Skulduggery since the 1920s
U.S. corporations and Iraqi oil
By Richard Becker
How and why did U.S. involvement in Iraq begin?
In all the countless hours the corporate media devote to
broadcasting the Bush administration's lies and deceits about
Iraq, that simple and crucial question is almost never
addressed. And for good reason.
Since its very beginning eight decades ago, U.S. policy
toward Iraq has been intensely focused on one objective: taking
control of that country's rich oil resources.
The roots of U.S. intervention in Iraq lie in the aftermath
of World War I. It was a war between capitalist empires. On one
side were the German, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman (Turkish)
Empires. On the other side was the British-French-Russian
imperial entente. Most of the Middle East was under Ottoman
control.
The British, through their agent T.E. Lawrence--known to
moviegoers as "Law rence of Arabia"--promised Arab leaders that
if they fought with Britain against their Turkish rulers, the
British would support the creation of an independent Arab state
after the war.
At the same time, the British, French and Russian foreign
ministries were secretly signing the Sykes-Picot agreement.
Sykes-Picot re-carved the Middle East. The agreement was made
public after the Russian Revolution of 1917 by the Bolshevik
party, which denounced it as imperialist.
Mass revolts broke out all over the Middle East when the
Arab and Kurdish peoples discovered their betrayal at the hands
of the imperial "democracies." The rebellions continued
throughout the colonial period. Repression was brutal in the
extreme. In 1925, for instance, the British dropped poison gas
on the Kurdish town of Sulaimaniya in Iraq, the first time that
gas was deployed from warplanes.
Britain, France divide Middle East
After the war ended in 1918, Britain and France proceeded
with their plans. Lebanon and Syria, they agreed, would be
incorporated into the French Empire. Palestine, Jordan and the
two southern provinces of Iraq--Baghdad and Basra--would become
part of the far-flung British Empire.
What they didn't agree about was who would get Mosul
province, the northern area of present-day Iraq. According to
the Sykes-Picot accord, it was part of the French "sphere of
influence." The British were determined, however, to add Mosul,
which was mainly Kurdish in population, to their new Iraq
colony. To back its claim, the British army occupied Mosul four
days after the Turkish surrender in October 1918--and never
left.
The resolution of the inter-imperialist struggle between
Britain and France over Mosul brought with it the beginning of
the U.S. role in Iraq.
Mosul's importance to the big powers was based on its known
but as of then largely undeveloped oil resources. The United
States had entered World War I on the side of Britain and
France in 1917, after both its allies and enemies were largely
exhausted. U.S. conditions for entering the war included the
demand that its economic and political objectives be taken into
account in the post-war world. Among those objectives was
access to new sources of raw materials, particularly oil.
In February 1919, Sir Arthur Hirtzel, a top British colonial
official, warned his associates, "It should be borne in mind
that the Standard Oil Company is very anxious to take over
Iraq." (Quoted in Peter Sluglett, "Britain in Iraq, 1914-32,"
London, 1974)
In the face of the British-French domination of the region,
the United States at first demanded an "Open Door" policy. U.S.
oil companies should be allowed to freely negotiate contracts
with the new puppet monarchy of King Faisal, whom the British
had installed on the throne in Iraq.
The solution to the victorious allies' conflict over Iraq
was found in dividing up Iraq's oil. The British kept Mosul as
part of their new Iraq colony.
Not one drop for Iraq
Iraq's oil was split five ways: 23.75 percent each to
Britain, France, Holland and the United States. The remaining 5
percent went to an oil baron named Caloste Gulbenkian, known as
"Mr. Five-Percenter," who helped negotiate the agreement.
Exactly zero percent of Iraq's oil belonged to Iraq. That's
how it was to stay until the revolution of 1958.
In 1927, major oil exploration got under way. Huge deposits
were discovered in Mosul province.
Two years later, the Iraqi Petroleum Co.--composed of
Anglo-Iranian (today British Petroleum), Shell, Mobil and
Standard Oil of New Jersey (Exxon)--was set up. Within a few
years it totally monopolized Iraqi oil production.
During the same period the al-Saud family, with Washington's
backing, conquered much of the neighboring Arabian peninsula.
