http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0241/ridgeway.php
The Village Voice: Nation: Mondo Washington: The Spoils of War by
James Ridgeway
"The doctrine of the preemptive strike is the perfect strategy for ushering in
a new century of neocolonialism, unfettered by any need to respect sovereignty
or self-determination."
Mondo Washington
by James Ridgeway
The Spoils of War
Be the First on Your Block to Make a Buck off Iraq
October 9 - 15, 2002
War means money, son: Dick Cheney with colonel 'D.. Dawg' in Qatar this year.
(photo: David Bohrer, www.whitehouse.gov)
As they prepare to make war on Iraq, cowboy-in-chief George Bush and
his cohorts have pulled out all the stops. They're trying to convince
us that this act of pure aggression is a "preemptive" move that will
allow Americans to sleep more peacefully in their beds, while the
Iraqi masses cheer the conquerors who have starved them for a decade
and then bombed them to smithereens.
And that's just for starters. In the imaginations of Bush and his
advisers, this Wild West approach to the Middle East stands to knock
out Syria's despot, rein in the Saudi royal family, inspire the
neighboring Iranians to their own pro-American putsch, banish the
Palestinians to Jordan, and clear the way for Israeli settlers.
The doctrine of the preemptive strike is the perfect strategy for
ushering in a new century of neocolonialism, unfettered by any need
to respect sovereignty or self-determination. Better still, it's
going to mean big bucks for whoever gets in on the ground floor.
Before the war can begin, the movers and shakers in Washington and
around the world have their eyes on divvying up the spoils.
MILITARY VENDORS
First in line to benefit from the war is Dick Cheney's old company
Halliburton and its subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root-or, more
colloquially, just Brown & Root-which has cornered the market in
supplying American armies of "liberation" around the globe. Launched
in the 1930s amid a maze of political deals and lucrative government
contracts, the Texas oil construction outfit built airstrips, roads,
harbors, and military bases in Vietnam, and later provided similar
services in Zaire, Haiti, Somalia, Kosovo, and Afghanistan.
As Bush Senior's secretary of defense, Cheney oversaw the
privatization of the military's logistics operations. Journalist
Robert Bryce, who has chronicled the construction company in minute
detail, reports Brown & Root won contracts of nearly $9 million to
help the government implement those policies, giving it a natural leg
up. During the 1990s, records show, it earned more than $2.5 billion
for military support-much of it during Cheney's time as a top
Halliburton executive.
With Cheney back in the White House, Brown & Root's fortunes have
only improved. Last spring the Army Operations Support Command
awarded it an open-ended deal to work with army engineers and
"provide for the construction of base camps and their
infrastructures, including billeting and dining facilities; food
preparation, potable water and sanitary systems; showers; laundries;
transportation; utilities; warehouses and other logistics support."
How much has Brown & Root already made under this contract-and how
much does it stand to make in Iraq? We may never know. The numbers
are classified.
AGRICULTURAL INTERESTS
Before the first Persian Gulf war, Iraq had become a sizable market
for American rice, wheat, and chickens. In the last half of the '80s,
the United States sold $4 billion in food to Iraq. Twenty percent of
the American rice crop went there at one point in the 1980s.
In 1988-89 the United States exported 521,000 tons of rice to Iraq,
making it our number one consumer. More recently, the figure has been
zero. A spokesperson for the U.S. Rice Federation, which takes a dim
view of the sanctions, wouldn't comment on the current situation. But
it's safe to say there would be nothing like a war, regime change,
and the subsequent lifting of sanctions to open up this lucrative
market once again.
BIG OIL
Oil, clearly, is the commercial jackpot in this war. Even under the
sanctions, Iraq provides us with 9 percent of our oil supply. Until
this spring, we were buying half of all Iraq's oil exports. But oil
is also the carrot the U.S. is holding out to potential allies. As
Bush with his left hand assures the American people that he will
fight to secure their energy supply, with his right he's giving away
future Iraqi oil to buy support from the French and the Russians.
At the recent Group of Eight summit in Canada, Russian president
Vladimir Putin reportedly told Bush he couldn't care less whether
Saddam got the heave-ho, as long as Russia got compensated for about
$12 billion in outstanding loans to Iraq, and $4 billion owed them
for transporting Iraqi oil. Meanwhile, the Russian oil companies are
scrambling to save their recent deals. LUKoil, for one, signed an
exploration contract in 1997. "We're against this war," said LUKoil's
flack Dmitry Dolgov in Moscow. "We don't know about the United
States, [but] we know that our government and our president promised
us to back all our interests in Iraq under any possible event." And
Slaveneft-which, according to one story, is actually financed by
Saddam Hussein himself-wants in.
