Blood, Oil, and Sand: The Hidden History of America's War on Iraqby Cliff Pearson
August 13, 2002 / Reading Between the Lyin's
"In the 1920s, American and European oil companies discovered and exploited the first oil fields in the Middle East. Since Western Europe had no oil of its own, this discovery was of particular importance to them. But World War II changed everything.
Despite being victors in the war, both France and England were taxed severely by the World War II and began to lose control of their former colonies. Having taken advantage of the war, new leaders had come to power in the Middle East, deposing monarchies that had been set up by the Europeans, and which – because of the war – were no longer being protected by their former colonial masters.
But the big winner in World War II, the United States, became the real player in Middle Eastern oil politics over even the British and French. Despite its own oil resources, the U.S. saw the strategic importance of controlling the flow of Middle Eastern oil: to "contain" the Soviet Union, to rebuild Western Europe (according to their own agendas), and to boost their industries.
But America had hoped to cash in on the Middle Eastern oil bonanza of before World War II. But the new regimes in the Middle East saw it differently. The Middle Eastern nations recognized their potential to become economic world players through their wellspring of oil productivity. Many of them – much to the chagrin of London, Paris, and Washington – attempted to nationalize their oil reserves, only to have the West retaliate.
In 1953, Iran's President Mossadegh nationalized their oil reserves and kicked the British out of their country. The United States responded by having the CIA assist in a coup that re-established the Shah of Iran as ruler. The Shah was very pro-Western, and pro-privatized oil, and Iran remained a Western oil colony until the Khomeini-inspired student revolt in 1979.
In 1956, Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser seized the Suez Canal – built by the Egyptian people yet controlled by the British – and declared it to be the property of the Egyptian people. Nasser's plan was to gain international economic staying power by not only beginning a plan to nationalize his country's oil reserves, but to control the very strategically-located canal. Britain, France and Israel immediately waged war on Egypt to take back control of the canal. As part of a peace deal in 1979, the Suez Canal became an international port.
General Abdel Karim Qassem, the ruler of Iraq, also attempted to nationalize his nation's oil. United States CIA Director Allen Dulles immediately and publicly declared General Qassem's actions to be "Communist," but also added that he didn't think the situation "was hopeless." Almost immediately after General Qassem moved to nationalize Iraq's oil, he was assassinated in a coup led by Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath Party.
"This coup came as a result of an oil deal between Iraq and a French company, IRAB," says Ahmed Al Bayati, London Representative of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution In Iraq. "This contract upset the West and the Americans in particular. So they encouraged a coup in Iraq at that time."
In 1972, according to former Iraqi oil minister Fadel Chalabi, a former Ba'ath Party member named Al Saadi spoke openly of having been trained for their successful coup by the CIA.
Also in 1972, OPEC, the international cartel of oil-producing nations, raised the price of crude oil from $3 per barrel to $22 per barrel in an effort to collectively profiteer off the West's dependence on their product. President Saddam Hussein reacted to this price-gouging opportunity by immediately nationalizing Iraq's oil fields. The United States reacted by branding Saddam Hussein "unreliable" and a "terrorist leader" and throwing their primary Middle Eastern support to Iran, led by the pro-Western Shah.
"For 25 years, from 1953, the Shah of Iran was the U.S. surrogate in the Persian Gulf and in the Middle East region," says former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark. "The U.S. sold him about $22 billion in arms from 1972 to 1976. The Shah was our man. The hope of control by the West of the Middle East jades in 1979 when the Shah is overthrown by anti-Western, fundamentalist leader Ayatollah Khomeini. By then, Saddam Hussein becomes again a viable card in Washington's hand. He becomes the actual president of Iraq after 11 years of being its acting vice president, and then perpetrates a sweeping purge of his opponents and attacks Iran – without provocation or apparent reason."
The Stockholm Peace Research Institute shows that, during the Iran-Iraq War, nations lined up to sell arms to both sides in the conflict. According to their online database, 52 nations sold to either Iran or Iraq and 29 countries supplied arms to both sides.
