Wed Jul 25, 2012, 04:01 PM
yurbud (31,406 posts)
Secret Pentagon papers reveal pre-war plans to get Big Oil into Iraq [View all]
Courtesy of Greg Muttitt and his new book Fuel on the Fire.
One thing that is striking here is that whether to use Iraq's oil "to advance important US foreign policy objectives" is more of an after-thought than front and center. That undermines the more grown up lie about why we invaded Iraq. The childish one is of course looking for WMD's, fighting terrorism, and spreading democracy. The more respectable lie was that we did it to secure access to that oil to run our economy. If that was really the case, we would simply coerce our oil companies to make contracts on terms favorable to Iraq so they would have no reason to ever cut us off. By invading, and trying to force contracts favorable to our oil companies, we made it MORE not less likely that at some point they will cut our supply or jack up the price to weaken us and prevent future attacks. DOCUMENT 17: a briefing to the Deputies Committee on November 6, 2002. The main topic of the meeting is how to spend the proceeds from Iraqi oil. See especially page 10, where weighing up whether to repair war-damaged Iraqi oil infrastructure, one of the cons is that it “could deter private sector involvement”... the EIPG planned to consider later that month “whether to use control of Iraqi oil to advance important U.S. foreign policy objectives”. DOD reports that it holds no record of such discussions. They are likely to involve not direct U.S. energy interests, but whether to tear up eg Russian and Chinese contracts in order to harm those countries.
(The briefing was stored by the DOD as landscape printed on portrait paper – hence the edges are cut off in the official archive too!). DOCUMENT 18: a briefing to the Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld on January 11, 2003, incorporating comments and decisions from earlier Deputies meetings. Here the option of leaving war damage unrepaired so as to make room for Big Oil has been rejected, in favor of appointing Halliburton subsidiary KBR to carry out repairs (page 5). *** Strikingly, "pubic diplomacy" (page 4) means the message that would be given to the public, including saying that "we will act... so as not to prejudice Iraq's future decisions" - even though the opposite is proposed as substantive policy. In other words, the briefing recommends that the Bush administration mislead the public on how it would approach Iraqi oil. LINKS TO ACTUAL DOCUMENTS AND MORE SUMMARY
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