 |
The Perennial Battle For Iraq's Oil
www.nlpwessex.org/docs/iraqoil.htm
And That Of Its Gulf Neighbours
Why They Really Hate Us
Anglo-American Access To Middle East Oil
Is What It Has Always Been About Since At Least 1913
'Democratic' Britain, Not Saddam Hussein, Was The
First To Gas The Kurds
As Favoured By Winston Churchill
"The
Iraq war was just the first of this century's 'resource wars', in which powerful countries
use force to secure valuable commodities, according to the UK government's former chief
scientific adviser. Sir David King predicts that with population growth, natural resources dwindling, and
seas rising due to climate change, the squeeze on the planet will lead to more conflict.
'Future historians might look back on our particular recent past and see the Iraq war as the first of the conflicts of this kind - the first of the resource wars,' he told an audience of 400 in London
as he delivered the British Humanist Association's Darwin Day lecture. Implicitly
rejecting the US and British governments' claim they went to war to remove Saddam Hussein
and search for weapons of mass destruction, he said
the US had in reality been very concerned about energy security and supply, because of its reliance on foreign oil from unstable states. 'Casting
its eye around the world - there was Iraq,' he said....Commenting on the idea of 'resource
wars', Alex Evans, of the Centre for International Co-operation at New York University,
who last month wrote a report on food security for the Chatham House thinktank, said he
believed King was right...King summed up by saying that with growing population and
dwindling resources, fundamental changes to the global economy and society were necessary.
'Consumerism has been a wonderful model for growing up economies in the 20th century. Is
that model fit for purpose in the 21st century, when resource shortage is our biggest
challenge?'"
UK's ex-science chief predicts century of 'resource' wars
Guardian,
13 February 2009
"Iraq may have been a British
creation, from the ruins of the Ottoman empire, but Churchill remembered all too well how
Britain's involvement had begun with a disaster. Over the 43 years of British influence,
from that first invasion in 1915 to the revolution of 1958, a remarkable array of Britons
had a hand in running the country. Churchill installed the first King of Iraq and his
advisers drew up its borders. Gertrude Bell, the archaeologist and traveller, who founded
the country's antiquities department, became known as the 'uncrowned Queen of Iraq'. T E
Lawrence took part in the invasion and advised Churchill on Iraq policy while Arthur
'Bomber' Harris tried out his theories of aerial bombardment.... By the close of 1918,
Britain had occupied all three Mesopotamian provinces - Basra in the south, Mosul in the
north and Baghdad in between.....Britain gave Iraq notional independence in 1932. By then, the country's oilfields had become of vital strategic
importance and the British remained dominant until
King Faisal II and his family were butchered in a 1958 revolution. After that, a
bewildering succession of coups and counter-coups bedevilled Iraq. Alternately America,
France and the Soviet Union displaced Britain as the power behind the scenes."
Meddling in Mesopotamia was always risky
Daily
Telegraph, 18 March 2003
| Since the
attacks of 9/11 the western world has been fighting a so-called 'war on terror' which has
included removing civil liberties in its own countries as a
supposedly self-defensive move in response. However, the move is essentially an exercise
in self-defeating futility as it does not tackle the source of the conflict. Moreover,
such moves demonstrate how successful terrorism can be in creating damaging results in
western countries in the form of reduced personal freedoms, further incentivising the
conduct of such attacks. Islamic terrorism has spread substantially beyond the central Arab-Israeli dispute in the Middle East largely as a result of actual or perceived western occupations of other Muslim lands such as Saudi Arabia (until 2003), Iraq (from 2003) and Afghanistan (from 2001). Those occupations have taken place largely as a result of the western need to protect access to oil and gas resources in the Middle East and Caspian Sea regions. This simple expediency is the principal underlying cause of the ongoing conflict between the west and the Muslim world. From the very outset of the 2003 war the United States showed every sign of wishing to maintain a permanent occupation of Iraq. Consequently until the west develops a coherent energy strategy whereby energy supplies are no longer critically dependent on oil and gas continuing to flow from those territories, particularly with the rise of Asia as a major rival energy consumer, the 'war on terror' is likely to remain unresolved and civil liberties are likely to continue to be removed in the 'free world'. |
"I rarely speak in public. I prefer to avoid the limelight and get on with my job. I speak not as a
politician, nor as a pundit, but as someone who has been an intelligence professional for
32 years..... There has been much speculation about what motivates young men and women to
carry out acts of terrorism in the UK. My service needs to
understand the motivations behind terrorism to succeed in
countering it, as far as that is possible. Al-Qaeda has developed an ideology which claims
that Islam is under attack, and needs to be defended. This is a powerful narrative
that weaves together conflicts from across the globe, presenting the West's response to
varied and complex issues, from long-standing disputes such as Israel/Palestine and
Kashmir to more recent events as evidence of an across-the-board determination to
undermine and humiliate Islam worldwide. The video wills of
British suicide bombers make it clear that they are motivated by perceived worldwide and long-standing
injustices against Muslims - an extreme and minority
interpretation of Islam promoted by some preachers and people of influence. And their interpretation as anti-Muslim of UK foreign policy, in particular the UK's involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan.”
Speech by Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller, Head Of Britains Interior Intelligence
Service MI5
BBC Online, 10
November 2006
| On This Page |
| Overview 'It's The Occupations Stupid' |
| Post 9/11 Era Oil And Evidence That London 7/7 Attacks Were Due To Occupations Of Iraq And Afghanistan |
| Gulf Oil Post Berlin War Era |
| Gulf Oil Cold War Era |
| Gulf Oil Early 20th Century Era |
| How Britain, Not Saddam, Was The First To Gas The Kurds |
“I am saddened that it is politically
inconvenient to acknowledge
what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about
oil.”
Alan Greenspan, Chairman Of The US Federal Reserve 1987 - 2006
Sunday Times, 16 September 2007
Overview
'It's The Oily Occupations Stupid'
"A study of
public opinion in predominantly Muslim countries reveals that very large majorities
continue to renounce the use of attacks on civilians as a means of pursuing political
goals. At the same time large majorities agree with
al Qaeda's goal of pushing the United States to remove its military forces from all Muslim
countries and substantial numbers, in some cases
majorities, approve of attacks on US troops in Muslim countries. People in majority-Muslim
countries express mixed feelings about al Qaeda and other Islamist groups that use
violence, perhaps due to this combination of support for al Qaeda's goals and disapproval
of its terrorist methods. However large majorities support allowing Islamist groups to
organize parties and participate in democratic elections. In some majority-Muslim
countries, Islamist groups, such as the Muslim Brotherhood, are forbidden from
participating in elections. Steven Kull, director of WorldPublicOpinion.org, comments, 'The US faces a conundrum. US efforts to fight terrorism with an
expanded military presence in Muslim countries appear to have elicited a backlash and to
have bred some sympathy for al Qaeda, even as most reject its terrorist methods.' The survey is part of an ongoing study of Egypt, Pakistan, and Indonesia,
with additional polling in Turkey, Jordan, the Palestinian territories, Azerbaijan and
Nigeria. It was conducted by WorldPublicOpinion.org with support from the START Consortium
at the University of Maryland. In nearly all nations
polled more than seven in 10 say they disapprove of attacks on American civilians. At the
same time large majorities endorse the goal of al Qaeda to 'push the US to remove its
bases and its military forces from all Islamic countries,' including 87 percent of
Egyptians, 64 percent of Indonesians, and 60 percent of Pakistanis. Asked specifically
about the US naval forces based in the Persian Gulf, there is widespread opposition across
the Muslim world....Significant numbers approve of
attacks on US troops based in Muslim countries, presumably as a means to apply pressure
for their removal. Opposition to US military presence appears to be related to largely
negative views of US goals in relation to the Muslim world. A key belief is that the US
has goals hostile to Islam itself. Large majorities ranging from 62 percent in Indonesia
to 87 percent in Egypt say they believe that the United States seeks 'to weaken and divide
the Islamic world.' Many also perceive the US having
goals of economic domination. Large majorities say that it is a US goal to 'maintain
control over the oil resources of the Middle East' ranging from 62 percent in Pakistan to
nine in 10 in Egypt, Turkey, Azerbaijan, and Jordan, and the Palestinian territories....In all Muslim publics polled, majorities see US support for democracy
in Muslim countries as conditional at best. Only very small minorities say 'the US favors
democracy in Muslim countries whether or not the government is cooperative with the US.'
The most common response is that the US favors democracy only if the government is
cooperative, while nearly as many say that the US simply opposes democracy in the Muslim
countries....The surveys were conducted July through September 2008. As part of an ongoing
study, in-depth surveys were conducted in Egypt (1,101 interviews), Indonesia (1,120
interviews), and Pakistan (1,200 interviews). This research was supported by the National
Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START) at the University
of Maryland." |
"Nigel
Inkster, who was an SIS [MI6] officer from 1975 to
2006 and rose to be Assistant Chief and Director of
Operations and Intelligence, was speaking this
morning at a counterterrorism conference in London.... Inkster said that there was
definitely a need for police and sometimes military action in fighting terrorism, but
suggested that it was now widely acknowledged in the
spook community that the Iraq invasion - and now the Israeli assault on Gaza - were
definite factors in radicalisation of British domestic terrorists."
