| There’s
something almost obscene about a map that was passed around among
senior Bush administration officials and a select group of oil
company executives in the spring of 2001. It doesn’t show
the kind of detail normally shown on maps — cities, towns,
regions. Rather its detail is all about Iraq’s oil. The
southwest is neatly divided, for instance, into nine “Exploration
Blocks.” Stripped of political trappings, this map shows
a naked Iraq, with only its ample natural assets in view. It’s
like a supermarket meat chart, which identifies the various parts
of a slab of beef so customers can see the most desirable cuts
… Block 1 might be the striploin, Blocks 2 and 3 are perhaps
some juicy tenderloin, but Block 8 — ahh, that could be
the filet mignon.
The map might seem crass, but it was never meant for public consumption.
It was one of the documents studied by the ultra-secretive task
force on energy headed by U.S. vice president Dick Cheney, and
it was only released under court order after a long legal battle
waged by the public interest group Judicial Watch.
Another interesting task force document, also released under court
order, was a two-page chart titled “Foreign Suitors for
Iraqi Oilfields.” It identifies 63 oil companies from 30
countries and specifies which Iraqi oil fields each company is
interested in and the status of the company’s negotiations
with Saddam Hussein’s regime. Among the companies are Royal
Dutch/Shell of the Netherlands, Russia’s Lukoil and France’s
Total Elf Aquitaine, which was identified as being interested
in the fabulous, 25-billion-barrel Majnoon oil field. Baghdad
had “agreed in principle” to the French company’s
plans to develop this succulent slab of Iraq. There goes the filet
mignon into the mouths of the French!
What makes these documents particularly striking is the fact that,
as we now know from several insider accounts, the Bush administration
was actively focused from its first days in office on overthrowing
Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. So, at the same time that the White
House was considering toppling Saddam, it was also keenly studying
Iraq’s oil fields and assessing how far along foreign companies
were in their negotiations with Saddam for a piece of Iraq’s
oil. Dick Cheney, former CEO of oil services giant Halliburton
Company, was masterminding both the task force deliberations and
the push to invade Iraq.
Cheney’s central role in these two initiatives — both
launched with a sense of urgency almost immediately after the
Bush administration took office — is noteworthy, particularly
given Cheney’s extremely influential role within the administration.
The fact that Cheney is focused on both invading Iraq and, at
the same time, energy policy, is certainly suggestive of a possible
connection between the invasion and a desire for Iraq’s
oil — the very thing that is always vehemently denied.
The task force documents certainly point to a commercial interest
in Iraq’s oil and the danger of it falling into the hands
of eager foreign oil companies, rather than ending up in the rightful
hands of eager U.S. oil companies. Indeed, as the documents show,
foreign oil companies were already nicely positioned for future
involvement in Iraq, while the major U.S. oil companies, after
years of U.S.-Iraqi hostilities, were largely out of the picture,
and would have been the big losers if UN sanctions had simply
been lifted. “The U.S. Majors stand to lose if Saddam makes
a deal with the UN [on lifting sanctions],” noted a report
by Germany’s Deutsche Bank in October 2002.
Presumably, the disadvantaged position of U.S. oil companies in
Saddam’s Iraq was discussed at meetings of Cheney’s
task force — and with representatives of those same U.S.
oil companies. The administration has refused to divulge exactly
who met with the task force, and continues to fight legal challenges
to force disclosure of the names. (A 2003 report by the General
Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, concluded
that the task force had relied on advice from oil industry officials.)
The administration’s close ties to the industry are legendary.
As the non-partisan Washington-based Center for Responsive Politics
has noted, George W. Bush received more money from the oil and
gas industry in the 1999–2000 period than any other U.S.
federal candidate had received over the previous decade.
One intriguing piece of evidence suggesting Big Oil’s involvement
in plans about Iraq was a National Security Council (NSC) document,
dated February 2001, directing NSC staff to co-operate fully with
Cheney’s task force. This might seem odd, since the task
force was focused on energy, while the NSC is focused on military
matters. But the NSC document, reported in The New Yorker
magazine, noted that the task force would be considering the “melding”
of two policy areas: “the review of operational policies
towards rogue states” and “actions regarding the capture
of new and existing oil and gas fields.” This certainly
implies that the Cheney task force was considering geopolitical
questions about actions related to the capture of oil and gas
reserves in “rogue” states, including presumably Iraq.
