Bringing Death and Destruction to Muslims
by Paul Craig Roberts
January 17, 2008
After pandering to Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert’s right-wing government last week, US president George W. Bush carried the Israeli/neoconservative campaign against Iran to Arab countries. Sounding as authentic as the “Filipino Monkey,” Bush told the Arab countries that “Iran is the world’s leading state sponsor of terror,” and that “Iran’s actions threaten the security of nations everywhere.”
To no effect. Every country in the world, except America, knows by now that the US is the world’s leading state sponsor of terror and that the neoconservative drive for US hegemony over the world threatens the security of nations everywhere. But before we get into this, let’s first see what Bush means by “terrorist” and Iran’s sponsorship of terrorism.
Bush considers Iran to be the leading state sponsor of terror, because Iran is believed to fund Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in the Palestinian ghetto. Hezbollah and Hamas are two organizations that exist because of Israeli aggression against Palestine and Lebanon. The two organizations are branded “terrorist” because they resist Israel’s theft of Palestine and Israel’s designs on southern Lebanon. Both organizations are resistance organizations. They resist Israel’s territorial expansion and this makes them “terrorist.”
They are terrorists because they don’t receive billions in US military aid and cannot put armies in the field with tanks, fighter jets and helicopter gunships, backed up by US spy satellites and Israel’s nuclear weapons – although Hezbollah, a small militia, has twice defeated the Israeli army. However, Palestine is so thoroughly under the Israeli heel that Hamas can resist only with suicide bombers and obsolete rockets. It is dishonest to damn the terrorist response but not the policies that provoke the response.
The US is at war in Iraq, because the neoconservatives want to rid Israel of the Muslim governments – Iraq, Iran and Syria – that are not American surrogates and, therefore, are willing to fund Palestinian and Lebanese resistance to Israeli aggression. Israel, protected by the US, has disobeyed UN resolutions for four decades and has been methodically squeezing Palestinians out of Palestine.
Americans do not think of themselves or of Israel as terrorist states, but the evidence is complete and overwhelming. Thanks to the power of the Israel Lobby, Americans only know the Israeli side of the story, which is that evil anti-semite Palestinians will not let blameless Israelis live in peace and persist in their unjustified terror attacks on an innocent Israeli state.
The facts differ remarkably from Israel Lobby propaganda. Israel illegally occupies Palestine. Israel sends bulldozers into Palestinian villages and knocks down Palestinian houses, occasionally killing an American protester in the process, and uproots Palestinian olive groves. Israel cuts Palestinian villages off from water, hospitals, farmlands, employment and schools. Israel builds special roads through Palestine on which only Israelis can travel. Israel establishes checkpoints everywhere to hinder Palestinian movement to hospitals, schools and from one enclave or ghetto to another. Many Palestinians die from the inability to get through checkpoints to medical care. Israel builds illegal settlements on Palestinian lands. Israeli Zionist “settlers” take it upon themselves to evict Palestinians from their villages and towns in order to convert them into Israeli settlements. A huge wall has been built to wall off the stolen Palestinian lands from the remaining isolated ghettoes. Israeli soldiers shoot down Palestinian children in the streets. So do Israeli Zionist “settlers.”
All of this has been documented so many times by so many organizations that it is pathetic that Americans are so ignorant. For example, Israeli peace groups such as Gush Shalom or Jeff Halper’s Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions provide abundant documentation of Israel’s theft of Palestine and persecution of Palestinians. Every time the UN passes a resolution condemning Israel for its crimes, the US vetoes it.
The Palestinian Agricultural Relief Committees’ film, The Iron Wall, reveals the enormity of Israel’s crimes against Palestine.
President Jimmy Carter, Israel’s friend, tried to bring peace to the Middle East but was frustrated by Israel. Carter was demonized by the Israel Lobby for calling, truthfully, the situation that Israel has created “apartheid.”
Historians, including Israel’s finest, such as Ilan Pappe, have documented The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, the title of Pappe’s book published in 2006.
Israelis, such as Uri Avnery, a former member of Israel’s Knesset, are stronger critics of Israel’s policies toward Palestine than can be found in America. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz is more outspoken in its criticism of Israeli policies than any newspaper would dare to be in North America or Europe.
But it is all to no avail in brainwashed America where Israelis wear white hats and Arabs wear black hats.
The ignorance of Americans commits US foreign policy to the service of Israel. As Uri Avnery wrote recently, a visitor from another planet, attending the recent press conference in Jerusalem, would conclude that Olmert is the leader of the superpower and that Bush is his vassal.
Americans don’t know what terror is. To know terror, you have to be a Palestinian, an Iraqi, or an Afghan.
Layla Anwar, an Iraqi Internet blogger, describes what terror is like. Terror is families attending a wedding being blown to pieces by an American missile or bomb and the survivors being blown to pieces at the funeral of the newlyweds. Terror is troops breaking down your door in the middle of the night, putting guns to your heads, and carrying off brothers, sons, and husbands with bags over their heads and returning to rape the unprotected women. Terror is being waterboarded in one of America’s torture dungeons. Terror is “when you run from hospital ward to hospital ward, from prison to prison, from militia to militia looking for your loved one only to recognize them from their teeth fillings in some morgue.”