Top MI6 spy: Terrorism less serious than bird flu
The
Register, 11 February 2009
"It was the wartime petroleum shortage
of 1917 and 1918 that really drove home the necessity of oil to British interests and
pushed Mesopotamia [Iraq] back to center stage. Prospects for oil development within the
empire were bleak, which made supplies from the Middle East of paramount importance. Sir Maurice Hankey, the extremely powerful secretary of the War Cabinet,
wrote to Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour that, 'oil in the next war will occupy the place
of coal in the present war, or at least a parallel place to coal. The only big potential supply that we can get under British
Control is the Persian [Iranian] and Mesopotamian [Iraqi] supply.' Therefore, Hankey said,
'control over these oil supplies becomes a first-class British war aim.' But the newly born 'public diplomacy' had to be considered..... Foreign
Secretary Balflour worried that explicitly pronouncing Mesopotamia a war aim would seem
too old-fashionably imperialistic. Instead, in August 1918, he told the Prime Ministers of
the Dominions that Britain must be the 'guiding spirit' in Mesopotamia, as it would
provide the one natural resource the British empire lacked. 'I do not care under what
system we keep the oil,' he said, 'but I am quite clear it is all-important for us that
this oil should be available.' To help make sure this would happen, British forces,
already elsewhere in Mesopotamia, captured Mosul after the armistice was signed with
Turkey."
Daniel Yergin - The Prize, 1991
First
published in Great Britain by Simon and Schuster Ltd, 1991
"The US justice department is
investigating the soaring building costs for a huge American embassy in Baghdad.
Postponing its scheduled opening last month, the state department said it didn't 'have an
answer' as to when it would be finished. The embassy was supposed to have opened by now
but has suffered from repeated postponements because work has either been judged to be
below standard or because of design changes. The original budget for the embassy, the biggest US one in the world, was $592m (£296m) but this has jumped by a further $144m. The size and cost of the embassy is a signal of US intentions to
stay in Iraq. The embassy, in Baghdad's
heavily-fortified Green Zone, will be hidden behind blast walls and have 27 separate
buildings, housing 615 people."
Inquiry begins into soaring cost of US embassy in Iraq
Guardian, 16 November 2007
"Plans to include the Iraq war in a
new GCSE history syllabus have been criticised as 'crazy' by a leading historian. The new
course from the Oxford Cambridge and Royal Society of Arts examinations board (OCR) will
give pupils the chance to assess the rights and wrongs of the Iraq war, to study the
terror attack of 9/11 and to consider why people become terrorists. The course, which has
been submitted to the exams regulator Ofqual for approval, covers the debate on weapons of
mass destruction, Saddam Hussein’s human rights record, claims about his links to
al-Qaeda, the oil industry and the roles of
George Bush and Tony Blair in the conflict. Tristram Hunt, a history lecturer at Queen
Mary, University of London, said that too little time had elapsed since the conflict began
for it to be included on the curriculum for 14-year-olds..... As pupils would be unlikely
to know about the British imperial presence in Iraq
in the early 20th century, they would not understand
the historical context of the war, he added. Dr Hunt said the only context in which it
would make sense to teach the Iraq war to GCSE history students would be as an appendix to
oil wars that began in the 1970s."
Iraq war and IRA terror included on syllabus in major GCSE review
London
Times, 19 April 2008
"A top-level United States policy
document has emerged that explicitly confirms the
Defence Department's readiness to fight an oil war.
According to the report, Strategic Assessment 1999, prepared for the US Joint Chiefs of
Staff and the Secretary of Defence, 'energy and resource issues will continue to shape
international security'. Oil conflicts over
production facilities and transport routes, particularly in the Persian Gulf and Caspian
regions, are specifically envisaged. Although the
policy does not forecast imminent US military conflict, it vividly highlights how the
highest levels of the US Defence community accepted the waging of an oil war as a
legitimate military option. Strategic Assessment also forecasts that if an oil 'problem'
arises, 'US forces might be used to ensure adequate supplies'.... Strategic Assessment was
prepared by the Institute for National Strategic Studies, part of the US Department of
Defence's National Defence University. The institute lists its primary mission as policy
research and analysis for the Joint Chiefs, the Defence Secretary, and a variety of
government security and defence bodies. According to the report, national security depends
on successful engagement in the global economy, so national defence no longer means
protecting the nation from military threats alone, but economic challenges, too. The fall
of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s brought an end to the US's ideological basis for
potential conflict. In 1992 Bill Clinton urged that 'our economic strength must become a
central defining element of our national security policy'. Since then, members of the Bush
Administration have promoted the need for the consolidation of the Cold War victory. In
what many may see as an apparent parallel to present events, Strategic Assessment 1999
drew attention to pre-World War II Britain's pursuit of an approach where control over
territory was seen as essential to ensuring resource supplies."
Oil wars Pentagon's policy since 1999
Syndey Morning
Herald, 20 May 2003
"The
global market will need increasing volumes of oil from members of the Organisation of
Petroleum Exporting Countries after non-OPEC
production reaches a maximum of about 50 million b/d between 2007 and 2011... A question crucial to future oil supply, therefore is: Can
OPEC's old fields deliver.... Most of the supergiant oil fields have had water or
gas injection installed to maintain pressure for 20-30 years. Handling produced injection
fluids is a growing problem in Iran, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and in older fields in Iraq
(Kirkuk, Zubair, and Rumailah).... The oil fields of Iraq are the least depleted and least
developed of any of the Persian Gulf oil producing countries, and Iraq has the potential
to rapidly increase oil output.... Combined with earlier results, these predictions for
OPEC yield an estimate of the world's ultimate recoverable oil reserves of 2.5-2.9
trillion bbl, with 1.29-1.66 trillion bbl remaining (1.224 trillion bbl produced to end
2003)..... It seems unlikely that OPEC can increase production at the rate that was
possible in the 1960s and 1970s, when the fields were fresh and initial well production
rates were higher... Only Iraq has
undeveloped supergiant oil fields (West Qurna, Majnoon, and East Baghdad) and the
potential to rapidly increase production to 8-10 million b/d...... The five Persian Gulf countries (Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran,
Kuwait and the UAE) are crucial to raising OPEC production. The political situation in
Iraq is unlikely to be conducive to major investment in new oil production capacity for
some years. Saudi Arabia has serious internal problems, which threaten to destabilize the
ruling royal family. Iran remains under unilateral US sanctions. US military intervention
in the Gulf and its failure to effectively and fairly engage in resolving the
Palestinian-Israeli conflict conspire to provide a hostile backdrop to western interests
in the Middle East. The combination of burgeoning future oil revenues and growing
hostility to the US in the region is not conducive to major capacity expansion and will
not provide a stable investment environment or offer easy opportunities to the major
international oil companies to assist in any capacity expansion projects. Based on
these considerations and the maturity of OPEC’s major fields, it seems more likely
that OPEC’s considerable reserves will be expressed as a long plateau rather than a
sharp peak. It is quite possible that the Persian Gulf countries will not raise production
capacity high enough or quickly enough, either for political reasons, the slowness of
internal decision-making, or the hostile security environment. The consequences of this for world oil supply are immense, with the likelihood of further military interventions and
conflicts within the Middle East .... a series of crises in oil supply is likely over the
coming decades. The first, related
to the peak and decline of non-OPEC production, is practically upon us and underpins the
currently high oil prices...... The
imminent inability of non-OPEC production to meet incremental demand and its decline after
2010 precipitates the second crisis as OPEC’s diminishing spare capacity (even with Iraq’s
production back to preinvasion levels) becomes less and less able to accommodate
short-term fluctuations.....The third crisis, due to OPEC’s incremental supply being unable to meet
incremental demand, follows in the first half of the next decade. This assumes that
OPEC’s reserves are as published. .....These
crises will have global economic and geopolitical significance: The oil price will be high
and volatile, and demand growth will have to be curtailed..."
Oil Supply Challenges - 2: What Can OPEC Deliver?
Oil and Gas Journal, 7 March 2005
It's The Occupations Stupid
"Labour's
foreign policy has aided radicalisation among Muslims, the security minister, Lord West,
has admitted. 'Tony Blair, I'm afraid, would never
accept that our foreign policy actually had any impact on radicalisation,' Lord West told
a conference in London. 'That's clearly rubbish. Gordon Brown is much clearer. 'The causes
are so diverse. We didn't understand it, we still don't totally understand it but we
actually have a far, far better understanding than we did in the past. 'To pretend what
happens abroad has no impact is nonsense,' the former first sea lord added. The minister
also suggested that Israel's action in Gaza earlier this month would also hinder the
Government's efforts to prevent the radicalisation of British Muslims."
Labour foreign policy has aided radicalisation, Lord West admits
Daily
Telegraph, 28 January 2009
"Government efforts to prevent the
radicalisation of British Muslims have been set back by Israel's assault on Gaza, the security and counter-terrorism
minister, Lord West of Spithead, announced yesterday. In an outspoken assessment of the
terror risk facing Britain, Gordon Brown's security adviser was scathing about the
assertion, made by Tony Blair when prime minister, that foreign policy did not alter the
UK's risk of a terror attack. 'We never used to accept that our foreign policy ever had
any effect on terrorism,' he said. 'Well, that was
clearly bollocks.' He added: 'They [the Blair
administration] were very unwilling to have any debate about how our foreign policy
impacted on radicalisation.'....Earlier this month, the head of MI5, Jonathan Evans, said
the Israeli action gave extremist groups in the UK more ideological ammunition. Community
groups working with young Muslims have also said that the action has set back their
efforts by years."
