Iraq War Ends When We Get The Oil
Posted by Sonja Ebron
Barack Obama is either lying or crazy when he says he’ll end the war in Iraq, and he doesn’t strike me as someone tolerant of self-delusion. Hate the game, not the player: Politicians lie for a living. No responsible American president could release his hold on a country floating on a sea of oil worth somewhere between $10-30 trillion, not while we remain so addicted to it and are too broke to even pay attention. (And the fact that the war is rank criminality? Look, I said American president.)
Of course, there is another alternative. The Financial Times reports that major Western oil companies are headed back to Iraq this year after four decades of being locked out. I’ve seen this story every other year since the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, so who knows if it’s actually true this time. But if it is, does this mean the war is finally coming to an end?
That was its purpose, after all, to control access to some of the largest oil fields in the world. As a British minister said in 2004,
Saddam controlled a country at the centre of the Gulf, a region with a quarter of world oil production in 2003, and containing more than 60% of the world’s known reserves. With 115bn barrels of oil reserves, and perhaps as much again in the 90% of the country not yet explored, Iraq has capacity second only to Saudi Arabia. The US, in contrast, is the world’s largest net importer of oil. Last year the US Department of Energy forecast that imports will cover 70% of domestic demand by 2025.
It’s not like this is the first time colonial powers have tried to steal Iraqi oil, and the Iraqi people have long memories. They’ve so far refused to enact laws and production sharing agreements giving away their natural resources. Iraqi “insurgents” are mostly fighting to keep Western hands off their oil. And there’s no sign they’re giving in, even as the Obama administration tries to persuade Iran and Syria to stop arming them. So the war is not ending. My guess, for what it’s worth, is that the oil companies are simply tired of waiting for stability and going for the black gold at whatever terms are available. As Obama likes to say, “Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.”
Update: The American general overseeing Iraq says he’s not planning to follow the security agreement the U.S. signed just a few months ago, which requires U.S. soldiers to leave Iraqi cities by July 1st. This follows a recent U.S. raid in violation of the agreement, which required but failed to even seek the permission of Iraqi officials. Surely no one expects an occupying power to respect anything it promises the occupied.
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