Det danske Fredsakademi
Kronologi over fredssagen og international politik 3. September 2012 / Timeline September 3, 2012
Version 3.52. September 2012, 4. September 2012
09/03/2012
Blood For Oil
By John Scales Avery
There is a close relationship between petroleum and war. James A.
Paul, Executive Director of the Global Policy Forum, has described
this relationship very clearly in the following words:
“Modern warfare particularly depends on oil, because
virtually all weapons systems rely on oil-based fuel - tanks,
trucks, armored vehicles, self-propelled artillery pieces,
airplanes, and naval ships. For this reason, the governments and
general staffs of powerful nations seek to ensure a steady supply
of oil during wartime, to fuel oil-hungry military forces in
far-flung operational theaters.”
“Just as governments like the US and UK need oil companies to
secure fuel for their global war-making capacity, so the oil
companies need their governments to secure control over global
oilfields and transportation routes. It is no accident, then, that
the world’s largest oil companies are located in the
world’s most powerful countries.”
“Almost all of the world’s oil-producing countries have
suffered abusive, corrupt and undemocratic governments and an
absence of durable development. Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Libya,
Iraq, Iran, Angola, Colombia, Venezuela, Kuwait, Mexico, Algeria -
these and many other oil producers have a sad record, which
includes dictatorships installed from abroad, bloody coups
engineered by foreign intelligence services, militariization of
government and intolerant right-wing nationalism.”
Iraq, in particular, has been the scene of a number of wars
motivated by the West’s thirst for oil. During World War I,
1914-1918, the British captured the area (then known as
Mesopotamia) from the Ottoman Empire after four years of bloody
fighting. Although Lord Curzon denied that the British conquest of
Mesopotamia was motivated by oil, there is ample evidence that
British policy was indeed motivated by a desire for control of the
region’s petroleum. For example, Curzon’s Cabnet
colleague Sir Maurice Hankey stated in a private letter that oil
was “a first-class war aim”. Furthermore, British
forces continued to fight after the signing of the Murdos
Armistice. In this way, they seized Mosul, the capital of a major
oil-producing region, thus frustrating the plans of the French, who
had been promised the area earlier in the secret Sykes-Picot
Agreement.
Lord Curzon was well aware of the military importance of oil, and
following the end of the First World War he remarked: “The
Allied cause has floated to victory on a wave of oil”.
During the period between 1918 and 1930, fierce Iraqi resistance to
the occupation was crushed by the British, who used poison gas,
airplanes, incendiary bombs, and mobile armored cars, together with
forces drawn from the Indian Army. Winston Churchill, who was
Colonial Secretary at the time, regarded the conflict in Iraq as an
important test of modern military-colonial methods.
In 1932, Britain granted nominal independence to Iraq, but kept
large military forces in the country and maintained control of it
through indirect methods. In 1941, however, it seemed likely that
Germany might try to capture the Iraqi oilfields, and therefore the
British again seized direct political power in Iraq by means of
military force. It was not only Germany that Britain feared, but
also US attempts to gain access to Iraqi oil.
The British fear of US interest in Iraqi oil was soon confirmed by
events. In 1963 the US secretly backed a military coup in Iraq that
brought Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath Party to power. In 1979
the western-backed Shah of Iran was overthrown, and the United
States regarded the fundamentalist Shi’ite regime that
replaced him as a threat to supplies of oil from Saudi Arabia.
Washington saw Saddam’s Iraq as a bulwark against the
militant Shi’ite extremism of Iran that was threatening oil
supplies from pro-American states such as Kuwait and Saudi
Arabia.
In 1980, encouraged to do so by the fact that Iran had lost its US
backing, Saddam Hussein’s government attacked Iran. This was
the start of a extremely bloody and destructive war that lasted for
eight years, inflicting almost a million casualties on the two
nations. Iraq used both mustard gas and the nerve gases Tabun and
Sarin against Iran, in violation of the Geneva Protocol.
Both the United States and Britain helped Saddam Hussein’s
government to obtain chemical weapons. A chemical plant, called
Falluja 2, was built by Britain in 1985, and this plant was used to
produce mustard gas and nerve gas. Also, according to the Riegel
Report to the US Senate, May 25, (1994), the Reagan Administration
turned a blind eye to the export of chemical weapon precursors to
Iraq, as well as anthrax and plague cultures that couldbe used as
the basis for biological weapons. According to the Riegel Report,
“records available from the supplier for the period 1985
until the present show that during this time, pathogenic (meaning
disease producing) and toxigenic (meaning poisonous), and other
biological research materials were exported to Iraq perusant to
application and licensing by the US Department of
Commerce.”
In 1984, Donald Rumsfeld, Reagan’s newly appointed Middle
East Envoy, visited Saddam Hussein to assure him of America’s
continuing friendship, despite Iraqi use of poison gas. When (in
1988) Hussein went so far as to use poison gas against civilian
citizens of his own country in the Kurdish village of Halabja, the
United States worked to prevent international condemnation of the
act. Indeed US support for Saddam was so unconditional that he
obtained the false impression that he had a free hand to do
whatever he liked in the region.
On July 25,
1990, US Ambassador April Glaspie met with Saddam Hussein to
discuss oil prices and how to improve US-Iraq relations. According
to the transcript of the meeting, Ms Galspie assured Saddam that
the US “had no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your
border disagreement with Kuwait.” She then left
on vacation. Mistaking this conversation for a green light, Saddam
invaded Kuwait eight days later.