Minister for terror: Gaza will fuel UK extremism
Guardian, 28
January 2009
"I rarely speak in public. I prefer
to avoid the limelight and get on with my job. I speak not as a politician, nor as a
pundit, but as someone who has been an intelligence professional for 32 years..... There
has been much speculation about what motivates young men and women to carry out acts of
terrorism in the UK. My service needs to understand
the motivations behind terrorism to succeed in
countering it, as far as that is possible. Al-Qaeda has developed an ideology which claims
that Islam is under attack, and needs to be defended. This is a powerful narrative
that weaves together conflicts from across the globe, presenting the West's response to
varied and complex issues, from long-standing disputes such as Israel/Palestine and
Kashmir to more recent events as evidence of an across-the-board determination to
undermine and humiliate Islam worldwide. The video
wills of British suicide bombers make it clear that they are motivated by perceived worldwide and long-standing
injustices against Muslims - an extreme and minority
interpretation of Islam promoted by some preachers and people of influence. And their interpretation as anti-Muslim of UK foreign policy, in
particular the UK's involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan.” |
"David Cameron is to devote his
energies to the by-election in Henley on June 26 rather than the unwanted contest in
Yorkshire forced by [the resignation over the 'war on terror' erosion
of civil liberties by Conservative shadow Home Secretary] David Davis, it emerged
yesterday.... Mr Davis's successor was embroiled in controversy last night when Labour
raised comments that he made after the London suicide attacks in 2005. Dominic Grieve,
then the Shadow Attorney-General, said that the
attacks were 'totally explicable' because of the deep anger felt by many British Muslims
over Iraq."
David Davis, Kelvin MacKenzie and a Raving Loony prepare for battle
London Times,
14 June 2008
"Waheed
Zaman stared fixedly into the camera lens and told anyone who might one day watch his
'martyrdom video' that he had not been brainwashed. Dressed in a black shirt, wearing a
Palestinian-style scarf tied around his forehead and sitting in front of a black flag
bearing Arabic script, he declared that he knew exactly what he was doing. 'I have not
been brainwashed, I am educated to a very high standard. I am old enough to make my own
decision,' Mr Zaman, who studied biomedical science, said. Then the former president of
the Islamic Society at London Metropolitan University warned the Western world that death
and destruction would sweep through it like a tornado. He said: 'You will not feel any
peace or security in your lands until you stop interfering
in our lands . . . As you kill us you will be killed. As you bomb us you
will be bombed.' Extracts from the film of Mr Zaman
were among seven alleged martyrdom videos played or read to a jury at Woolwich Crown Court
yesterday. The videos were found by police in August 2006 after the arrests of Mr Zaman
and seven other men who are on trial accused of plotting to carry out suicide attacks on
transatlantic airliners....The films were found in
an unedited state, and in a number of them someone off-camera asks the men how they feel
about claiming innocent lives. Each replies that no one in the West is innocent as long as its armies are in Muslim countries....In his
videoclip, Mr Islam said: 'We will not leave this path until
you leave our lands, until you feel what we are feeling. This is revenge
for the actions of the USA in the Muslim lands
and their accomplices such as the British and the Jews. '... In another clip, Mr Ali said:
'I’m doing this . . . to punish and to humiliate the kuffar [unbeliever], to
teach them a lesson that they will never forget. It’s to tell them that we Muslim
people have pride, our people of Allah, the people of Islam, we are brave. We are not
cowards. Enough is enough.' He added: 'Sheikh Osama [bin
Laden] warned you many times to leave our lands or you will be destroyed
and now the time has come for you to be destroyed.'” "The leader of an alleged terrorist
gang accused of planning mid-air carnage dismissed a plot to set off a bomb at Westminster
as a 'publicity stunt'. Abdulla Ahmed Ali, 27, admitted conspiring to explode a bomb at
the Houses of Parliament as a political protest, but he told Woolwich Crown Court that
neither he nor two other men involved in the plan wanted to kill or hurt anyone. He said
that martyrdom videos found by police, in which he and others threatened violent attacks
on the West, were propaganda for an anti-government documentary. Giving evidence in his
defence, Mr Ali said that the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan had driven him to act.... He said: 'The
root problem we thought was to try and change foreign
policy. We thought we are not American so forget
America, we should deal with being a British citizen.'.... Mr Ali, who said that he and Mr
Sarwar also considered power stations and Canary Wharf as targets, added: 'It is nothing
to do with Islamic funda-mentalism or radical Islam, it is purely
down to foreign policy.' ” "The arrests of three men over terror
offences are linked to an investigation into threats to kill Prime Minister Gordon Brown,
the BBC has learned. The threats, also against former prime minister Tony Blair, were made
in January on a recognised jihadi website. The group posting the statement called itself
'Al Qaeda in Britain' and demanded the withdrawal of
British forces from Iraq and Afghanistan." "The NHS doctor who tried to murder
thousands of people in the London and Glasgow car bombings had been part of a terrorist
cell in Iraq, counter-terrorism sources have told The Times. Bilal Abdulla came to
Britain to open a 'new front' in the Islamist jihad after he had been refused permission
to carry out a suicide attack in Baghdad.... Abdulla, a 29-year-old Iraqi born in
Aylesbury, showed no emotion as he was convicted yesterday at Woolwich Crown Court of
conspiracy to murder and cause explosions. He faces life imprisonment and will be
sentenced today....Abdulla, the son of respected physicians who had trained in Britain
before returning to Iraq with their five-year old son, had
witnessed both the first and second invasions of his home country by allied forces....A senior police source said that Abdulla was an 'intelligent,
self-motivated individual' who possessed a burning hatred of both Americans and Shia
Muslims. He dedicated a section of his will to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the self-proclaimed
leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq who was killed before Abdulla’s attacks. Jim Sturman, QC, for Abdulla, said that his client wanted it to be known
that his crimes were motivated by politics and his anger at
what he saw as an 'unjust war', not religion." |
"The West is losing the wars in Iraq
and Afghanistan because it does not understand the true motives of terrorists and is thus
taking wrong strategies against them, a former analyst of U.S. Central Intelligence Agency
(CIA) said Sunday. The reason for Osama bin Laden and his followers to fight the West is
not because of their different values, or because they hate freedom, democracy or gender
equality, but rather lies in Western countries' policies in the Middle East, Michael Scheuer, a retired
22-year CIA veteran told Canadian Television during an interview. American and the West's unqualified support for Israel, support
for tyrannical regimes in the Middle East, and dependence on oil in the region are the
real factors behind the terrorist acts of Islamic fundamentalist, he pointed out. Western countries so far have not realized or
acknowledged these true reasons for terrorism, and so 'we're fighting an enemy that
doesn't exist,' he said, adding 'if you don't fight the enemy in the way that he's
motivated, you're going to lose.' "
CIA analyst says West losing in Iraq, Afghanistan
Xinhua, 17
September 2007
| "A
former head of MI5 today describes the response to
the September 11 2001 attacks on the US as a 'huge overreaction' and says the invasion of
Iraq influenced young men in Britain who turned to terrorism. In an interview with the
Guardian, Stella Rimington calls al-Qaida's attack on the US 'another terrorist incident' but not
qualitatively different from any others. 'That's not how it struck me. I suppose I'd lived
with terrorist events for a good part of my working life and this was as far as I was
concerned another one,' she says. In common with Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller, who retired
as MI5's director general last year, Rimington, who left 12 years ago, has already made it
clear she abhorred 'war on terror' rhetoric and the government's abandoned plans to hold
terrorism suspects for 42 days without charge. Today, she goes further by criticising
politicians including Jacqui Smith, the home secretary, for trying to outbid each other in
their opposition to terrorism and making national security a partisan issue. It all began,
she suggests, with September 11. 'National security has become much more of a political
issue than it ever was in my day,' she says. 'Parties are tending to use it as a way of
trying to get at the other side. You know, 'We're more tough on terrorism than you are.' I
think that's a bad move, quite frankly.' Rimington mentions Guantánamo Bay, the practice
of extraordinary rendition, and the invasion of Iraq - three issues which the majority in
Britain's security and intelligence establishment opposed privately at the time. She challenges claims, notably made by Tony Blair, that the war in
Iraq was not related to the radicalisation of Muslim youth in Britain. Asked what impact the war had on the terrorist threat, she replies:
'Well, I think all one can do is look at what those people who've been arrested or have
left suicide videos say about their motivation. And most of them, as far as I'm aware, say
that the war in Iraq played a significant part in persuading them that this is the right
course of action to take.'" Response to 9/11 was 'huge overreaction' - ex-MI5 chief Guardian, 18 October 2008 |
"American military intervention in
Muslim countries has bred a generation of 'angry young men' vulnerable to al-Qa'eda
recruitment, a report from a leading security analysis group has said. A survey conducted
in Iraq last month found that 46% of young men said they were 'angry all the time'.
Similar levels of discontent have been detected in Afghanistan, where America has led the
Nato coalition for six years and Somalia, which has not recovered from the chaos that led
to a brief US intervention in 1991.... Norine MacDonald, the lead Senlis reseacher, said
the resentment of the Muslim young had exposed a 'structural weakness' in the American-led
campaign to quash Islamic-based terrorism."