For people targeted by American hegemony, terror is realizing that Americans have no moral conscience. Terror is the lack of medicines from American embargoes that led to the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children. When asked by Lesley Stahl if the American policy was worth the children’s deaths, Madeleine Albright, President Bill Clinton’s secretary of state, said “we think the price is worth it.”
In the feeble minds of the White House Moron and his immoral supporters, the massive deaths for which America is responsible, including those inflicted by Israel, have nothing to do with Muslim enmity toward America. Instead, Muslims hate us for our “freedom and democracy,” the real threat to which comes from Bush’s police state measures and stolen elections.
There is dispute over the number of Iraqis killed or murdered by Bush’s illegal invasion, a war crime under the Nuremberg standard, but everyone agrees the number is very large. Many deaths result from American bombing of civilian populations as the Israelis did in Lebanon and do in Gaza. There is nothing new about these bombings. President Clinton bombed civilians in Serbia in order to dictate policy to Serbia. But when Americans and Israelis bomb other peoples, it is not terror. It is only terror when the US or Israel is attacked in retaliation.
The Israeli assault from the air on Beirut apartment houses is not terror. But when a Palestinian puts on a suicide belt and blows himself up in an Israeli cafe, that’s terror. When Clinton bombs a Serbian passenger train, that’s not terror, but when a buried explosive takes out an American tank somewhere in Iraq, that’s terror.
Aggressors always have excuses for their aggression. Hitler was an expert at this. So are the US and Israel.
Unfortunately for the world, there’s little chance for change in America or Israel. The presidential candidates (Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich) who would bring change in Washington, without which there will be no change in Israel, are not in the running for their party’s nomination. As John J. Mearsheimer noted on January 12, the candidates in the running are as much under the thumb of the Israel Lobby as Bush. The candidates are Bush clones as strongly committed as Bush to hegemony, war, Israel and executive power.
The possible exception is Obama. If he is an exception, that makes him a threat to the powers that be, and, as we might have witnessed in the NH primary, the Republican-supplied, Republican-programmed Diebold electronic voting machines can easily be rigged to deny him the Democratic nomination. Hillary will not resist Israel’s wishes, and her husband’s presidency bombed at will his demonized victims.
There is no essential difference between the candidates or between the candidates and George W. Bush. Alabama Governor George Wallace, a surprisingly successful third party candidate for the presidency, said as long ago as 1968, “There’s not a dime’s worth of difference between the Democrat and Republican Parties.” Today, four decades later, there’s not a penny’s worth of difference, not an ounce of difference. Both parties have revealed themselves to be warmonger police state parties. The US Constitution has few friends in the capital city.
Source: http://www.antiwar.com/roberts/?articleid=12224
About Author
—————–
Paul Craig Roberts wrote the Kemp-Roth bill and was assistant secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He was associate editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and contributing editor of National Review. He is author or co-author of eight books, including The Supply-Side Revolution (Harvard University Press). He has held numerous academic appointments, including the William E. Simon chair in political economy, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Georgetown University, and senior research fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He has contributed to numerous scholarly journals and testified before Congress on 30 occasions. He has been awarded the U.S. Treasury’s Meritorious Service Award and the French Legion of Honor. He was a reviewer for the Journal of Political Economy under editor Robert Mundell.
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The Dogs of Holy War
Jeff Huber
January 15, 2008
“Balboa found the Pacific, and on the trail one day. He met some friendly Indians whom he was told were gay. So he had them torn apart by dogs on religious grounds they say. The great nations of Europe were quite holy in their way . . .”
–Randy Newman, “The Great Nations of Europe”
I managed to catch just enough of a replay of the recent ABC GOP presidential debate to hear Fred Thompson say that we won in Afghanistan. I made the sound of one jaw dropping: not so much over what Thompson said, but because not one of the other candidates batted an eyelash.
They didn’t contradict Thompson, or take him to task for being senile, or roll their eyes and make one of those “Grandpa smells funny again” faces. I have to conclude that they all think we won in Afghanistan, or that they know better but don’t want to admit that we’re actually still there and still losing. In either case, this episode illustrates one of the major reasons we don’t want any of the Republicans currently running for president as our next commander in chief. They’re either disconnected from foreign policy realities or they refuse to recognize the ones they don’t like.
We’ve had enough of that sort of thing.
Another thing we don’t need any more of is faith based foreign policy, and it looks more and more as if that’s what the GOP front-runners plan on if they grab the brass ring.
God Is My National Security Adviser
Iowa Caucus winner Mike Huckabee says God intervened in the race on his behalf. Then again, Huck also swears on a stack of you-know-whats that the crucifix appearing behind his head in his Christmas ad just happened by accident, so you can pretty much figure anything Huck says is jive.
