By MARCUS GEE
There's a clever e-mail flitting around about George W. Bush, Iraq and oil. It inserts the logos of various oil companies into a made-up speech by Mr. Bush: "We SHELL not EXXONerate Saddam Hussein for his actions. We will MOBILize to meet this threat to our vital interests in the Persian GULF until an AMOCOble solution is reached. Our best strategy is to BPrepared. Failing that, we are ARCO-ing to kick your ass." Vulgar, yes, but you get the point. Whatever Mr. Bush may say about his motives for confronting Iraq, it's really all about oil. To those who believe in this particular conspiracy theory, the facts speak for themselves. Mr. Bush and his vice-president, Dick Cheney, were once oil men. Lots of their rich friends are oil men, too. Iraq has oil reserves of 112 billion barrels, or 11 per cent of the world's supply. U.S. oil companies have been kept away from Iraqi oil fields since the 1991 Persian Gulf war. Isn't it obvious, then, that Mr. Bush is going after Mr. Hussein so his pals in the oil business can get their hands on Iraqi oil? To the "it's all about oil" crowd, the Bush strategy is clear. Put U.S. oil companies in charge of rebuilding the Iraqi oil industry. Make a defeated Iraq flood the world with cheap oil. That would undermine OPEC, make the U.S. less dependent on fragile Saudi Arabia for oil imports and boost the U.S. economy by making energy cheaper for companies and consumers. Unfortunately for its authors, the theory is full of holes. To begin with, war with Iraq would push the price of oil up, not down. During the gulf war, it soared above $40 a barrel. The oil market is nervous, not happy, at the prospect of war, and each time the war drums grow louder, prices rise. A wartime spike in prices would hammer the U.S. economy at a time when it already is in bad shape. That would be terrible for Mr. Bush and his hopes of getting re-elected in 2004. In the longer term, an Iraq without Mr. Hussein and without international sanctions should indeed start pumping quantities of oil, putting downward pressure on oil prices and undermining OPEC's attempts to keep them above $22 a barrel forever. That would be a good thing, not just for the United States but for scores of other countries, many of them poor, that rely on oil as a source of energy. OPEC has kept the price of oil far above what it should be for far too long. Anything that hastens its demise is welcome. Unfortunately, it may take a while. The death of OPEC has been forecast many times, but it hasn't happened yet. Oil analysts estimate it will take five years and more to rebuild Iraq's oil industry. Even when Iraqi oil starts flowing again, there's no guarantee that a post-Hussein Iraq would break its links with OPEC. Washington would have great influence on Iraq, but it would not be a colonizing power. Iraq would have a government of its own and that government might decide it could fetch a better price by being in the cartel. Anyway, if Washington really wants to flood the world with Iraqi oil, it need not go to war. It would be far easier to just lift the sanctions that keep Iraqi oil largely out of the market. Mr. Bush's oil industry friends urged Washington to do that for years. Instead, it backed the sanctions and pushed Iraq to give up its weapons of mass destruction, a policy that ensured that the Iraqi oil business went to Russian and French, not American, firms. So much for the idea that Mr. Bush is doing the bidding of the oil industry. Getting back the business that U.S. firms lost will be hard, even in an Iraq dominated by Washington. In the past few months, U.S. leaders have been assuring Russia and France that they will not be muscled out of the Iraqi oil business. The United States wants their support at the United Nations as it confronts Mr. Hussein. It also wants to forge a partnership with Moscow to exploit Russian oil, which it sees as an alternative to reliance on the Middle East. Oh, and there is one more reason that it isn't all about oil. Ever
since Sept. 11, Mr. Bush has been obsessed with one thing: security.
Whether or not you share his world-view, it is clear that everything he
does is motivated by a quest for safety. Protecting Americans against
another terrorist attack eclipses all other considerations, even almighty
oil. |
<<pixelshim.gif>>
AdletCounter?ad1=GAM_natl
Description: Binary data