US wars have helped al-Qa'eda, says report
Daily
Telegraph, 6 June 2008
"If someone hates us so much that he
is prepared to sacrifice his own life in order to commit mass murder, then we want to find
a rational explanation in his personality or his background to separate him from the rest
of us. He would ideally have grown up in deprivation, with a dysfunctional family, few
friends, minimal education, a poverty of expectation and a world view that can be easily
moulded by the Islamist zealots whose nihilistic creed offers a simple, deadly solution to
all of life’s problems. The reality,
disturbingly, is very different. A study of 172
al-Qaeda terrorists conducted four years ago by Marc Sageman, a forensic psychiatrist and
former CIA case officer in Pakistan, found that 90 per cent came from a relatively stable,
secure background. Three quarters were from middle-class or upper-class families, two
thirds went to college and two thirds were professionals or semi-professionals, often
engineers, physicians, architects or scientists.....Because the West is seen as engaged in
a global war against Islam, jihad in the name of Allah is seen as the duty of every
Muslim. That jihadist terrorism is abhorrent to the vast majority of Muslims, and Muslim
doctors, living in Britain was emphasised yesterday when a coalition of groups calling
itself Muslims United took out advertisements in national newspapers to condemn the car
bomb attacks. 'Not in our name,' they said, quoting a verse from the Koran: 'Whoever kills
an innocent soul, it is as if he killed the whole of mankind. And whoever saves one, it is
as if he saved the whole of mankind.' Your educated, middle-class jihadist will point out
that the full verse actually prohibits the killing of another human being 'except as a
punishment for murder and other villainy in the land'. The Koran’s fifth chapter
continues: 'Those that make war against God and his apostle and spread disorder in the
land shall be slain . . .' For some Muslims, especially
those who have lived in or near Iraq, it does not
demand a great leap of faith, whatever their profession, to include the United States and
Britain among those 'that make war against God'."
The unexpected profile of the modern terrorist: 26, from a caring family, married, with
children, graduate
London Times,
7 July 2007
"The Gallup poll (which surveyed
10,000 Muslims in 10 different countries) also revealed that the
wealthier and better-educated Muslims are, the more
likely they are to be politically radical. So if you ever believed that anti-Western
sentiment was an expression of poverty and deprivation, think again. Even more perplexingly, Islamists are more supportive of democracy than
Muslim moderates. Those who imagined that the Middle East could be stabilised with a
mixture of economic and political reform could not have been more wrong. The richer these
people get, the more they favour radical Islamism. And they see democracy as a way of
putting the radicals into power."
Hatred of America unites the world
Sunday
Telegraph, 25 February 2007
"In Leaderless
Jihad, the latest book by the author of 2004's Understanding
Terror Networks, forensic psychiatrist Marc Sageman attempts to unravel the
psychological profile of Islamist terrorists. Like his earlier book, Leaderless Jihad discredits conventional wisdom about
terrorists by eschewing anecdotes and conjecture in favor of hard data and statistics. And
statistically, the enemy is us. 'It is easy to view terrorists as alien creatures who
exist outside normal patterns of social interaction,' he writes. But the sobering reality
is that they don't. Sociopaths do not make capable terrorists — they seldom take
orders and are rarely willing to sacrifice their lives for a larger goal. Many terrorists
on the other hand, share qualities with ordinary, law-abiding people: they can be
cooperative, goal-orientated and intelligent, even if emotionally wrought. Often, the
start of their radicalization can be traced to a scrupulously moral outrage — not an irrational hatred or base
prejudice. Radical Muslims become bombers, Sageman argues, when the causes of their anger
— the Israeli occupation of Palestine, the U.S.
invasion of Iraq — come to be perceived as part
of a general war against Islam. The feeling of being under attack may be amplified by
personal experience of discrimination, and then validated by exchanges with like-minded
friends, family members and Internet users, before being converted into action by
'al-Qaeda.' Not, as Sageman puts it, 'al-Qaeda Central' (made up of those who have sworn
an oath of loyalty to Osama bin Laden), but al-Qaeda the informal network, mobilizing
radicalized Islamists around the world without any contact with bin Laden at all....The
solution to Islamic terrorism, as the author sees it, is genuine peace in Palestine and an
immediate U.S. withdrawal from Iraq, depriving jihadis of their ability to wage a moral
war. 'The presence of even one American soldier ... will trump any goodwill policy the
United States attempts to carry out in the Middle East.' He also recommends an end to the
offering of rewards, publication of 'most wanted' lists and staging of press conferences
to proclaim the capture of top terrorists, since jihadis regard all these as badges of
honor. It would be better, Sageman says, to treat terrorists like common criminals."
The Jihadi Next Door
TIME, 31 March
2008
"Many Muslims have been alienated from
British society by the Iraq war and by public hostility based on the fear that they may be sympathetic to
Islamic terrorists. But there are also many Muslims who think terrorism is evil, who are
not fundamentalists, who want to create a satisfactory life here. They may well be
reluctant to report the nice young man down the road who may, or may not, have joined a
terrorist group, but they would be horrified to think that one of their own children could
become a bomber.....Many Muslims resent what they
regard as injustices to Islam, but few of them support the massacre of the innocent; most
of them want to enjoy the pluralist opportunities of modern Britain."
Lord Rees-Mogg
This time we were lucky. This time . . .
London
Times, 2 July 2007
"For years, suicide bombings in the
Middle East have caused death, destruction and chaos. In turn, they have generated news
headlines and analyses that often frame the attacks, like those perpetrated by
Palestinians or Iraqi insurgents, as weapons in a holy war. But Pape, author of the
provocative new book 'Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism,' contends
those reports fuel significant misperceptions about the bombers, their motivations and
specifically the role religion plays in their actions. 'There is little connection between
suicide terrorism and Islamic fundamentalism, or any one of the world's religions,' he
says. Before September 11, Pape's main academic focus was the impact of air power in
military conflicts. After the attacks, he shifted his attention to suicide terrorism.
Finding out what motivated these bombers and their groups proved challenging, as he
discovered little in the way of comprehensive data. So Pape began building a database and
then mined it for details. After studying 315 suicide attacks from 1981-2004, the
University of Chicago political science professor concludes that suicide bombers' actions
stem from logical military strategies, not their religion -- and especially not Islam.
While American news-watchers may hear more about Israel and Iraq, Pape calls the Tamil Tigers the leading purveyors of suicide attacks over the last two
decades -- until now. An adamantly secular group with Hindu roots, the Tamil Tigers are
engaged in a struggle for independence and power with the Sri Lankan government. So what
is the suicide bomber's main rationale? It is that the attacks work, Pape found. 'What nearly all suicide terrorist attacks have in common is a
specific secular and strategic goal: to compel modern democracies to withdraw military
forces from territory that the terrorists consider to be their homeland.' Which means, in the case of al Qaeda
and like-minded groups, getting the United States out of the Arabian Peninsula and Iraq.... Indiana Sen. Richard Lugar, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee, was 'very impressed and very interested' after reading Pape's book and being
briefed by him, according to a Lugar aide."
Suicide bombings as military strategy
CNN, 30 June 2005
"At a time when
Islamist terrorism seems to have returned to the centre of London, it is easy to
forget that during the 20th century terror was used on a vast scale by secular regimes.
Today suicide attacks are automatically linked with a belief in martyrdom followed by
paradise in the afterlife. Yet suicide bombing of the kind we now confront is a terrorist
technique that was developed by people with no such beliefs. Though they claim to reject
all things modern and Western, Islamist terrorists are continuing a modern Western
tradition of using systematic violence to transform society. The roots of contemporary
terrorism are in radical Western ideology – especially Leninism – far more than
religion..... It might be thought that with the rise of Islamism, secular terrorism has
died out. This is far from the truth. Suicide bombing
may now be the Islamist technique of choice, but it was the Tamil Tigers – a
Marxist-Leninist group that recruits mostly from Hindus in Sri Lanka, but which is
militantly hostile to all forms of religion – that devised it. It was the Tamil
Tigers that developed the explosive belt worn by Hamas and Islamic Jihad suicide bombers,
and up to the Iraq war the Tigers had committed more such attacks than any other
organisation. The first wave of suicide attacks in Lebanon in the Eighties was also mainly
the work of secular groups. Of 41 attacks between
1982 and 1986, including the attack in 1983 that killed more than 100 US Marines, 27 were
carried out by members of leftist groups such as the Lebanese communist party and the Arab
Socialist Union. Only eight were Islamists, and three were Christians (including a woman
high school teacher)."
A trail of terror stretching 200 years
London
Times, 30 June 2007
"The War on Terror has radicalised
Muslims around the world to unprecedented levels of anti-American feeling, according to
the largest survey of Muslims ever to be conducted.....Gallup’s Centre for Muslim
Studies in New York carried out surveys of 10,000 Muslims in ten predominantly Muslim
countries. One finding was that the wealthier and better-educated the Muslim was, the more
likely he was to be radicalised. The surveys were carried out in 2005 and 2006. Along with
an earlier Gallup survey in nine other countries in 2001, they
represent the views of more than 90 per cent of the world’s Muslims. A further 1,500 Muslims in London, Paris and Berlin are involved in a
separate poll to be published in April.... The Gallup
findings indicate that, in terms of spiritual values and the emphasis on the family and
the future, Americans have more in common with Muslims than they do with their Western
counterparts in Europe. A large number of Muslims supported the Western ideal of
democratic government. Fifty per cent of radicals supported democracy, compared with 35
per cent of moderates. Religion was found to have little to do with radicalisation or
antipathy towards Western culture. Muslims were
condemnatory of promiscuity and a sense of moral decay. What they admired most was
liberty, its democratic system, technology and freedom of speech.... Researchers set out
to examine the truth behind the stock response in the West to the question of when it will
know it is winning the war on terror. Foreign policy experts tend to believe that victory
will come when the Islamic world rejects radicalism. 'Every
politician has a theory: radicals are religious fundamentalists; they are poor; they are
full of hopeless-ness and hate. But those theories are wrong,' the researchers reported. 'We find that Muslim radicals have more in
common with their moderate brethren than is often assumed. If the West wants to reach the
extremists, and empower the moderate majority, it must first recognise who it’s up
against.' Gallup says that because terrorists often hijack Islamic precepts for their own
ends, pundits and politicians in the West sometimes portray Islam as a religion of
terrorism. 'They often charge that religious fervour triggers radical and violent views,'
said John Esposito, a religion professor, and Dalia Mogahed, Gallup’s Muslim studies
director, in one analysis. 'But the data say otherwise. There is no significant difference
in religiosity between moderates and radicals. In fact, radicals are no more likely to
attend religious services regularly than are moderates.' They continue: 'It’s no secret that many in the Muslim world suffer from
crippling poverty and lack of education. But are radicals any poorer than their fellow
Muslims? We found the opposite: there is indeed a key difference between radicals and
moderates when it comes to income and education, but it is the radicals who earn more and
stay in school longer.' In fact, the surveys found that the radicals were more satisfied
with their finances and quality of life than moderates."