The New Hampshire victor and “Comeback Codger” John McCain ran a Christmas ad that dramatized the oft-told story about the guard at the Hanoi Hilton who stood next to a battered Lieutenant McCain on Christmas morning and etched a cross in the dirt with his toe. Taken out of its political context, this story is about bravery, cruelty and compassion. As a piece of pandering to the pre-sentient segment of the religious right, its message is slightly subtler but as unmistakable as Huckabee’s: Like Christ, John McCain too was tortured.
Mitt Romney, who took the silver in both Iowa and New Hampshire, gave a pre-Christmas speech on December 6 in which he told America that “Freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom.” Mitt’s grasp of history is as firm as his issue positions are consistent. Freedom and religion have often been practiced independently of each other. Think of how many societies have sought solace from tyranny in their religions (e.g., “Render unto Caesar!”).
Mitt said that, “It is important to recognize that while differences in theology exist between the churches in America, we share a common creed of moral convictions.” Apparently, to Mitt’s analytical mind, those moral convictions aren’t contained in “the creed of conversion by conquest” practiced by “radical Islamists [who] do their preaching not by reason or example, but in the coercion of minds and the shedding of blood.”
Mitt doesn’t mention, and possibly isn’t aware, that the shedding of blood in our present nightmare in the Middle East was caused by a messianic Evangelical Christian who invaded another country halfway across the world because God told him to.
It’s important to point out here that while Mitt pointed his finger at “radical” Islamists, there is really no distinction in neoconservative dogma between radical Islam and any other sort of Islam. Listen to talk radio luminary Neal Boortz wax wacky on the subject some time. He’ll remind you of the insane Colonel Kurtz, rotting in his lair at the mouth of the Nung River, gasping, “Kill them all.” Deriding any effort to separate Islam the religion from global terrorism is one of Big Brother Media’s major initiatives, as a recent Washington Times piece written by Diana West illustrates. The article, titled “Foul Play,” ridicules initiatives in the Pentagon to parse “Islam” from “jihad” as politically correct appeasement. West makes the standard weekly comparison of the Muslim evil doers to Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, blithely skipping over the kind-of-critical detail about how the Nazis and Soviets were honest to goodness peer competitors, whereas today’s evil ones don’t have a formal army or an air force or a navy or a country or a gross domestic product or even a pot to plant in.
Onward Christian Soldiers
If you think nobody who matters is taking this fear and loathing of Islam talk seriously, think again. Boortz, who refers to Islam as “a deadly virus,” has one of the most loyal fan bases in the broadcast media. (If you want to go highbrow in a political debate at a right wing bar, you cite Neal Boortz instead of Rush Limbaugh.) Evangelist Jerry Falwell says the prophet Muhammad was a terrorist. Pat Robertson of 700 Club fame denies that Islam is a religion at all. Rather, “It is a worldwide political movement meant on domination of the world. And it is meant to subjugate all people under Islamic law.” So make no mistake; the message says that history is leading up to an apocalyptic showdown with the Jews and Christians on one side and the Muslims on the other, and the talk radio/Fox News crowd is eating it up like hotcakes.
One member of this hate speech audience is a retired Army officer I’ve been acquainted with for some years. Norm (we’ll call him) is the kind of Christian conservative who makes an annual production number out of condemning the War on Christmas but who probably hasn’t seen the inside of a church since the Cuban Missile Crisis. A couple of Christmases ago, while holding court in one of his favorite watering holes and discussing the war on terror, Norm offered the considered opinion that if we had to slaughter every man, woman and child of the Muslim persuasion to keep America safe, he was sure Jesus Christ would approve. A lot of heads at the bar nodded in agreement.
We can’t simply dismiss yahooligans like this because they vote. They get to vote, of course, because they, like the children of some of them there immigrants they don’t like, were born here.
The Dogs of Holy War
It’s sad to say, but the history of humanity is largely the history of its wars, and the armed conflicts of western civilization more often than not involved clashes of religious ideologies.
The Peloponnesian War (431-404 BC) that ended Greece’s reign as a hegemon pitted a society of Athena’s followers against a cult of Ares worshipers. The Crusades waged by Christian Europe against Muslims, pagans, Orthodox Christians, Gnostics, Shamanists, Buddhists, Hussites, political enemies of the pope, etc. drug on for centuries. Subsequent conflicts among the great nations of Europe involved Catholics, Lutherans, Anglicans and Orthodox Christians crashing into each other and/or persecuting Jews and/or buggering heathens in the third world….
This led to World Wars I and II, and then the Cold War, which was an ideological struggle between the Judeo/Christian west and the Evil Empire of Godless Communists complete with proxy wars that featured more buggering of third world heathens.
The framers of the U.S. Constitution insisted on separation of church and state for a number of reasons. Premier among them was to prevent a self-proclaimed unitary executive from exploiting misplaced religious fervor to wage unnecessary and ill-advised wars. That the leading candidates of what has become America’s War Party would fall all over each other invoking God and Islamo-fabulism as the pillars of their foreign policy platforms is not unexpected, but it is disheartening to watch the country Abraham Lincoln called mankind’s “last best hope” devolve into a postmodern incarnation of the old world at its worst (Excuse me, great nations coming through!).