This suggests that Big Oil, through the Cheney task force, was
involved with top administration officials in discussions about
getting control of oil in Iraq, even as the administration was
drawing up plans for an invasion. Since Big Oil has sought to
distance itself from the administration’s decision to invade
Iraq, this apparent involvement certainly helps explain the otherwise
baffling level of secrecy surrounding
the task force.
One
reason that regime change in Iraq was seen as offering significant
benefits for Big Oil was that it promised to open up a treasure
chest which had long been sealed — private ownership of
Middle Eastern oil. A small group of major international oil companies
once privately owned the oil industries of the Middle East. But
that changed in the 1970s when most Middle Eastern countries (and
some elsewhere) nationalized their oil industries. Today, state-owned
companies control the vast majority of the world’s oil resources.
The major international oil companies control a mere 4 percent.
The majors have clearly prospered in the new era, as developers
rather than owners, but there’s little doubt that they’d
prefer to regain ownership of the oil world’s Garden of
Eden. “[O]ne of the goals of the oil companies and the Western
powers is to weaken and/or privatize the world’s state oil
companies,” observes New York-based economist Michael Tanzer,
who advises Third World governments on energy issues.
The possibility of Iraq’s oil being reopened to private
ownership — with the promise of astonishing profits —
attracted considerable interest in the run-up to the U.S. invasion.
In February 2003, as U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell held
the world’s attention with his dramatic efforts to make
the case that Saddam posed an imminent threat to international
peace, other parts of the U.S. government were secretly developing
plans to privatize Iraq’s oil (among other Iraqi assets).
A confidential 100-page contracting document, drawn up by the
U.S. Agency for International Development and the U.S. Treasury
Department, laid out a wide-ranging plan for a “Mass Privatization
Program… especially in the oil and supporting industries.”
The Pentagon was also working on plans to open up Iraq’s
oil sector. In the fall of 2002, months before the invasion, the
Pentagon retained Philip Carroll, a former CEO of Shell Oil Co.
in Texas, to draft a strategy for developing Iraqi oil. Carroll’s
plans apparently became the basis of a proposed scheme, which
became public shortly after the war, to redesign Iraq’s
oil industry along the lines of a U.S. corporation, with a chairman,
chief executive and a 15-member board of international advisers.
Carroll was chosen by Washington to serve as chairman, but the
plans were shelved after they encountered stiff opposition inside
Iraq.
Still, the prospect of privatizing Iraq’s oil remained of
great interest to U.S. oil companies, according to the Robert
Ebel, from the influential Washington-based Center for Strategic
and International Studies. Ebel has close ties to the oil industry.
He is a former vice-president of Enserch Corporation, a Dallas-based
oil exploration company, and he worked closely with top officials
from Exxon, Halliburton and Aramco as director of a two-year project
on the future of energy. In an interview in his Washington office,
Ebel said it was up to Iraq to make its own decisions, but he
made clear that U.S. oil companies would prefer Iraq abandon its
nationalization. “We’d rather not work with national
oil companies,” Ebel said bluntly, noting that the major
oil companies are prepared to invest the $35 to $40 billion to
develop Iraq’s reserves in the coming years. “We’re
looking for places to invest around the world. You know, along
comes Iraq, and I think a lot of oil companies would be disappointed
if Iraq were to say ‘we’re going to do it ourselves.’
”
Along comes Iraq?
How fortuitous. U.S. oil companies just happened to have tens
of billions of dollars that they wanted to invest in undeveloped
oil reserves when Iraq presented itself, ready for invasion.
Along comes Iraq, indeed.
Excerpted from It’s the Crude, Dude: War, Big Oil,
and the Fight for the Planet. Copyright © Linda
McQuaig 2004. Published by Doubleday Canada. Reproduced by arrangement
with the Publisher. All rights reserved.
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