Anti-American feelings soar among Muslims, study finds
London
Times, 21 February 2007
Why The
Occupations?
It's The Oil Stupid
"Robert Baer, a former CIA spy who presents a
television documentary on the history of suicide bombing, says he knew the practice
would come to the UK. And it’s not the West’s values, but its foreign policies,
that are to blame.... 'The other one thing is, ‘they hate us’, which is just
total bullsh**.' [he says] Is it? 'Yes,' he says, 'it is.' In a school run by Hezbollah, he asked a class
dominated by the daughters of 'martyrs' if they watched US television. 'Everybody raised
their hand. And what did they watch? Oprah. I said, ‘How can you watch this
cr**?’ And they said, ‘No, she’s great. We love Oprah.’..... So, it
wasn’t our values. It wasn’t Western values. It’s Western presence. They
want us to get out.'..... There is, however, a
three-letter reason why the US will not impose a peace plan on Israel and leave the
region. Baer, the author of Sleeping
With The Devil: How Washington Sold Our Soul for Saudi
Crude, well knows what it is. 'I don’t
think any American politician, however at fault we are in Iraq or anywhere else, can say,
‘All right, let the crazies have the oil fields’, because oil at $200 a barrel would put us into a
depression.' So because the American economy is at
stake, we can’t get out even to save our skins? 'That, I believe, is your classic
paradox.' " "... we've been in the Middle East
more than 50 years. We've been in the Middle East ever since the -- however you would like
to call the dependency upon oil has developed. And our forces have been there either as naval, air or
land forces in one way or another for an awful long time. And once the British pulled out
the Arabian gulf, it became more and more necessary for us to provide more and more force
in the region..... And ultimately, it comes down to the free flow of goods and resources on which the prosperity of our own
nation and everybody else's depends upon.... We need to maintain a presence that protects
the small nations and ensures the continued stability of the region and the flow of those resources that are essential to our well-being." |
"The
super-giant fields of southeastern Iraq are the largest concentration of super-giants to
be found anywhere in the world....unlike neighbor Saudi Arabia, Iraq has been unable to
deploy the latest technology, such as 3-D seismic, to find its reserves. Present reserve
estimates of Iraq's oil are based on 2-D seismic technology from the 1980s. Still, the
estimated success rate in Iraq ranges from one in two in the Mesopotamian Basin to one in
four in the western and northwestern stable platform, with the overall success rate
exceeding 72 percent - perhaps the highest success rate achievable anywhere in the world. Oil exploration costs are among the
cheapest globally, with the current cost estimated at around 50 cents per barrel....To
date, petroleum geologists have delineated and mapped over 526 prospects - drilling 131
prospects to discover 73 major fields. They have identified some 239 as having a high
degree of certainty, but those prospects remain undrilled. Thirty fields have been
partially developed and only 12 fields are actually onstream. Undrilled structures and undeveloped
fields could represent the largest untapped hydrocarbon resource anywhere in the world.....Clearly, large parts of Iraq are
still virgin - its large hydrocarbon reserves are still waiting to be developed to their
full potential, while most
other Middle East countries are fully exploiting their reserves. The main challenges facing the new Iraqi
authority are to establish law and order as well as security. Once these issues are resolved, Iraq will
perhaps be the most exciting place on Earth with regard to oil development and exploration....International oil companies are
looking forward with great anticipation to the opening of Iraq, as they have been waiting
for the past 40 years. Hopefully, Iraq will soon be able to offer them acreage, thereby
allowing proper development of its huge potential. Open and fair competition will enable
oil companies to apply the latest technologies in the search for, and development of, the
country's hydrocarbon resources - thus helping Iraq realize its full hydrocarbon
potential."
Assessing Iraq’s Oil
Potential
Geotimes, October 2003
"Brigadier-General James Ellery CBE,
the Foreign Office’s Senior Adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad
since 2003, confirmed the critical role of Iraqi oil reserves in potentially alleviating a
'world shortage' of conventional oil. The Iraq War has helped to head off what Brigadier
Ellery described as 'the tide of Easternisation' – a shift in global political and
economic power toward China and India, to whom goes 'two thirds of the Middle East’s
oil'. After the 2004 transfer of authority to an interim Iraqi civilian administration,
Brigadier Ellery set up and ran the 700-strong security framework operation in support of
the US-funded Reconstruction of Iraq. His remarks were made as part of a presentation at
the School of Oriental & African Studies (SOAS), University of London, sponsored by
the Iraqi Youth Foundation, on 22nd April.... 'The reason that oil reached $117 a barrel
last week', he said, 'was less to do with security of supply… than World shortage.'
He went on to emphasise the strategic significance of Iraqi petroleum fields in relation
to the danger of production peaks being breached in major oil reserves around the world.
'Russia’s production has peaked at 10 million barrels per day; Africa has proved slow
to yield affordable extra supplies – from Sudan and Angola for example. Thus the only near-term potential increase will be from Iraq,' he said. Whether Iraq began 'favouring East or West' could therefore be
'de-stabilizing' not only 'within the region but to nations far beyond which have an
interest.'.... Brigadier Ellery’s career in the British Army has involved stints in
the Middle East, Africa, Bosnia, Germany and Northern Ireland. 'Iraq holds the key to
stability in the region,' he said, 'unless that is you believe the tide of
‘Easternisation’ is such that the USA and the West are in such decline, relative
to the emerging China and India, that it is the East – not the West – which is
more likely to guarantee stability. Incidentally, I do not.' Iraq’s pivotal
importance in the Middle East, he explained, is because of its 'relatively large,
consuming population' at 24 million, its being home to 'the second largest reserve of oil
– under exploited', and finally its geostrategic location 'on the routes between
Asia, Europe, Arabia and North Africa - hence the Silk Road.'.... Brigadier-General James
Ellery is currently Director of Operations at AEGIS Defence Services Ltd., a private
British security firm and US defence contractor since June 2004. In April this year, the
same month as Ellery’s SOAS lecture, AEGIS won the renewal of its US defence
department (DoD) contract for two more years, which at $475 million is the single largest
security contract brokered by the DoD. The contract is to provide security services for
reconstruction projects in Iraq conducted by mostly American companies..... During his
April presentation at SOAS, AEGIS director Ellery declared, 'Iraq promises a degree of
prosperity in the region as it embarks on massive Iraqi-funded reconstruction, a part of which will raise Iraqi’s oil
production from 2.5 million bpd today to 3 million by next year and maybe ultimately 6
million barrels per day.'”
Ex-British Army Chief Confirms Peak Oil Motive for War; Praises Fraudulent Reconstruction
Programs
Atlantic Free Press, 18 June
2008
"The invasion of Iraq by Britain and
the US has trebled the price of oil, according to a leading expert, costing the world a
staggering $6 trillion in higher energy prices alone. The oil economist Dr Mamdouh
Salameh, who advises both the World Bank and the UN Industrial Development Organisation
(Unido), told The Independent on Sunday that the price of oil would now be no more than
$40 a barrel, less than a third of the record $135 a barrel reached last week, if it had
not been for the Iraq war.... Dr Salameh, director of the UK-based Oil Market Consultancy
Service, and an authority on Iraq's oil, said it is
the only one of the world's biggest producing countries with enough reserves substantially
to increase its flow. Production in eight of the others – the US, Canada, Iran,
Indonesia, Russia, Britain, Norway and Mexico – has peaked, he says, while China and
Saudia Arabia, the remaining two, are nearing the point at of decline. Before the war, Saddam Hussein's regime pumped some 3.5 million barrels
of oil a day, but this had now fallen to just two million barrels. Dr Salameh told the
all-party parliamentary group on peak oil last month that Iraq had offered the United
States a deal, three years before the war, that would have opened up 10 new giant oil
fields on 'generous' terms in return for the lifting of sanctions. 'This would certainly
have prevented the steep rise of the oil price,' he said. 'But
the US had a different idea. It planned to occupy Iraq and annex its oil.'"
Oil: A global crisis
Independent
On Sunday, 25 May 2008
Persian Gulf Oil and Gas Exports Fact Sheet Strait of Hormuz Bab al-Mandab Suez/Sumed Complex Other Export Routes |
The Potential Importance Of Syria As A Transit Route
| <<<---- To USA and Europe |
 |
Blue
= Pre-War Iraqi Oil Transit Route To Meditteranian Via Arabian Peninsula
And Suez Canal (Suez Cannot Take Largest Tankers) |
"As I went back through the Pentagon
in November 2001, one of the senior military staff officers had time for a chat. Yes, we
were still on track for going against Iraq, he said. But there was more. This was being
discussed as part of a five-year campaign plan, he said, and there were a total of seven
countries, beginning with Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon,
Libya, Iran, Somalia and Sudan....He said it with
reproach--with disbelief, almost--at the breadth of the vision. I moved the conversation
away, for this was not something I wanted to hear. And it was not something I wanted to
see moving forward, either. ...I left the Pentagon that afternoon deeply concerned."