If we’re not very careful, our politicians will deliver unto us a brave new world of war everlasting with victory just around the corner forever and ever, amen. And if you really think more theo-conservative doctrine can solve our present cornucopia of foreign policy fiascos, please consider this: mankind has been praying for peace for as long as it has been fighting wars, which is about as long as there has been a mankind.
All that praying for peace hasn’t done a fat lot of good, has it?
Source: http://www.military.com/opinion/0,15202,160090,00.html
About Author
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Freelance writer Jeff Huber was operations officer of a naval air wing and an aircraft carrier, and he commanded an E-2C Hawkeye aircraft squadron. His analyses of military and foreign policy affairs have appeared in Proceedings, The Navy, Jane’s Fighting Ships, and other print periodicals. Some of his essays have been required student reading at the U.S. Naval War College, where he received a master’s degree in national security studies in 1995. Jeff is a contributing editor with ePluribus Media.
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Why Did We Invade Iraq Anyway?
by Michael Schwartz and Tom Engelhardt
November 1, 2007
TomDispatch
History… phooey!
Or, more mildly, Americans traditionally aren’t much interested in it and the media largely don’t have time for it either. For one thing, the past is often just so inconvenient. On Monday, for instance, there was a front-page piece in the New York Times by Elisabeth Bumiller on Robert Blackwill, one of the “Vulcans” who helped Condoleezza Rice advise George W. Bush on foreign policy during the 2000 election campaign, Iraq Director on the National Security Council during the reign in Baghdad of our viceroy L. Paul Bremer III, and the President’s personal envoy to the faltering occupation (nicknamed “The Shadow”), among many other things.
He is now – here’s a giant shock – a lobbyist. And, among those he’s lobbying for (in this case to the tune of $300,000) is Ayad Allawi, former CIA asset and head – back in Saddam’s day – of an exile group, the Iraq National Accord. Bumiller identifies Allawi as “the first prime minister of the newly sovereign nation – America’s man in Baghdad.” She also refers to him as having had “close ties to the CIA” and points out that he was not just Bremer’s, but Blackwill’s “choice” to be prime minister back in 2004. Now, he’s Blackwill’s “choice” again. Allawi is, it seems, yet once more on deck, with his own K-Street lobbyist, ready to step in as prime minister if the present PM, Nouri al-Maliki, were to fall (or be shoved aside).
But there’s another rather inconvenient truth about Allawi that goes unmentioned – and it’s right off the front page of the New York Times, no less – a piece by Joel Brinkley, “Ex-C.I.A. Aides Say Iraq Leader Helped Agency in 90’s Attacks,” published in early June 2004, just at the moment when Allawi had been “designated” prime minister. In the early 1990s, Brinkley reported, Allawi’s exile organization was, under the CIA’s direction, planting car bombs and explosive devices in Baghdad (including in a movie theater) in a fruitless attempt to destabilize Saddam Hussein’s regime. Of course, that was back when car bombs weren’t considered the property of brutes like Sunni extremists, al-Qaeda in Iraq, and the Taliban. (Just as, inconveniently enough, back in the 1980s the CIA bankrolled and encouraged the training of Afghan “freedom fighters” in mounting car-bomb and even camel-bomb attacks in a terror campaign against Soviet officers and soldiers in Russian-occupied Afghan cities (techniques personally “endorsed,” according to Steve Coll in his superb book Ghost Wars, by then-CIA Director William Casey).
But that was back in the day – just as, to randomly cite one more inconvenient piece of history also off the front page of the New York Times (Patrick Tyler, “Officers Say U.S. Aided Iraq in War Despite Use of Gas,” August 18, 2002), years before we went into Iraq to take out Saddam’s by then nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, we helped him use them. The Reagan Pentagon had a program in which 60 officers from the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency “were secretly providing detailed information on Iranian deployments” to Saddam’s forces, so that he could, among other things, wield his chemical weapons against them more effectively. (”The Pentagon ‘wasn’t so horrified by Iraq’s use of gas,’ said one veteran of the program. ‘It was just another way of killing people – whether with a bullet or phosgene, it didn’t make any difference.’”)
Of course, when it comes to America’s oily history in Iraq, there is just about no backstory – not on the front page of the New York Times, not basically in the mainstream. Even at this late date, with the price of crude threatening to head for the $100 a barrel mark, Iraqi oil is – well, not exactly censored out – just (let’s face it) so darn embarrassing to write about. In fact, now that all those other explanations for invading Iraq – WMD, freedom, you name it – have long since flown the coop, there really is no explanation (except utter folly) for Bush’s invasion. So, better to move on, and quickly at that. These last months, however, Tomdispatch has returned repeatedly to the subject as a reminder that history, even when not in sight, matters. And the deeper you go, as Michael Schwartz proves below, the more likely you are to find that gusher you’re looking for. Tom
Why Did We Invade Iraq Anyway?
