FlashBack!!Crude Vision: How Oil Interests Obscured US Government Focus...

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Crude Vision: How Oil Interests Obscured US Government Focus on Chemical Weapons Use by Saddam Hussein

<http://www.globalpolicy.org/security/oil/2003/03crudevision.pdf>

The Bush Administration claims that war with Iraq has nothing to
do with oil, and everything to do with disarming Iraq of its “weapons of mass destruction,” including its chemical weapons. On November 15, 2002, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld told a radio audience that any notion that oil is a factor in the focus on “regime change” in Iraq is “nonsense:” “It just isn’t {a factor.} There are certain things like that, myths that are floating around. It has nothing to do with oil, literally nothing to do with oil.”1

However, since the 1973 Arab oil embargo, successive administrations have equated national security with access to, and control of, oil - particularly in the Persian Gulf, which holds two-thirds of global oil reserves. “Regime change” is simply the latest and most aggressive posture the U.S. has assumd in an effort to ensure the long-term availability of Iraqi oil for U.S. industry and consumers— an effort that dates back 40 years to a CIA-aided coup.2

This brief examines never-before-published government and corporate memoranda, letters, and telegrams, which we found in the National Archives, along with government documents recently published by the National Security Archive. Selected copies of the National Archives-sourced correspondence are available on our website, Others are cited herein and many are available upon request. The National Security Archives released documents may be found at:
<http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB82/>

Our examination shines a new spotlight on the revolving door between Bechtel and the Reagan Administration that drove U.S.-Iraq interactions between 1983 and 1985. The men who courted Saddam while he gassed Iranians are now waging war against him, ostensibly because he holds weapons of mass destruction. To a man, they now deny that oil has anything to do with the conflict. Yet during the Reagan Administration, and in the years leading up to the present conflict, these men shaped and implemented a strategy that has everything to do with securing Iraqi oil exports. All of this documentation suggests that Reagan Administration officials bent many rules to convince
Saddam Hussein to open up a pipeline of central interest to the US, from Iraq to Jordan.

This project, the Aqaba pipeline, was critical...

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