'Winning Modern' Wars (page 130), General Wesley Clark
"The shimmering blue water washes
gently on to golden sands that stretch past the crumbling, whitewashed villas lining the
shore. Dolphins leap from the gentle swell of the Indian Ocean....In another age this was
known as 'beautiful Mogadishu', a destination for package tourists from Europe. Today it
stands beside the most dangerous shipping lane in the world. Pirates armed with
rocket-propelled grenades and AK47s control the waters far out to sea; close to shore, the
threat of Islamist suicide boats keeps captains watchful. About
30,000 ships use the route as they pass in and out of the Suez Canal, making it a vital
artery for global trade. A US-led naval taskforce,
set up as part of Operation Enduring Freedom to tackle terrorism, has been given
responsibility for trying to keep the sea lanes open. They have established a series of
waypoints marking a safe corridor through the Gulf of Aden patrolled by warships and
coalition aircraft overhead."
Somalia: Only guns can get aid past the pirates into the gates of Hell
London
Times, 20 September 2008
"Islamist extremists prepared last
night to unload rocket-propelled grenades and anti-aircraft guns from a Ukrainian
freighter seized by Somali pirates even as foreign warships surrounded the vessel. A US destroyer and
submarine from an international taskforce set up to patrol the
Gulf of Aden and Indian Ocean and two
European-flagged ships were reported to be tracking the freighter that had anchored off
the southern Somali coast. The ship's captain contacted media outlets by satellite phone to
say that one of his crew had died during the hostage drama....Piracy has flourished around
Somalia's
lawless coast since the mid-1990s. It was briefly stamped out by the Union of Islamic
Courts which took control of the country in 2006. The trade returned when the Islamists
were defeated by an Ethiopian assault. In the past the trade was directed at earning hard
currency. However, this year the pirates have acquired an ideological dimension. Bruno
Schiemsky, a Somali analyst based in Kenya, said that Somalia's al-Shabaab militia — the youth wing of the Islamist movement —
had joined forces with the pirates, offering weapons training in return for lessons in
plundering at sea. 'This has now gone beyond money. The Shabaab are now at sea looking for
Israelis, Americans and other Westerners,' he said. 'This is getting very nasty
now.'”
Islamists plunder weapons from hijacked ship in Somalia
London
Times, 29 September 2008
"Rice will not leave Washington until
later today, and it was clear from her pronounced lack of urgency that President George W
Bush had torn up previous manuals for Middle East crisis intervention. The White House
played down the seriousness of the Lebanon crisis, characterising the death and
destruction as the 'birth pangs of a new Middle East'. Officials argued that it was pointless to negotiate with Hezbollah and
that only its eradication could create the necessary conditions for a durable political
settlement. The crisis was 'an opportunity, not a setback', insisted one senior US official."
Hell in the Holy Lands
Sunday Times, 23
July 2006
"Israel stands to benefit greatly
from the US led war on Iraq, primarily by getting rid of an implacable foe in President
Saddam Hussein and the threat from the weapons of mass destruction he was alleged to
possess. But it seems the Israelis have
other things in mind. An intriguing pointer
to one potentially significant benefit was a report by Haaretz on 31 March that minister
for national infrastructures Joseph Paritzky was considering the possibility of reopening
the long-defunct oil pipeline from Mosul to
the Mediterranean port of Haifa. With Israel lacking
energy resources of its own and depending on highly expensive oil from Russia, reopening
the pipeline would transform its economy....
All of this lends weight to the theory that Bush's war is part of a masterplan to reshape
the Middle East to serve Israel's interests. Haaretz quoted Paritzky as saying that the
pipeline project is economically justifiable because it would dramatically reduce Israel's
energy bill. US efforts to get Iraqi oil to Israel are not surprising. Under a 1975
Memorandum of Understanding (MoU), the US guaranteed all Israel's oil needs in the event
of a crisis. The MoU, which has been quietly renewed every five years, also committed the
USA to construct and stock a supplementary strategic reserve for Israel, equivalent to
some US$3bn in 2002. Special legislation was enacted to exempt Israel from restrictions on
oil exports from the USA. Moreover, the USA agreed to divert oil from its home market,
even if that entailed domestic shortages, and guaranteed delivery of the promised oil in
its own tankers if commercial shippers were unwilling or not available to carry the crude
to Israel. All of this adds up to a potentially massive financial commitment. The USA has another reason for supporting Paritzky's
project: a land route for Iraqi oil direct to the Mediterranean would lessen US dependence
on Gulf oil supplies. Direct access to the world's second-largest oil reserves (with the
possibility of expansion through so-far untapped deposits) is an important strategic
objective."
Oil from Iraq : An Israeli pipedream?
Jane's
Foreign Report, 16 April 2003
"The
United States has asked Israel to check the possibility of pumping oil from Iraq to the
oil refineries in Haifa. The request came in a
telegram last week from a senior Pentagon official to a top Foreign Ministry official in
Jerusalem. The Prime Minister's Office, which views the pipeline to Haifa as a 'bonus' the
U.S. could give to Israel in return for its unequivocal support for the American-led
campaign in Iraq, had asked the Americans for the official telegram. The new pipeline
would take oil from the Kirkuk area, where some 40 percent of Iraqi oil is produced, and
transport it via Mosul, and then across Jordan to Israel. The U.S. telegram included a
request for a cost estimate for repairing the Mosul-Haifa pipeline that was in use prior
to 1948. During the War of Independence, the Iraqis stopped the flow of oil to Haifa and
the pipeline fell into disrepair over the years. The National Infrastructure Ministry has
recently conducted research indicating that construction of a 42-inch diameter pipeline
between Kirkuk and Haifa would cost about $400,000 per kilometer. The old Mosul-Haifa
pipeline was only 8 inches in diameter. National Infrastructure Minister Yosef Paritzky
said yesterday that the port of Haifa is an attractive destination for Iraqi oil and that
he plans to discuss this matter with the U.S. secretary of energy during his planned visit
to Washington next month. Paritzky added that the plan depends on Jordan's consent and
that Jordan would receive a transit fee for allowing the oil to piped through its
territory. The minister noted, however, that 'due to pan-Arab concerns, it will be hard
for the Jordanians to agree to the flow of Iraqi oil via Jordan and Israel.' Sources in
Jerusalem confirmed yesterday that the Americans are looking into the possibility of
laying a new pipeline via Jordan and Israel. (There is also a pipeline running via Syria
that has not been used in some three decades.) Iraqi oil is now being transported via
Turkey to a small Mediterranean port near the Syrian border."
U.S. checking possibility of pumping oil from northern Iraq to Haifa, via Jordan
Haaretz,
1 August 2007
"Iraqi and Syrian oil ministers agreed
on Wednesday to repair and subsequently reopen a key pipeline between their two countries
that connects Iraq's oil-rich Kirkuk region and a Syrian port. The agreement between Iraqi
Oil Minister Hussain al-Shahristani and his Syrian counterpart Sufian Allaw came at the
end of a three-day visit here by a top Iraqi delegation, headed by Prime Minister Nouri
al-Maliki. The 880-kilometer (550 mile) pipeline links Iraq's northern oil fields to the
Syrian port of Baniyas, and reopening it would allow Iraq to use a second export terminal
on the Mediterranean Sea. Currently, Iraq exports nearly all its oil through the Persian
Gulf. The main export pipeline from Kirkuk to the Turkish Mediterranean port of Ceyhan has
been mostly closed due to sabotage. The pipeline to
Baniyas was built in the 1950s but was bombed by U.S. forces during the 2003 invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein."
