It seemed like such an easy answer. People who didn’t know that much about international affairs would shake their heads knowingly and say, “Oh, the U.S. invaded Iraq just to get its oil.” I would smirk even more knowingly and remind them that there was a lot more than that at stake. The war profiteers, I pontificated, were the ones who stood to gain most -Blackwater, Halliburton/KBR, CACI,Titan and others of that ilk. Look how well connected those vultures are. Didn’t Vice President Dick Cheney have close ties to Halliburton, for example? You bet he did. And didn’t he stand to gain personally from the war? So, put two and two together and see what you get.
And, of course, I was right (I am always right, regardless of anything Sandra might say to the contrary), but only partially. The Halliburtons and other battlefield ghouls did make a killing (sorry about the pun… bad taste and all that, but I couldn’t resist it). But, according to a very authentic seeming article on the AlterNet web site yesterday, the trigger that set off the Iraq disaster was that old, familiar villain, Big Oil.
The article, by Antonia Juhasz, goes into convincing detail to make the point that the United States and Britain ravaged Iraq because Saddam Hussein shut their companies out of the bidding for the country’s oil. Here’s an excerpt:
Before the United States and Britain invaded Iraq in March 2003, their oil companies were shut out of oil-production contracts being negotiated by the government of Saddam Hussein. Today, more than six years of war later, Saddam is gone, and the U.S. and British oil companies are not only in on the oil contracts, they have managed to sweeten the terms….
The invasion of Iraq dealt handily with the problem of U.S. and British exclusion.
So, if Antonia (photo at right) knows what she’s talking about – and the article certainly reads as if she does – oil men Bush and Cheney (and their buddy Tony Blair) ravaged Iraq, sacrificed more than 4,000 American lives (and caused thousands of Americans to be maimed and crippled), and killed and wounded hundreds of thousands of Iraqi men, women and children, just to open the Iraq spigot for western oil companies.
If you’re laboring under the delusion that the world has evolved beyond the bad old days of Standard Oil and the United Fruit Company – and the British East India Company before them – you should read Antonia’s article at:
www.alternet.org/world/143879/did_big_oil_win_the_war_in_iraq
As it was in the beginning, and probably always will be, the world’s mightiest nations pursue colonialism at the beck and call of commercial powers that pull the strings of political puppets. When will they ever learn? When will we ever learn?