Saudi Arabia came into being in the 1930s as a neocolony of the
United States. The U.S. embassy in Riyadh, the Saudi capital,
was located in the ARAMCO (Arab American Oil Co.) building.
But the U.S. oil companies and their government in
Washington weren't satisfied. They wanted complete control of
the Middle East's oil, just as they had a near-monopoly of the
Western Hemi sphere's petroleum reserves. This meant displacing
the British, who were still top dog in the region.
The U.S. opportunity came as a result of World War II. While
the United States and British are generally depicted as the
closest of wartime allies, the fact is that they were at the
same time fierce opponents.
The war greatly weakened the British Empire both at home and
in the loss of key colonies in Asia. In the early stages of the
war, 1939-42, it was a question whether Britain would survive.
It it was never to fully recover its former dominance.
The United States, on the other hand, grew increasingly
powerful throughout the war--which the Washington rulers had
once again bided their time before entering.
In the latter stages of World War II, the Roosevelt and
Truman administrations, dominated by big banking, oil and other
corporate interests, were determined to restructure the
post-war world to ensure the dominant position of the United
States.
The key elements in their strategy were: 1) U.S. military
superiority in nuclear and conventional weaponry; 2)
U.S.-dominated corporate globalization, using the International
Monetary Fund and World Bank, created in 1944, and
establishment of the dollar as the world currency; and 3)
control of global resources, particularly oil.
While the fighting was still raging on the battlefields, a
behind-the-scenes struggle for global economic control was
unfolding between the United States and Britain. So intense was
this battle that on March 4, 1944--three months before the
D-Day invasion at Normandy--British Prime Minister Winston
Churchill sent a message to President Franklin Roosevelt that
was unusual in its imperialist content and hostile tone:
"Thank you very much for your assurances about no sheep's
eyes [looking enviously--RB] on our oilfields in Iran and Iraq.
Let me reciprocate by giving you the fullest assurance that we
have no thought of trying to horn in upon your interests or
property in Saudi Arabia. My position in this as in all matters
is that Great Britain seeks no advantage, territorial or
otherwise, as a result of this war. On the other hand she will
not be deprived of anything which rightly belongs to her after
having given her best services to the good cause, at least not
so long as your humble servant is entrusted with the conduct of
her affairs." (Quoted in Gabriel Kolko, "The Politics of War,"
New York, 1968)
What this note clearly showed was that the U.S. leaders were
so intent on taking over Iran and Iraq, both important
neocolonies of Britain, that they had set off alarm bells in
British ruling circles.
Despite Churchill's bluster, there was nothing the British
could do to restrain rising U.S. power. Within a few years, the
British ruling class would adapt to the new reality and accept
the role of Washington's junior partner.
U.S. role expands after WW II
In 1953, after the CIA coup that put the shah (king) in
power, the United States took control of Iran. By the
mid-1950s, Iraq was jointly controlled by the United States and
Britain.
Washington set up the Baghdad Pact, which included its
client regimes in Pakistan, Iran, Turkey and Iraq, along with
Britain, in 1955. The Baghdad Pact, or CENTO--Central Treaty
Organization, had two purposes.
First was to oppose the rise of Arab and other liberation
movements in the Middle East and south Asia. The second purpose
was to be another in a series of military alliances--NATO,
SEATO and ANZUS were the others--encircling the socialist camp
of the Soviet Union, China, Eastern Europe, north Korea and
north Vietnam.
Iraq, the core of CENTO, was independent only in name. The
British maintained military airfields in Iraq. While the
country was extremely rich in oil--10 percent of the world's
reserves--the people lived in extreme poverty and hunger.
Illiteracy was over 80 percent. There was one doctor for every
6,000 people, one dentist for every 500,000.
Iraq was ruled by a corrupt monarchy under King Faisal II
and a coterie of feudal landowners and merchant
capitalists.
Underlying Iraq's poverty was the simple fact that Iraq did
not own its vast oil reserves.
The Iraqi Revolution
But on July 14, 1958, Iraq was rocked by a powerful social
explosion. A military rebellion turned into a countrywide
revolution. The king and his administration were suddenly gone,
the recipients of people's justice.
