate. And it has an extra danger if it is likely to be successful in terms that are likely to be meaningful to others who are suffering from the same conditions....

A fully independent Vietnam could truly dominate Indochina, which could become an independent nationalist force, a rotten apple which would affect others: Thailand, Malaya, which was a big problem at the time, possibly Indonesia....

By around 1960 the US recognized that it could not maintain a client state in Vietnam. The client state, which had already killed maybe 60,000 people, had engendered resistance which it could not control. So in 1962 Kennedy simply invaded the country outright. That's when US bombing started, chemical warfare, attempts to drive people into concentration camps and so on, and from then on it just escalated. By 1967 South Vietnam was practically destroyed....

The US and England and the rest were just content to see Vietnam destroyed. That was much worse than anything happening in Iraq. It looked at that point as if they would conquer Vietnam. The Tet Offensive [a major national offensive by anti-US Vietnamese forces in early 1968] made it clear it was going to be a long war. At that point the business world turned against the war and decided this is just not worth it. They said we have already achieved the main objectives and Vietnam is not going to undergo successful independent development. It will be lucky if it survives. So it is pointless; why waste the money on it. The main goal had been achieved by the early seventies.

You start reading in the Far Eastern Economic Review that this was a pointless enterprise, you guys have basically won so just go home and quit. Why ruin your economy, spoil your situation in the world scene and so on. And they assumed that now that it is destroyed it will sooner or later be absorbed into our system, which is in fact what happened. Well that's a partial victory not a defeat. The defeat was that they didn't achieve their maximal goal which was to turn all of Indochina into something like Guatemala or the Philippines, and that they didn't achieve, but they did achieve their main goal.

What about Iraq, then? Given the level of terror, assassination, and bombing -- perpetrated by the US, it's puppets, as well as by resistance to the US -- it is obvious that the US has completely and utterly failed in stated goals President Bush described a couple of years ago as including ``transforming a place of torture chambers and mass graves into a nation of laws and free institutions'' to form a ``decent and democratic society at the center of the Middle East'' that is ''free of assassins, and torturers, and secret police.''

President Bush said of these ``assassins'' that, ``They know that as democracy rises in Iraq, all of their hateful ambitions will fall like the statues of the former dictator.''

Just the opposite has happened. Creation of Iraq's new pro-foreign-investment Constitution and the elections that followed permanently have split the country and have inspired even deeper sectarian conflict. Torture is rampant while hundreds of newly-assassinated bodies are found lying along the roads of Iraq every week.

Chomsky sees, however, that unlike Vietnam, ``Iraq is worth owning''. With decisions about the future control of Iraq's oil now at a critical point, the table has been set through the pro-US-oil-company Constitution writing phase. All the reconstruction failure, death & destruction is irrelevant as long as the major goals are met.

And that major goal is, according to Chomsky, a desire of US warmakers to ``control that massive [oil] resource'' because ``it is a source of world control.''

Also, ``the profit from it also matters, and having bases there that allow you to organize the region in your own interests, of course that matters''.

It is yet to be seen if the US ultimately will succeed. The Iraqi resistance has proven surprisingly tenacious. It is able to beat down oil production nearly to the crisis point. Hence the takeover of the oil ministry by the Pentagon agent Chalabi.

Meanwhile Cheney is out again, in friendly confines at the Heritage foundation, continuing to peddle ``a long struggle, unlike any we have ever known'', following up on his October declaration that the ``fight'' the US now has in Iraq and other places will require ``decades of patient effort''.

Curiously, Cheney never utters the word ``oil'' during his self-declarations of the nobility of his ruinous war.