‘Yes, the Iraq War was a war for oil, and it was a war with winners: Big Oil’ — Antonia Juhasz
By Herbert Rothschild
In my last column, written the week after the 20th anniversary of our invasion of Iraq, I faulted our mainstream media for again failing to call out the lies the Bush administration told to sell it to the U.S. public. That failure was inexcusable in the run-up to the war, which caused a huge amount of suffering and loss. It’s inexcusable now, when approximately one-third of Americans still believe that such suffering and loss was justified. And it’s likely that many of those who no longer support the war do so only because they think we lost it, not because it was a moral enormity.

I’m not sure anything can convince a majority of us to reject our long-standing determination to impose our will on the world, mainly through military force. But if anything might, perhaps it would be the truth about why we invaded Iraq and, more generally, the aims of our endless armed interventions. So, as I promised last week, today I’ll discuss the aims those lies were told to disguise, a subject unmentioned in the recent retrospectives on the war that I read.
On Jan. 22, 2003, an article by Ariel Cohen appeared in bi-monthly journal The National Interest titled “Privatization and the Oil Industry: A Strategy for Postwar Iraqi Reconstruction.”Cohen was addressing an administration that had long before made up its mind to invade Iraq, although the invasion didn’t begin until March 19. Cohen wrote, “If successful, Iraq’s privatization of its oil sector, refining capacity, and pipeline infrastructure, could serve as a model for privatizations by other OPEC members, thereby weakening the cartel’s domination of the energy markets.”
Doubtless, Cohen knew he was preaching to the choir. To the extent that George W. Bush had worked at anything before becoming governor of Texas, it was in the West Texas oil patch, where his father’s success had paved his way. From 1995 to 2000, between serving as Secretary of Defense for Bush père and Vice President for Bush fils, Dick Cheney was chairman and CEO of Halliburton, the world’s second largest oil field service company. Condoleezza Rice, George W.’s National Security Advisor, had served as a board member of Chevron Corporation. Appointees to lesser posts had similar connections.
Cheney, George W.’s éminence grise, took charge of energy policy, his primary focus upon assuming office. White House visitor logs revealed that from February to April 2001, Cheney’s Energy Policy Task Force met with approximately 300 groups and individuals, the vast majority of whom were representatives of the fossil fuels industry. Unfortunately, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2004 that almost all of what transpired in those closed meetings could be kept secret, but before that ruling, a Judicial Watch’s lawsuit did force the government to hand over documents that contain a map of Iraqi oilfields, pipelines, refineries and terminals, as well as two charts detailing Iraqi oil and gas projects, and “Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield Contracts.” The documents are dated March 2001.
Paul O’Neill was Bush’s first Secretary of the Treasury. He was dismissed for disagreeing with Bush about tax policy. Former Wall Street Journal reporter Ron Suskind interviewed O’Neill extensively for Suskind’s book “The Price of Loyalty” (2004). Here’s what O’Neill told Suskind about the administration’s first National Security Council meeting: “‘From the very beginning, there was a conviction, that Saddam Hussein was a bad person and that he needed to go,’ says O’Neill, who adds that going after Saddam was topic ‘A’ 10 days after the inauguration — eight months before Sept. 11 . . . ‘It was all about finding a way to do it. That was the tone of it. The president saying, “Go find me a way to do this,”’ says O’Neill.
The best source of information about the Bush administration’s quest to control Iraqi oil for the benefit of Western corporations is Antonia Juhasz, an investigative reporter who has covered the intersection of energy, human rights and the environment for a quarter century. In addition to her articles in, among many others, The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Guardian, The Star-Johannesburg, The International Herald Tribune, and Cambridge University Review of International Relations Journal, Juhasz published “The Bush Agenda: Invading the World, One Economy at a Time” (2006).
In a special to CNN on the 10th anniversary of the invasion, Juhasz observed, “Yes, the Iraq War was a war for oil, and it was a war with winners: Big Oil. . . Before the 2003 invasion, Iraq’s domestic oil industry was fully nationalized and closed to Western oil companies. A decade of war later, it is largely privatized and utterly dominated by foreign firms.”
In that piece, Juhasz recounts the struggle of the Iraqi parliament to maintain national ownership of the nation’s oil and its refusal to pass the Iraq Hydrocarbons Law, partially drafted by the Western oil industry, which would have locked the nation into private foreign investment under the most corporate-friendly terms. “In 2008, with the likelihood of the law’s passage and the prospect of continued foreign military occupation dimming as elections loomed in the U.S. and Iraq, the oil companies settled on a different track. Bypassing parliament, the firms started signing contracts that provide all of the access and most of the favorable treatment the Hydrocarbons Law would provide — and the Bush administration helped draft the model contracts. … The new contracts lack the security a new legal structure would grant, and Iraqi lawmakers have argued that they run contrary to existing law, which requires government control, operation and ownership of Iraq’s oil sector. But the contracts do achieve the key goal of the Cheney energy task force: all but privatizing the Iraqi oil sector and opening it to private foreign companies.”
So many U.S. veterans commit suicide that, in 2017, an overburdened Veterans Administration introduced AI into its clinical practice. We might, alternatively, introduce decency into our foreign policy.
Herbert Rothschild is an unpaid Ashland.news board member. Opinions expressed in columns represent the author’s views and may or may not reflect those of Ashland.news. Email Rothschild at [email protected].