Washington and Wall Street were stunned. In the week that
followed, the New York Times, the U.S. "newspaper of record,"
had virtually no stories in its first 10 pages other than those
about the Iraqi Revolution.
While another great revolution that took place just six
months later in Cuba is better remembered today, Washington
regarded the Iraqi upheaval as far more threatening to its
vital interests at the time.
President Dwight D. Eisenhower called it "the gravest crisis
since the Korean War." The day after the Iraqi Revolution,
20,000 U.S. Marines began landing in Lebanon. The day after
that, 6,600 British paratroopers were dropped into Jordan.
This was what came to be known as the "Eisenhower Doctrine."
The United States would intervene directly--go to war--to
prevent the spread of revolution in the vital Middle East.
U.S. and British expeditionary forces went in to save the
neocolonial governments in Lebanon and Jordan. Had they not,
the popular impulse from Iraq would have surely brought down
the rotten dependent regimes in Beirut and Amman.
But Eisenhower, his generals and his arch-imperialist
Secretary of State John Foster Dulles also had something else
in mind: invading Iraq, overturning the revolution and
installing a new puppet government in Baghdad.
Three factors forced Washington to abandon that plan in
1958: the sweeping character of the Iraqi Revolution; the
announcement by the United Arab Republic, which bordered Iraq,
that its forces would fight the imperialists if they sought to
invade; and the emphatic support of the People's Republic of
China and the Soviet Union for the revolution. The USSR began a
mobilization of troops in the southern Soviet republics close
to Iraq.
The combination of these factors forced the U.S. leaders to
accept the existence of the Iraqi Revolution. But Washington
never really reconciled itself to the loss of Iraq.
Over the next three decades, the U.S. government applied
many tactics designed to weaken and undermine Iraq as an
independent country. At various times--such as after Iraq
completed the nationalization of the Iraqi Petroleum Co. in
1972 and signed a defense treaty with the USSR--the United
States gave massive military support to right-wing Kurdish
elements fighting Baghdad and added Iraq to its list of
"terrorist states."
The United States supported the more rightist elements
within the post-revolution political structure against the
communist and left-nationalist forces. For example, the United
States applauded the suppression of the Iraqi Communist Party
and left-led labor unions by the Ba'ath Party government of
Saddam Hussein in the late 1970s.
In the 1980s, the United States encouraged and helped to
fund and arm Iraq in its war against Iran. U.S. domination of
the latter was ended by Iran's Islamic revolution in 1979. In
reality, though, the U.S. aim in the Iran-Iraq war was to
weaken and destroy both countries. Ex-Secretary of State Henry
Kissinger revealed the real U.S. attitude about the war when he
said, "I hope they kill each other."
The Pentagon provided Iraq's air force with satellite photos
of Iranian targets. At the same time, as the Iran-Contra
scandal revealed, the United States was sending anti-aircraft
missiles to Iran.
The Iran-Iraq war was a disaster, killing a million people
and weakening both countries.
Collapse of USSR and Gulf War
When the war finally ended in 1988, developments in the
Soviet Union were posing a new and even graver danger to Iraq,
which had a military and friendship treaty with the USSR. In
pursuit of "permanent détente" with the United States,
the Gorbachev leadership in Moscow began to cut its support for
its allies in the developing world.
In 1989, Gorbachev went further and withdrew support for the
socialist governments in Eastern Europe, most of which then
collapsed. This sharp shift in the world relationship of
forces--culminating with the collapse of the Soviet Union
itself two years later--constituted the greatest victory for
U.S. imperialism since World War II.
It also opened the door for the U.S. war against Iraq in
1991, and more than a decade of sanctions/blockade and bombing
that have devastated Iraq and its people.
Today, the Bush administration is seeking to win public
support for a new war against Iraq by talking about "weapons of
mass destruction" and "human rights." The reality is that
Washington is concerned about neither Iraq's diminished
military capacity nor human rights anywhere in the world.
What moves U.S. policy toward Iraq in 2002 is the same
objective that motivated Washington and Wall Street 80 years
ago: oil.
Reprinted from the Oct. 31, 2002, issue of
Workers World newspaper
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