Putting a Country in Your Tank
By Michael Schwartz
Lately, even Democratic candidates for president have been weighing in on why the U.S. must maintain a long-term, powerful military presence in Iraq. Hillary Clinton, for example, used phrases like protecting our “vital national security interests” and preventing Iraq from becoming a “petri dish for insurgents,” in a major policy statement. Barack Obama, in his most important speech on the subject, talked of “maintaining our influence” and allowing “our troops to strike directly at al-Qaeda.” These arguments, like the constantly migrating justifications for invading Iraq, serially articulated by the Bush administration, manage to be vaguely plausible (with an emphasis on the “vaguely”) and also strangely inconsistent (with an emphasis on the “inconsistent”).
That these justifications for invading, or remaining, are unsatisfying is hardly surprising, given the reluctance of American politicians to mention the approximately $10-$30 trillion of oil lurking just beneath the surface of the Iraq “debate” – and not much further beneath the surface of Iraqi soil. Obama, for example, did not mention oil at all in his speech, while Clinton mentioned it twice in passing. President Bush and his top officials and spokespeople have been just as reticent on the subject.
Why then did the U.S. invade Iraq? Why is occupying Iraq so “vital” to those “national security interests” of ours? None of this makes sense if you don’t have the patience to drill a little beneath the surface – and into the past; if you don’t take into account that, as former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz once put it, Iraq “floats on a sea of oil”; and if you don’t consider the decades-long U.S. campaign to control, in some fashion, Middle East energy reservoirs. If not, then you can’t understand the incredible tenaciousness with which George W. Bush and his top officials have pursued their Iraqi dreams or why – now that those dreams are clearly so many nightmares – even the Democrats can’t give up the ghost.
The Rise of OPEC
The United States viewed Middle Eastern oil as a precious prize long before the Iraq war. During World War II, that interest had already sprung to life: When British officials declared Middle Eastern oil “a vital prize for any power interested in world influence or domination,” American officials agreed, calling it “a stupendous source of strategic power and one of the greatest material prizes in world history.”
This led to a scramble for access during which the United States established itself as the preeminent power of the future. Crucially, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt successfully negotiated an “oil for protection” agreement with King Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia. That was 1945. From then on, the U.S. found itself actively (if often secretly) engaged in the region. American agents were deeply involved in the overthrow of a democratically elected Iranian government in 1953 (to reverse the nationalization of Iran’s oil fields), as well as in the fateful establishment of a Baathist Party dictatorship in Iraq in the early 1960s (to prevent the ascendancy of leftists who, it was feared, would align the country with the Soviet Union, putting the country’s oil in hock to the Soviet bloc).
U.S. influence in the Middle East began to wane in the 1970s, when the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) was first formed to coordinate the production and pricing of oil on a worldwide basis. OPEC’s power was consolidated as various countries created their own oil companies, nationalized their oil holdings, and wrested decision-making away from the “Seven Sisters,” the Western oil giants – among them Shell, Texaco, and Standard Oil of New Jersey – that had previously dominated exploration, extraction, and sales of black gold.
With all the key oil exporters on board, OPEC began deciding just how much oil would be extracted and sold onto international markets. Once the group established that all members would follow collective decisions – because even a single major dissenter might fatally undermine the ability to turn the energy “spigot” on or off – it could use the threat of production restrictions, or the promise of expansion, to bargain with its most powerful trading partners. In effect, a new power bloc had emerged on the international scene that could – in some circumstances – exact tangible concessions even from the United States and the Soviet Union, the two superpowers of the time.
Though the United States was largely self-sufficient in oil when OPEC was first formed, the American economy was still dependent on trading partners, particularly Japan and Europe, which themselves were dependent on Middle Eastern oil. The oil crises of the early 1970s, including the sometimes endless gas lines in the U.S., demonstrated OPEC’s potential.
It was in this context that the American alliance with the Saudi royal family first became so crucial. With the largest petroleum reserves on the planet and the largest production capacity among OPEC members, Saudi Arabia was usually able to shape the cartel’s policies to conform to its wishes. In response to this simple but essential fact, successive American presidents strengthened the Rooseveltian alliance, deepening economic and military relationships between the two countries. The Saudis, in turn, could normally be depended upon to use their leverage within OPEC to fit the group’s actions into the broader aims of U.S. policy. In other words, Washington gained favorable OPEC policies mainly by arming, and propping up a Saudi regime that was chronically fragile.
Backed by a tiny elite that used immense oil revenues to service its own narrow interests, the Saudi royals subjected their impoverished population to an oppressively authoritarian regime. Not surprisingly, then, the “alliance” required increasing infusions of American military aid as well political support in situations that were often uncomfortable, sometimes untenable, for Washington. On its part, in an era of growing nationalism, the Saudis found overt pro-American policies difficult to sustain, given the pressures and proclivities of its OPEC partners and its own population.