Iraqi, Syrian oil ministers agree to reopen key pipeline
Associated
Press, 22 August 2007
Guardian -
Comment Is Free [extracts]The rape of Iraq's oilThe Baghdad government has caved in to a damaging plan that will enrich western companies. March 22, 2007 1:30 PM | Printable version The recent cabinet agreement in Baghdad on the new draft oil law was hailed as a landmark deal bringing together the warring factions in the allocation of the country's oil wealth. What was concealed was that this is being forced through by relentless pressure from the US and will sow the seeds of intense future conflict, with serious knock-on impacts on the world economy. The draft law, now before the Iraqi parliament, sets up "production sharing partnerships" to allow the US and British oil majors to extract Iraqi oil for up to 30 years. While Iraq would retain legal ownership of its oil, companies like Exxon, Chevron, Shell and BP that invest in the infrastructure and refineries would get a large share of the profits. No other Middle Eastern oil producer has ever offered such a hugely lucrative concession to the big oil companies, since Opec has always run its oil business through tightly-controlled state companies. Only Iraq in its present dire condition, dependent on US troops for the survival of the government, lacks the bargaining capacity to resist. This is not a new plan. According to documents obtained from the US State Department by BBC Newsnight under the US Freedom of Information Act, the US oil industry plan drafted early in 2001 for takeover of the Iraqi oilfields (after the removal of Saddam) was pushed aside by a secret plan, drafted just before the invasion in 2003, calling for the sell-off of all of Iraq's oilfields. This secret plan was crafted by neo-conservatives intent on using Iraq's oil to destroy the Opec cartel through massive increases in production above Opec quotas. However, Philip Carroll, the former CEO of Shell Oil USA, who took control of Iraq's oil production for the US government a month after the invasion, stalled the sell-off scheme. As Ariel Cohen of the neo-conservative Heritage Foundation later told Newsnight, an opportunity had been missed to privatise Iraq's oilfields. Now the plan is being revisited, or as much of it as can be salvaged after the fading of American power on the battlefield made enforced sell-off impossible. This revision of the original plan has been drafted by BearingPoint, a US consultancy firm, at the request of the US government. Significantly, it was checked first with Big Oil and the IMF and is only now being presented to the Iraqi parliament. But if accepted by the Iraqis under intense pressure, it will lock the country into weakness and dependence for decades. The neo-cons may have lost the war, but they are still manipulating to win the most substantial chunk of the peace when and if it ever comes.... ....in neo-conservative eyes Iraq was also required as an alternative to Saudi Arabia to provide a military base for the US to police the whole of Gulf oil. It was no longer possible for the US to maintain troops in Saudi Arabia for that purpose without risking the collapse of the dictatorial Saudi regime and its giant oil assets falling into the hands of Islamic extremists. The removal of US troops from Saudi Arabia was the principal demand contained in Osama bin Laden's fatwa of 1996. This was why, shortly after invading Iraq, the US announced that it was pulling its combat troops out of Saudi Arabia, thereby meeting Bin Laden's principal pre-9/11 political demand. But unfortunately for the US, al-Qaida is now seeking the removal of US troops from Iraq as well. Above all, the policy is flawed by its extreme short-sightedness. Even if the US were to win its war in Iraq, which now looks virtually impossible, its incremental gain before the oil runs out would be short-term, while its exposure to intensified and unending insurgency because of perceived US seizure of Iraqi oil rights, especially if extended to Iran, would be disproportionately enormous both in the Middle East and maybe also at home. It is diametrically the opposite of the policy to which the whole world will be forced ineluctably by the accelerating onset of climate change. Perhaps the single greatest gain of the west learning this lesson of weaning itself off its oil addiction is that it would end this interference in the internal affairs of Muslim countries simply because they happen to have oil - the central cause of world conflict today. |
"Oil ruled the 20th century; the shortage of oil will rule the 21st.... Last Tuesday the lead story in The Financial Times was the latest report from the International Energy Agency. The FT quoted the IEA as saying: 'Oil looks extremely tight in five years’ time,' and that there are 'prospects of even tighter natural gas markets at the turn of the decade'. For an international agency, that is inflammatory language.... 27 of the 51 oil-producing nations listed in BP’s Statistical Review of World Energy reported
output declines in 2006. One projection of world crude oil production actually forecasts a 10 per cent reduction in total world output between 2005 and 2015. That would be a revolution..... Some analysts think that the peak oil moment has already been reached; some still think that it will not come until 2020 – which is itself only 12 years away. Market trends and the statistics both support the IEA’s view that consumption is accelerating and supplies falling faster than expected. Of course, if the 'crunch' point is only five years’ away for oil, and closer for natural gas, it has, for practical purposes, already arrived....The shortage of oil and natural gas, relative to demand, had already changed the balance of world power. Historians may well conclude that the US decision to invade Iraq was primarily motivated by the desire to gain physical control of Iraq’s oil and to provide defence support to other Middle Eastern oil powers. Political motivations are always mixed, but oil is an essential national interest of the United States. If the US is now deciding to withdraw from Iraq, the price will have to be paid in terms of loss of access to oil.... The world is coming to the end of the age of oil, which produced its own technology, its balance of power, its own economy, its pattern of society. It does not greatly matter whether the oil supply has peaked already or is going to peak in five or 12 years’ time. There is a huge adjustment to be made. There will be some benefits, including higher efficiencies and perhaps a better approach to global warming. But nothing will take us back towards the innocent expectation of indefinite expansion of the first months of the new millennium.""I fear we're going to be at war for
decades, not years ..... one major component of that war is oil."
James Woolsey, Former Director of The
CIA
Report On The Annual Policy
Forum Of The American Council On Renewable Energy (ACORE)
Washington, 6-7 December 2004
RenewableEnergyAccess.com, 14 December
2004
"Iraq can be seen as the first battle
of the fourth world war. After two hot world wars and one cold one that all began and were
centered in Europe, the fourth world war is going to be for the Middle East."
Former Director of the CIA, James
Woolsey
NATO
conference, Prague, November 2002
"[BP's] Lord Browne's said that most
exploration for new supplies had halted [in Iraq] when the Iraqis nationalised their
industry.... he believed there was a plenty of oil and gas waiting to be discovered in
Iraq and that BP should be in prime position to capitalise [after a war with Iraq] because
it had found most of the country's oil before being thrown out in the 1970s.... Lord
Browne will be listened to carefully in Downing Street because the BP executive team has
such close links with the UK government that it was once dubbed Blair Petroleum."
BP chief fears US will carve up Iraqi oil riches
Guardian, 30 October 2002
"Saddam Hussein sits and smiles as the price
of his oil - as well as that of his neighbors' (which, he doubtless believes, he may again
be able to seize) -- skyrockets, giving him more to spend on his military forces,
including longer range ballistic missiles and weapons of mass destruction. He can be
confident that within the next decade or two - the period during which most independent
assessments of reserves suggest that world petroleum production will begin to decline -
the world's sharply increasing demand for petroleum will increasingly have to be satisfied
by him and his neighbors, to their great profit.... Although all these serious
[economic, environmental and social] problems may at first seem unconnected, Mr. Chairman,
they in fact all have essentially the same cause - over-dependence by the rest of the
world on petroleum-derived products that will increasingly have to come from the very
troubled and unstable Middle East."
James Woolsey, former Director of the CIA
Statement
to Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry, Unites States Senate, 11 April 2000
"... the mideast will increasingly
become the source of the world's oil, and this is a strategic problem for us and for many other
countries."
James Woolsey, Former Director of the CIA
Interview with
the Council on Foreign Relations and the Washington Post: June 7, 2000
"At the time of the US invasion,
Vice-President Dick Cheney and other senior US officials boldly predicted that production would
exceed three million barrels a day within eight months, generating more than enough money
to rebuild Iraq. They underestimated the desperate state of Iraq’s oil infrastructure
after 23 years of war, sanctions and postinvasion looting. 'It was held together with bits
of string and chewing gum,' said one US official. Even now the facilities that The Times
visited in Kirkuk this week were shockingly corroded and dilapidated. The Bush
Administration also failed to foresee the virulence of the insurgency. The website Iraq
Pipeline Watch records 466 attacks on oil infrastructure or employees since 2003, and that
is probably a fraction of the real total. US officials reckon as many as half the
industry’s most skilled workers fled Iraq, or were killed, as Iraq descended into
mayhem. The insurgents have used the oil that was supposed to finance the country’s
reconstruction to fund their efforts to destroy it. They and other criminals have
routinely tapped into the pipelines to steal oil, hijacked tankers and diverted huge
amounts of oil from production facilities with the help of corrupt employees.... The Oil
Ministry will soon invite bids from international oil companies to increase output from
Iraq’s half-dozen poorly-managed, investment-starved 'super-giant' fields from early
next year. That would more than double production to
six million barrels a day within three or four years,
Hussain al-Sharistani, the Oil Minister, told The Times. Thereafter,
multinationals will be invited to develop new fields.
Competition will be intense, with no guarantee that Western companies will prevail.
'Everybody in the world, more than 45 companies, have approached us . . . the Chinese,
Russians, Indians, Brazilians,' Mr al-Sharistani said. "
Beneath the desert sands flows lifeblood of economic recovery
London
Times, 1 February 2008
"The Bush Administration began
making plans for an invasion of Iraq, including the use of American troops, within days of President Bush's inauguration in January
of 2001 -- not eight months later after the
9/11 attacks, as has been previously reported. That's what former Treasury Secretary Paul
O'Neill says in his first interview about his time as a White House insider.... In the
book, O'Neill is quoted as saying he was surprised that no one in a National Security
Council meeting questioned why Iraq should be invaded. 'It was all about finding a way to
do it. That was the tone of it. The president saying 'Go
find me a way to do this,' says O'Neill in
the book.... "
Saddam Ouster Planned Early '01?
CBS News,
10 January 2004
Bush Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill |
"In a world of looming shortage, Iraq
represented a unique opportunity. With 115bn barrels, it had the world's third biggest
reserves, and after years of war and sanctions they were the most underexploited. In the
late 1990s, production averaged about 2m barrels, but with the necessary investment its
reserves could support three times that..... Cheney knew, fretting about global oil
depletion in a speech in London the following year, where he noted that 'the Middle East with two thirds of the world's oil and lowest
cost is still where the prize ultimately lies'. Blair too had reason to be
anxious: British North Sea output had peaked in 1999, while the petrol protests of 2000
had made the importance of maintaining the fuel supply excruciatingly obvious. Britain's
and the US's fears were secretly formalised during the planning for Iraq. It is widely
accepted that Blair's commitment to support the attack dates back to his summit with Bush in Texas in April 2002. What is less well known is that at the same summit, Blair proposed
and Bush agreed to set up the US-UK Energy Dialogue, a permanent liaison dedicated to
'energy security and diversity'. Its existence
was only later exposed through a freedom of information inquiry. Both governments refuse
to release minutes of Dialogue meetings, but one paper dated February 2003 notes that to
meet projected demand, oil production in the Middle East would have to double by 2030 to
more than 50m barrels a day. So on the eve of the invasion, UK and US officials were
discussing how to raise production from the region - and we are invited to believe this is
coincidence. The bitterest irony is, of course, that the invasion has created conditions
that guarantee oil production will remain hobbled for years to come, bringing the global
oil peak that much closer. So if that was plan A, what on earth is plan B?"