David Welch, former Iraq Program Director for the U.S. State Department, admits that the United States sold some arms to Iraq during the war but insists that it was very little, citing an international "arms embargo" on both countries that made such sales illegal in most cases.
In truth, however, a Congressional investigation found in 1992 that the CIA and the State Department were very much aware that Saddam Hussein was using chemical weapons, made by and bought from American companies, against Kurdish civilians and Irani soldiers.
Former U.S. Secretary of State Ramsey Clark reports that, from as early as 1972, the CIA and State Department had been monitoring Saddam Hussein's ambitious determination to acquire "non-conventional weapons of mass destruction." Documents obtained by Congress show that in the 80s, during the height of the Iran-Iraq War, the United States knew that a $1.7 billion "agricultural aid" package to Iraq was actually being used by Saddam Hussein to purchase helicopters, trucks, pesticides – and even anthrax. (One document shows the purchase from the United States of "bacillus anthracis (ATCC 240) Batch #05-14-63 (3 each) Class III pathogen).
Immediately Congressional leaders began questioning these practices. But, according to Clark, the U.S. State Department and CIA, under former presidents Reagan and Bush, Sr., began to systematically quell all Congressional inquiries about U.S. support for Iraq's military build-up, and eventually the inquiries faded away.
As a result of Saddam Hussein's unprovoked war with Iran and massive arms purchases, by the end of the Iran-Iraq War in 1988, Saddam Hussein had managed to ruin Iraq's economy and place them about $40 billion in debt.
Because of this debt, Iraq was desperate to nationalize their oil fields so they could profiteer off their oil productivity and help offset their war-related economic woes.
"OPEC keeps the price of oil stable by limiting how much oil each OPEC member-country can produce," says Siu Hin Lee, an international oil market analyst. "In 1989, after the end of the Iraq/Iran war, Kuwait suddenly exceeded its quotas by 20 percent, driving the price of oil down on the world market. As a result of Kuwait's production hike, Iraq lost almost a third of its oil income. And this was at a time when Iraq was desperate for money."
Kuwait – a major source of oil to the West – is an artificially created country, set up by the British Empire during the "Mandates Period," and carved out of the southern tip of Iraq. The creation of Kuwait by the British took Iraq's access to the Persian Gulf away from them and set up a British-picked royal family, or "emirate," that was friendly to the West, as the rulers. The territory had been in dispute by Iraq for nearly a century. But when Kuwait's newfound wealth added to Iraq's already miserable economic woes, many Iraqi government leaders suddenly "remembered" that Kuwait was theirs, and Saddam Hussein decided it was time to re-annex Kuwait.
As late as six days before Iraq's invasion of Iraq, the U.S. State Department was assuring Saddam Hussein that the United States had "no security agreement with Kuwait." Taking his cue, in 1990 Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, convinced that the United States would not react. But in reality, the Pentagon was more than ready to react.
"We went ahead and did an exercise, what is called a command post exercise, which is what Internal Look was, to test our ability to deal with this particular scenario, and also to uncover any command and control problem that might exist, any doctrine problem that might exist between the Air Force, the Navy and the armed forces," says former Gulf War Commander-in-Chief General Norman Schwarzkopf. "And it just so happened that we were in the middle of conducting the Internal Look command post exercise at the same time when the crisis developed in the Gulf."
Within hours after Saddam Hussein's invasion of Iraq, the United States had managed to freeze all of Iraq's assets and the U.S. Navy had started a blockade of the Persian Gulf – before the United Nations even had a chance to convene to discuss the crisis.
Within days of Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait, U.S. Department of State and Department of Defense officials were in Riyadh meeting with Saudi Arabian officials in an attempt to convince them that Iraq was determined to invade Saudi Arabia. U.S. representatives argued that Iraq posed a grave threat to Saudi Arabia and that the United States must be allowed to deploy hundreds of thousands of soldiers in Saudi Arabia to help protect the Saudis. As part of this attempt at persuasion, the American officials showed the Saudis military satellite photos of a massive build-up of Iraqi troops in Kuwait, apparently poised to invade Saudi Arabia at any moment.
cont...
http://progressiveaustin.org/pearson1.htm