By invading Kuwait, Hussein severely worried western oil companies
and governments, since Saudi Arabia might be next in line. As
George Bush senior said in 1990, at the time of the Gulf War,
“Our jobs, our way of life, our own freedom and the freedom
of friendly countries around the world would all suffer if control
of the world’s great oil reserves fell into the hands of
Saddam Hussein.”
On August 6, 1990, the UN Security Council imposed comprehensive
economic sanctions against Iraq with the aim of forcing Iraq to
withdraw from Kuwait. Meanwhile, US Secretary of State James A.
Baker III used arm- twisting methods in the Security Council to
line up votes for UN military action against Iraq. In Baker’s
own words, he undertook the process of “cajoling, extracting,
threatening and occasionally buying votes”.
On November 29, 1990, the Council passed Resolution 678,
authorizing the use of “all necessary means” (by
implication also military means) to force Iraq to withdraw from
Kuwait. There was nothing at all wrong with this, since the
Security Council had been set up by the UN Charter to prevent
states from invading their neighbors. However, one can ask whether
the response to Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait would
have been so wholehearted if oil had not been involved.
There is much that can be criticized in the way that the Gulf War
of 1990-1991 was carried out. Besides military targets, the US and
its allies bombed electrical generation facilities with the aim of
creating postwar leverage over Iraq. The electrical generating
plants would have to be rebuilt with the help of foreign technical
assistance, and this help could be traded for postwar compliance.
In the meantime, hospitals and water-purification plants were
without electricity. Also, during the Gulf War, a large number of
projectiles made of depleted uranium were fired by allied planes
and tanks. The result was a sharp increase in cancer in Iraq.
Finally, both Shi’ites and Kurds were encouraged by the
Allies to rebel against Saddam Hussein’s government, but were
later abandoned by the allies and slaughtered by Saddam.
The most terrible misuse of power, however, was the US and UK
insistence the sanctions against Iraq should remain in place after
the end of the Gulf War. These two countries used their veto power
in the Security Council to prevent the removal of the sanctions.
Their motive seems to have been the hope that the economic and
psychological impact would provoke the Iraqi people to revolt
against Saddam. However that brutal dictator remained firmly in
place, supported by universal fear of his police and by massive
propaganda. The effect of the sanctions was to produce more than
half a million deaths of children under five years of age, as is
documented by UNICEF data. The total number of deaths that the
sanctions produced among Iraqi civilians probably exceeded a
million, if older children and adults are included.
Ramsey Clark, who studied the effects of the sanctions in Iraq from
1991 onwards, wrote to the Security Council that most of the deaths
“are from the effects of malnutrition including marasmas and
kwashiorkor, wasting or emaciation which has reached twelve per
cent of all children, stunted growth which affects twenty-eight per
cent, diarrhea, dehydration from bad water or food, which is
ordinarily easily controlled and cured, common communicable
diseases preventable by vaccinations, and epidemics from
deteriorating sanitary conditions. There are no deaths crueler than
these. They are suffering slowly, helplessly, without simple
remedial medication, without simple sedation to relieve pain,
without mercy.”
On the morning of September 11, 2001, two hijacked airliners were
deliberately crashed into New York’s World Trade Center,
causing the collapse of three skyscrapers and the deaths of more
than three thousand people. Almost simultaneously, another hijacked
airliner was driven into the Pentagon in Washington DC, and a
fourth hijacked plane crashed in a field in Pennsylvania. The
fourth plane probably was to have made a suicide attack on the
White House or the Capitol, but passengers on the airliner became
aware what was happening through their mobile telephones, and they
overpowered the hijackers.
Blame for the September 11 attacks soon centered on the wealthy
Saudi Arabian Islamic extremist, Osama bin Laden, and on his
terrorist organization, al-Quaeda. In a later statement
acknowledging responsibility for the terrorist attacks, bin Ladin
gave as his main reasons firstly the massive US support for Israel,
a country that, in his view, was committing atrocities against the
Palestinians, and secondly the presence of US troops in Saudi
Arabia.
Like Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Ladin was an ex-protegé of
the CIA, by whom he had previously been armed, trained, and
supported. The history of bin Ladin’s relationship with the
CIA began in 1979, when the CIA, acting through Pakistan’s
Inter-Services Intelligence Agency, began to train and arm the
Mujaheddin, an international force of Islamic fundamentalists who
were encouraged to attack Afghanistan’s secular socialist
government.
US National Security Advisor Zbigniew Bryzinski anticipated that
the Soviets would respond by sending troops to protect the
socialist government of Afghanistan, and he believed that the
resulting war would be the Soviet Union’s version of Viet
Nam: It would be a war that would fatally weaken the Soviet Union.
Thus he saw the war that he was provoking in Afghanistan as an
important step in the liberation of Eastern Europe. “What is
most important in the history of the world?”, Polish-born
Bryzinski asked in a 1998 interview, “The Taliban, or the
collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Muslims, or the
liberation of central Europe...?” It was, in fact, these same
“stirred-up Muslims” who guided two hijacked aircraft
into the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001.
During the spring of 2003, our television and newspapers presented
us with the spectacle of an attack by two technologically superior
powers on a much less industrialized nation, a nation with an
ancient and beautiful culture. The ensuing war was one-sided.
Missiles guided by laser beams and signals from space satellites
were more than a match for less sophisticated weapons.
Speeches were made to justify the attack. It was said to be needed
because of weapons of mass destruction (some countries are allowed
to have them, others not). It was said to be necessary to get rid
of a cruel dictator (whom the attacking powers had previously
supported and armed). But the suspicion remained that the attack
was resource-motivated. It was about oil.
Looking at the present and threatend conflicts in the Middle East
against the background of this history, must we not ask: To what
extent are they too about oil?
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