The French, too, want American assurances they won't lose oil
concessions. "We have no operations right now, as it isn't legally
possible," said Tomas Fell of Totalfinaelf, the giant French oil
concern hungry to develop two fields in southern Iraq. "If we could
legally operate in Iraq, we would be very interested in working
there."
Other smaller outfits are hoping to cash in on oil deals: Petro
Vietnam, China's National Petroleum Corporation, and Indonesian
companies are all eyeing the Iraqi fields.
Publicly, the big international oil companies remain above it all.
When asked if the Exxon Mobil had any operations in Iraq, flack Lynn
Durano of Exxon Mobil said, "Absolutely not." As for the upcoming
war, Durano added, "It would be totally inappropriate to speculate on
a war with Iraq. Exxon has not been involved with any topical
discussions regarding a war in Iraq." A Shell spokesperson likewise
had no comment on the sanctions or the possibility of war, saying
only, "We obey the law."
However, it is well known that the majors, reeling from attacks on
their environmental policies and with an invidious history of
meddling in the third world, need stability to drill oil and protect
the billion-dollar-plus investments in pipelines. Lucio Noto, former
Exxon Mobil vice chairman, said in a recent interview, "I think in
many cases [sanctions] do not achieve the intended objective. In many
cases they hurt groups of people we are not intending to hurt. I
believe they take us out of the ball game and leave the playing field
to other people. And I think if you look at the track record, they
have been singularly ineffective."
The prospect of a black-gold rush in Iraq means the United States can
exchange oil futures for support for the war. But over the long haul,
the war may produce unanticipated consequences for the oil
companies-and thus for their native son George W. Bush. Robert Mabro,
who heads the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies, a British think
tank, argues there is no doubt that a new pro-American Iraqi
government will initially seek to maximize the volume of production.
"This output-maximization policy, particularly if pursued at a time
when the market is oversupplied, could cause prices to collapse" and
thus destabilize the region. "Bad seeds sowed now will inevitably
produce in the end their poisonous flowers," warns Mabro.
SAUDI ROYALS
There's another potential monkey wrench in the rosy scenario for big
business. If there's war, the one man Bush will need is Abdullah bin
Abd al-Aziz, crown prince of Saudi Arabia. His kingdom is America's
surrogate in the Middle East, providing the U.S. with a secure
military base and acting as a stabilizing force within OPEC,
absorbing the ups and downs of oil prices. More than anyone else in
the royal family, the prince knows how to handle the quarrelsome
local tribes-including the Wahhabi, whose religious fundamentalism
influences Osama bin Laden and many of his followers-and how to stave
off any fundamentalist revolt by doling out jobs in the Saudi
National Guard.
But by all reports, al-Aziz is getting tired of being Our Man in
Riyadh, taking in billions in oil dollars and then recirculating them
back to the United States through defense contracts. He wants a more
independent policy.
He also has close dealings with Syria's strongman, President Bashar
al Asad, and has been trying to persuade the International Monetary
Fund to help modernize Syria's economy with the understanding that
Saudi Arabia stands behind any deal. Bush hawks who see Iraq as the
starting point for a world war that takes out Syria will run hard up
against the Saudis. The Saudis also are financiers of last resort if
Lebanon goes down the drain.
Most important, the prince has reached out to Iran with the goal of
forging a common oil policy. A report last month from the Petroleum
Finance Company-a consulting firm in Washington which works with
Aramco, the joint U.S.-Saudi oil company-pointed out that a united
Saudi-Iranian oil front would become the heartbeat of OPEC, and would
wield extraordinary power. Should either or both of these two nations
decide they've had it with Bush, all they have to do is let the
much-heralded free market take over, flooding the globe with crude
and sending oil prices into a steep dive. Lower prices would wipe out
not only smaller international companies that have been enticed into
oil play by high prices, but could wipe out the domestic oil
companies in the United States, causing sheer political hell for Bush
in his little oil bastion of Houston. V
Additional research: Gabrielle Jackson, Rebecca Winsor, and Josh Saltzman
This story is part of the Voice's ongoing coverage of the war on terror.
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