The Neocons Seize the Unipolar Moment
The key year in the Middle East would be 1979, when Iranians, who had lost their government to an American and British inspired coup in 1953, poured into the streets. The American-backed Shah’s brutal regime fell to a popular revolution; American diplomats were taken hostage by Iranian student demonstrators; and Ayatollah Khomeini and the mullahs took power. The Iranian revolution added a combustible new element to an already complex and unstable equation. It was, in a sense, the match lit near the pipeline. A regime hostile to Washington, and not particularly amenable to Saudi pressure, had now become an active member of OPEC, aspiring to use the organization to challenge American economic hegemony.
It was at this moment, not surprisingly, that the militarization of American Middle Eastern policy came out of the shadows. In 1980, President Jimmy Carter – before his Habitat for Humanity days – enunciated what would become known as the “Carter Doctrine”: that Persian Gulf oil was “vital” to American national interests and that the U.S. would use “any means necessary, including military force” to sustain access to it. To assure that “access,” he announced the creation of a Rapid Deployment Joint Task Force, a new military command structure that would be able to deliver personnel from all the armed services, together with state-of-the-art military equipment, to any location in the Middle East at top speed.
Nurtured and expanded by succeeding presidents, this evolved into the United States Central Command (Centcom), which ended up in charge of all U.S. military activity in the Middle East and surrounding regions. It would prove the military foundation for the Gulf War of 1990, which rolled back Saddam Hussein’s occupation of Kuwait, and therefore prevented him from gaining control of that country’s oil reserves. Though it was not emphasized at the time, that first Gulf War was a crystalline application of the Carter Doctrine – that “any means necessary, including military force,” should be used to guarantee American access to Middle Eastern oil. That war, in turn, convinced a shaky Saudi royal family – that saw Iraqi troops reach its border – to accept an ongoing American military presence within the country, a development meant to facilitate future applications of the Carter Doctrine, but which would have devastating unintended consequences.
The peaceful disintegration of the Soviet Union at almost the same moment seemed to signal that Washington now had uncontested global military supremacy, triggering a debate within American policy circles about how to utilize and preserve what Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer first called the “unipolar moment.” Future members of the administration of Bush the younger were especially fierce advocates for making aggressive use of this military superiority to enhance U.S. power everywhere, but especially in the Middle East. They eventually formed a policy advocacy group, The Project for a New American Century, to develop, and lobby for, their views. The group, whose membership included Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and dozens of other key individuals who would hold important positions in the executive branch after George W. Bush took office, wrote an open letter to President Clinton in 1998 urging him to turn his “administration’s attention to implementing a strategy for removing Saddam’s regime from power.” They cited both the Iraqi dictator’s military belligerence and his control over “a significant portion of the world’s supply of oil.”
Two years later, the group issued a ringing policy statement that would be the guiding text for the new administration. Entitled Rebuilding America’s Defenses, it advocated what would become known as a Rumsfeldian-style transformation of the Pentagon. U.S. military preeminence was to be utilized to “secure and expand” American influence globally and possibly, in the cases of North Korea and Iraq, used “to remove these regimes from power and conduct post-combat stability operations.” (The document even commented on the problem of defusing American domestic resistance to such an aggressive stance, noting ominously that public approval could not be obtained without “some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor.”)
Saddam’s Iraq and Oil on the Brain
The second Bush administration ascended to the presidency just as American influence in the Middle East looked to be on the decline. Despite victory in the first Gulf War and the fall of the Soviet Union, American influence over OPEC and oil policies seemed under threat. That sucking sound everyone suddenly heard was a tremendous increase in the global demand for oil. With fears rising that, in the very near future, such demand could put a strain on OPEC’s resources, member states began negotiating ever more vigorously for a range of concessions and expanded political power in exchange for expanded energy production. By this time, of course, the United States had joined the ranks of the energy deficient and dependent, as imported oil surged past the 50% mark.
In the meantime, key ally Saudi Arabia was further weakened by the rise of al-Qaeda, which took as its main goal the overthrow of the royal family, and its key target – think of those unintended consequences – the American troops triumphantly stationed at permanent bases in the country after Gulf War I. They seemed to confirm the accusations of Osama bin Laden and other Saudi dissidents that the royal family had indeed become little but a tool of American imperialism. This, in turn, made the Saudi royals increasingly reluctant hosts for those troops and ever more hesitant supporters of pro-American policies within OPEC.
The situation was complicated further by what was obvious to any observer: The potential future leverage that both Iraq and Iran might wield in OPEC. With the second and third largest oil reserves on the planet – Iran also had the second largest reserves of natural gas – their influence seemed bound to rise. Iraq’s, in particular, would be amplified substantially as soon as Saddam Hussein’s regime was freed from severe limitations imposed by post-war UN sanctions, which prevented it from either developing new oil fields or upgrading its deteriorating energy infrastructure. Though the leaders of the two countries were enemies, having fought a bitter war in the 1980s, they could agree, at least, on energy policies aimed at thwarting American desires or demands – a position only strengthened in 1998 when the citizens of Venezuela, the most important OPEC member outside the Middle East, elected the decidedly anti-American Hugo Chavez as president. In other words, in January 2001, the new administration in Washington could look forward to negotiating oil policy not only with a reluctant Saudi royal family, but also a coterie of hostile powers in a strengthened OPEC.
