Blood for Oil?

[G_j]

Blood for Oil?

A group of writers examines the notion that the US invaded Iraq for its oil. They conclude that "the invasion of Iraq was about Chevron and Texaco, but it was also about Bechtel, Kellogg, Brown and Root, Chase Manhattan, Enron, Global Crossing, BCCI and DynCorp," referring to the opening of Iraqi markets to US corporations. (London Review of Books)

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http://www.globalpolicy.org/security/oil/2005/0421blood.htm

Retort, a group of writers and activists, considers whether oil was the reason for the invasion of Iraq

By Iain Boal, T.J. Clark, Joseph Matthews and Michael Watts
London Review of Books
April 21, 2005

Capitalism presents itself, Marx said on more than one occasion, as an ‘immense accumulation of commodities’. In a full-scale commodity producing economy, what comes to matter about each separate article is not so much its constellation of uses as its value as an item of exchange, its function as a ‘material depository’ (Marx again) of exchange value. The commodity’s value is generated from its shifting place in a complex, self-contained world of money equivalents. So that finally the usefulness of petroleum presents itself as merely the outward and accidental aspect of something more basic: the article’s price.

For all the talk lately about the emergence of a post-industrial economy – in which ‘information’ or ‘services’ are displacing the authority of any single material resource – the last few years have been an object lesson in just how vital to capitalist dreams of the future the control of a few strategic commodities still is. They are the motors of production, the ultimate hard currency of exchange. For that very reason they are subject to deep mystification. Oil is a ‘curse’, commentators say, it ‘distorts’ the natural course of development and encourages an economy of hyper-consumption and excess: golf courses in the Saudi desert, bloated shopping malls in Dubai and Bahrain. Democracy is ‘hindered’ by oil (as if cobalt promoted constitutional government), which brings about despotic rule and patrimonialism rather than statecraft and capitalist discipline. There is some truth in this, but it is a shallow view of things because it substitutes a narrow commodity determinism for the larger truths of primitive accumulation: the deadly complicity of guns, oil and money.

If a single political thread tied the anti-war demonstrations of February and March 2003 together, it was the refrain ‘No Blood for Oil’. On every march a flotilla of signs carried variants on the idea, and in San Francisco it was the Chevron building that goaded the marchers to their most vocal dissent.

And with good reason. The American addiction to cheap petroleum has shepherded the brokers, carpetbaggers and hustlers of the oil business directly into political office. Five ‘supermajors’ (Exxon-Mobil, Royal Dutch-Shell, BP-Amoco, TotalFinaElf and Chevron-Texaco), elephantine oil corporations with wells, pipelines, refineries and subsidiaries in almost every country on earth, and collective sales revenues of more than $500 billion (almost twice the GDP of sub-Saharan Africa), have scaled the walls of the White House. In a bullish five years in the 1990s as CEO of Halliburton, the world’s largest oil and gas services company, Dick Cheney drew $44 million in salary from an outfit that on his own Brechtian admission saw war as offering ‘growth opportunities’. Millions of dollars more in ‘deferred compensation’ were earmarked to tide him over during his time in government. In December 2003 the administration trotted out the Bush family consigliere, James Baker, the consummate oilman, as special presidential envoy to restructure Iraq’s $130 billion debt. Baker’s law firm represents Halliburton; Baker Hughes, his oil-services company, was promised the contract to restore second-tier oilfields in Iraq. He is a member of the politburo of the Carlyle Group, in which it is estimated he owns equity of $180 million – a sliver of their $17.5 billion portfolio. Baker’s mission, we now know, was less about debt-forgiveness than about cutting a deal for the Carlyle Group, which was to receive a $1 billion investment from Kuwait as a quid pro quo for restructuring Iraq’s liabilities, thereby guaranteeing Kuwait – and various oil companies – billions of dollars in war reparations, still due from Iraq following the 1991 Gulf War. Good business if you can get it.

..more..

[G_j]

1. link this with the "smoking memo"

and you have one compelling story

[DrDebug]

2. kick

[G_j]

3. kick

[G_j]

4. deserves another chance IMO n/t