It is hardly surprising, then, that the new administration, bent on unipolarity anyway and dreaming of a global Pax Americana, wasted no time implementing the aggressive policies advocated in the PNAC manifesto. According to then Secretary of the Treasury Paul O’Neill in his memoir The Price of Loyalty, Iraq was much on the mind of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld at the first meeting of the National Security Council on January 30, 2001, seven months before the 9/11 attacks. At that meeting, Rumsfeld argued that the Clinton administration’s Middle Eastern focus on Israel-Palestine should be unceremoniously dumped. “[W]hat we really want to think about,” he reportedly said, “is going after Saddam.” Regime change in Iraq, he argued, would allow the U.S. to enhance the situation of the pro-American Kurds, redirect Iraq toward a market economy, and guarantee a favorable oil policy.
The adjudication of Rumsfeld’s recommendation was shuffled off to the mysterious National Energy Policy Development Group that Vice President Cheney convened as soon as Bush took occupancy of the Oval Office. This task force quickly decided that enhanced American influence over the production and sale of Middle East oil should be “a primary focus of U.S. international energy policy,” relegating both the development of alternative energy sources and domestic energy conservation measures to secondary, or even tertiary, status. A central goal of the administration’s Middle East focus would be to convince, or coerce, states in that region “to open up areas of their energy sectors to foreign investment”; that is, to replace government control of the oil spigot – the linchpin of OPEC power – with decision-making by multinational oil companies headquartered in the West and responsive to U.S. policy needs. If such a program could be extended even to a substantial minority of Middle Eastern oil fields, it would prevent coordinated decision-making and constrain, if not break, the power of OPEC. This was a theoretically enticing way to staunch the loss of American power in the region and truly turn the Bush years into a new unipolar moment in the Middle East.
Having determined its goals, the Task Force began laying out a more detailed strategy. According to Jane Mayer of the New Yorker, the most significant innovation was to be a close collaboration between Cheney’s energy crew and the National Security Council (NSC). The NSC evidently agreed “to cooperate fully with the Energy Task Force as it considered the ‘melding’ of two seemingly unrelated areas of policy: ‘the review of operational policies towards rogue states,’ such as Iraq, and ‘actions regarding the capture of new and existing oil and gas fields.’”
Though all these deliberations were secret, enough of what was going on has emerged in these last years to demonstrate that the “melding” process was successful. By March of 2001, according to O’Neill, who was a member of both the NSC and the task force:
“Actual plans…. were already being discussed to take over Iraq and occupy it – complete with disposition of oil fields, peacekeeping forces, and war crimes tribunals – carrying forward an unspoken doctrine of preemptive war.”
O’Neill also reported that, by the time of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the plan for conquering Iraq had been developed and that Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld indeed urged just such an attack at the first National Security Council meeting convened to discuss how the U.S. should react to the disaster. After several days of discussion, an attack on Iraq was postponed until after al-Qaeda had been wiped out and the Taliban driven from power in Afghanistan. It took only until January 2002 – three months of largely successful fighting in Afghanistan – before the “administration focus was returning to Iraq.” It wasn’t until November 2002, though, that O’Neill heard the President himself endorse the invasion plans, which took place the following March 20th.
The Logic of Regime Change
With this background, it’s easier to understand the recent brief, but highly significant, flurry of controversy over a single sentence in The Age of Turbulence, the bestselling, over-500-page memoir by longtime Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan. He wrote simply, as if this were utterly self-evident: “I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.” As the first major government official to make such a statement, he was asked repeatedly to explain his thinking, particularly since his comment was immediately repudiated by various government officials, including White House spokesman Tony Fratto, who labeled it “Georgetown cocktail party analysis.”
His subsequent comments elaborated on a brief explanation in the memoir: “It should be obvious that as long as the United States is beholden to potentially unfriendly sources of oil and gas, we are vulnerable to economic crises over which we have little control.” Since former ally Saddam Hussein was, by then, unremittingly unfriendly, Greenspan felt that (as he told Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward) “taking Saddam out was essential” in order to make “certain that the existing system [of oil markets] continues to work.” In an interview at Democracy Now! he elaborated on this point, explaining that his support for ousting Hussein had “nothing to do with the weapons of mass destruction,” but rather with the economic “threat he could create to the rest of the world” through his control over key oil reserves in the Persian Gulf region.
Greenspan’s argument echoes the logic expressed by the Project for a New American Century and other advocates of aggressive military solutions to the threat of OPEC power. He was concerned that Saddam Hussein, once an ally, but by then a sworn enemy of U.S. interests in the Middle East, would control key oil flows. That, in turn, might allow him to exercise economic, and so political, leverage over the United States and its allies.
The former Fed chief then elaborated further, arguing that the threat of Saddam could be eliminated “by one means or another” – either by “getting him out of office or getting him out of the control position he was in.” Replacing Saddam with a friendly, pro-American government seemed, of course, like such a no-brainer. Why have a guy like that in a “control position” over oil, after all? (And think of the possibility of taking those embarrassing troops out of Saudi Arabia and stationing them at large permanent bases in nearby, well-situated, oil-rich Iraq.) Better by far, as the Cheney Energy Task put it, “to open up areas of [Iraq's] energy sectors to foreign investment.” Like the Task Force members, Greenspan believed that removing oil – not just from Saddam’s control, but from the control of any Iraqi government – would permanently remove the threat that it or a broken OPEC could continue to wield economic leverage over the United States.
Revealingly enough, Greenspan saw the invasion of Iraq as a generically conservative action – a return, if anything, to the status quo ante that would preserve unencumbered American access to sufficient Middle Eastern oil. With whole new energy-devouring economies coming on line in Asia, continued American access seemed to require stripping key Middle Eastern nations of the economic and political power that scarcity had already begun to confer. In other words, Greenspan’s conservative urge implied exactly the revolutionary changes in the political and economic equation that the Bush administration would begin to test out so disastrously in Iraq in March 2003. It’s also worth remembering that Iraq was only considered a first pit stop, an easy mark for invasion and occupation. PNAC-nurtured eyes were already turning to Iran by then as indicated by the classic prewar neocon quip, “Everyone wants to go to Baghdad. Real men want to go to Tehran.”
And beyond this set of radical changes in the Middle East lay another set for the rest of the world. In the twenty-first century, expanding energy demand will, sooner or later (probably sooner), outdistance production. The goal of unfettered American access to sufficient Middle Eastern oil would, if achieved and sustained, deprive other countries of sufficient oil, or require them to satisfy U.S. demands in order to access it. In other words, Greenspan’s conservative effort to preserve American access implied a dramatic increase in American leverage over all countries that depended on oil for their economic welfare; that is, a radical transformation of the global balance of power.
Notice that these ambitions, and the actions taken to implement them, rested on a vision of an imperial America that should, could, and would play a uniquely dominant, problem-solving role in world affairs. All other countries would, of course, continue to be “vulnerable to economic crises” over which they would have “little control.” Only the United States had the essential right to threaten, or simply apply, overwhelming military power to the “problem” of energy; only it had the right to subdue any country that attempted to create – or exploit – an energy crisis, or that simply had the potential and animus to do so.
None of this was lost on the unipolar-minded officials who made the decision to invade Iraq – and were more ready than any previous administration to spell out, shock-and-awe style, a new stronger version of the Carter Doctrine for the planet. According to Treasury Secretary O’Neill, Rumsfeld offered a vision of the grandiosity of these goals at the first Bush administration National Security Council meeting:
“Imagine what the region would look like without Saddam and with a regime that’s aligned with U.S. interests. It would change everything in the region and beyond.”
An even more grandiose vision was offered to the New York Times by presidential speech writer David Frum a few days later:
“An American-led overthrow of Saddam Hussein, and the replacement of the radical Baathist dictatorship with a new government more closely aligned with the United States, would put America more wholly in charge of the region than any power since the Ottomans, or maybe even the Romans.”
As worldwide demand for hydrocarbons soared, the United States was left with three policy choices: It could try to combine alternative energy sources with rigorous conservation to reduce or eliminate a significant portion of energy imports; it could accept the leverage conferred on OPEC by the energy crunch and attempt to negotiate for an adequate share of what might soon enough become an inadequate supply; or it could use its military power in an effort to coerce Middle East suppliers into satisfying American requirements at the expense of everyone else. Beginning with Jimmy Carter, five U.S. presidents chose the coercive strategy, with George W. Bush finally deciding that violent, preemptive regime change was needed to make it work. The other options remain unexplored.
[Note: This commentary - and most of the useful work on the role of oil in Middle East and world politics - rests on the remarkable evidential and analytic foundation provided by Michael Klare's indispensable book, Blood and Oil,The Dangers and Consequences of America's Growing Dependency on Imported Petroleum. Readers who seek a full understanding of these issues should start with that text.]
Source: http://www.antiwar.com/engelhardt/?articleid=11842
About Author
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Michael Schwartz, Professor of Sociology and Founding Director of the Undergraduate College of Global Studies at Stony Brook University, has written extensively on popular protest and insurgency, and on American business and government dynamics. His books include Radical Protest and Social Structure and Social Policy and The Conservative Agenda (edited, with Clarence Lo). His work on Iraq has appeared on numerous Internet sites, including Tomdispatch, Asia Times, Mother Jones, and ZNET; and in print in Cities, Contexts, Against the Current, and Z Magazine. His email address is Ms42@optonline.net.
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