The real casus belli: peak oil
Guardian, 26 June
2007
"Fuel is our economic lifeblood. The
price of oil can be the difference between recession and recovery. The western world is
import dependent. ....So: who develops oil and gas, what the new potential sources of
supply are, is a vital strategic question...The
Middle East, we focus on naturally."
Prime Minister's speech at the George Bush Senior Presidential
Library, Texas
10
Downing St, Press Release, 7 April 2002
AFTER THE INVASION OF
"The
British Prime Minister, House of Commons, 14 April 2003
BEFORE THE INVASION OF
".... our
energy system faces new challenges.... Our energy supplies will increasingly depend on
imported gas and oil..... we need access to a wide range of energy sources."
British Prime Minister, Foreword to DTI Energy White Paper,
February 2003
"The shortage of oil and natural gas,
relative to demand, had already changed the balance of world power. Historians may well conclude that the US decision to invade Iraq
was primarily motivated by the desire to gain physical control of Iraq’s oil and to
provide defence support to other Middle Eastern oil powers. "
Lord William Rees-Mogg
Are these the last days of the Oil Age?
London Times, 16 July 2007
"The
super-giant fields of southeastern Iraq are the largest concentration of super-giants to
be found anywhere in the world....unlike neighbor Saudi Arabia, Iraq has been unable to
deploy the latest technology, such as 3-D seismic, to find its reserves. Present reserve
estimates of Iraq's oil are based on 2-D seismic technology from the 1980s. Still, the
estimated success rate in Iraq ranges from one in two in the Mesopotamian Basin to one in
four in the western and northwestern stable platform, with the overall success rate
exceeding 72 percent - perhaps the highest success rate achievable anywhere in the world. Oil exploration costs are among the
cheapest globally, with the current cost estimated at around 50 cents per barrel....To
date, petroleum geologists have delineated and mapped over 526 prospects - drilling 131
prospects to discover 73 major fields. They have identified some 239 as having a high
degree of certainty, but those prospects remain undrilled. Thirty fields have been
partially developed and only 12 fields are actually onstream. Undrilled structures and undeveloped
fields could represent the largest untapped hydrocarbon resource anywhere in the world.....Clearly, large parts of Iraq are
still virgin - its large hydrocarbon reserves are still waiting to be developed to their
full potential, while most
other Middle East countries are fully exploiting their reserves. The main challenges facing the new Iraqi
authority are to establish law and order as well as security. Once these issues are resolved, Iraq will
perhaps be the most exciting place on Earth with regard to oil development and exploration....International oil companies are
looking forward with great anticipation to the opening of Iraq, as they have been waiting
for the past 40 years. Hopefully, Iraq will soon be able to offer them acreage, thereby
allowing proper development of its huge potential. Open and fair competition will enable
oil companies to apply the latest technologies in the search for, and development of, the
country's hydrocarbon resources - thus helping Iraq realize its full hydrocarbon
potential."
Assessing Iraq’s Oil
Potential
Geotimes, October 2003
"When Tony Blair became Leader of the Opposition in 1994, he — like Margaret Thatcher — knew little about foreign policy. What he did have was a series of instincts about how the Major Government and the international community had handled affairs in Bosnia, and he wasn’t impressed. Ever the anti-fatalist, once in office he was inclined to see such problems as requiring a solution. And passing across his desk in autumn 1997 were a series of intelligence reports concerning the dictator of Iraq, Saddam Hussein, and his weapons of mass destruction. 'We cannot let him get away with it,' he told Paddy Ashdown that November..... As the Kosovo crisis developed, Blair had delivered a major foreign policy speech in Chicago that spring. This address outlined a doctrine of liberal interventionism, arguing that there were circumstances when, though its interests were not directly threatened, the international community might intervene in the domestic affairs of sovereign states. The speech singled out two major villains: Milosevic and Saddam..... By Christmas 2001 the Taleban were defeated and Bin Laden was on the run. Now, the question was, what came next? The American answer, by early 2002, was Saddam. Our man at the UN, Sir Jeremy Greenstock, was, he told me, very surprised because he couldn’t see the relevance of Iraq to 9/11. What had changed, Greenstock thought, was the calculus of opportunity — Bush could now get support for action against Iraq that would previously have been opposed by the American people. In London, Tony Blair was thinking about Iraq in a slightly different way. To him, according to Sir David Manning, his foreign policy adviser, it was the calculus of risk that had altered with the attack on America. The nightmare was the confluence of WMD with terrorism; nuclear programmes were believed to be up and running in Libya, Iran and North Korea, and Saddam’s continued defiance of UN resolutions seemed to confirm intelligence reports of continuing WMD capacity. Worse, the existing sanctions regime against Iraq was crumbling. 'What you could get away with before 9/11,' explained David Manning, 'was no longer acceptable.'.... When war came it was the 'coalition of the willing'. Bush had phoned Blair two days earlier to tell him that Britain could stand aside if it meant saving Blair’s premiership. 'I said rather than lose your Government,' Bush told me, 'be passive, you know we’ll go without you if need be.' Blair refused. I asked him why. His answer was impassioned. 'Because I think this is the most fundamental struggle of our time and there is only one place to be which is in the thick of it and trying to sort it out.' Some, including Colin Powell, have subsequently criticised Blair for never really facing Bush down. I put Powell’s words to Blair. 'It wasn’t a bargaining chip for me,' he replied. 'I wasn’t in a position where I was negotiating with him (Bush) in order to get him to do something different. In my view if it wasn’t clear that the whole nature of the way Saddam was dealing with this issue had changed I was in favour of military action. And, I am afraid, in one sense it is worse than people think in so far as my position is concerned. I believed in it. I believed in it then, I believe in it now.'”
"Tony Blair has admitted for the first time that he ignored the pleas of his aides and ministers to deter President Bush from waging war on Iraq because he believed that America was doing the right thing. And he has acknowledged that he turned down a last-ditch offer from Mr Bush to pull Britain out of the conflict. He has also revealed that he wishes he had published the full reports from the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) instead of the infamous September dossier about Saddam Hussein’s alleged weapons of mass destruction that so damaged him, and was almost certainly one of the factors that contributed to him leaving office sooner than he wanted. In frank remarks in a BBC documentary, Mr Blair confirmed openly the belief of many of his closest supporters that he never used his position as America’s strongest ally to try to force Mr Bush down the diplomatic rather than the military route....In return for promising Mr Blair that he would try to help get a second resolution at the UN, he also won Mr Blair’s pledge that if he got 'stuck' in the UN, war would be the only way out. Mr Blair later suggested that Mr Bush tried for a second resolution as a 'favour' to him."
"Former House Speaker [and Republican] Newt Gingrich said Thursday the Bush administration is waging
a 'phony war' on terrorism, warning that the country is losing ground against the kind of Islamic radicals who attacked the country on Sept. 11, 2001. A more effective approach, said Gingrich, would begin with a national energy strategy aimed at weaning the country from its reliance on imported oil....""For the world as a whole, oil companies are expected to keep finding and developing enough oil to offset our seventy one million plus barrel a day of oil depletion, but also to meet new demand. By some estimates there will be an average of two per cent annual growth in global oil demand over the years ahead along with conservatively
a three per cent natural decline in production from existing reserves. That means by 2010 we will need on the order of an additional fifty million barrels a day. So where is the oil going to come from? Governments and the national oil companies are obviously in control of about ninety per cent of the assets. Oil remains fundamentally a government business. While many regions of the world offer great oil opportunities, the Middle East with two thirds of the world's oil and the lowest cost, is still where the prize ultimately lies, even though companies are anxious for greater access there, progress continues to be slow."Ex-CIA Chief Predicted 'Peak' Oil Crisis In 1999 CFR Paper
"Now most Americans accept seven
damning facts: (1) President Bush did little or nothing about terrorism before 9/11, (2)
there was no Iraqi threat to the United States, (3) the Bush
administration began plotting to invade Iraq early in their term, well before 9/11, (4) there is no evidence of an Iraqi hand in 9/11, or of any
significant support to al Qaeda, (5) there were no weapons of mass destruction and the
White House and Pentagon justified their claims about WMD by citing phony evidence from
Iraqi exiles to whom they paid millions of dollars, (6) the Bush administration had no
real plan to administer Iraq after the invasion, and (7) Secretary of Defense Donald
Rumsfeld ignored professional military advice and sent too few troops to Iraq to protect
our forces.... There is at least one momentous error that is
inescapable: President Bush has sowed the
seeds of current and future terrorism against the
United States by his needless, counterproductive, deceitful invasion of Iraq.... It pains me that so much of what I wrote in this book is
coming to pass.... It is a war we are losing,
as more and more of the Islamic world develops antipathy toward the United States and some
even develop a respect for the jihadist movement."
Richard Clarke - White House Head Of Counterterrorism 1992 - 2003
Foreword To The Paperback Edition
'Against All Enemies' -
Edition first published in Great Britain by The Free Press in 2004
"On the morning of the 12th [September
2001], DOD's [Department of Defense] focus was already beginning to shift from al Qaeda.
CIA was explicit now that al Qaeda was guilty of the attacks, but Paul Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld's
deputy, was not persuaded. It was too sophisticated and complicated an operation, he said,
for a terrorist group to have pulled off by itself, with out a state sponsor - Iraq must
have been helping them. I had a flashback to Wolfowitz saying the very same thing in April
when the administration had finally held its first deputy secretary-level meeting on
terrorism. When I had urged action on al Qaeda then, Wolfowitz had harked back to the 1993
attack on the World Trade Center, saying al Qaeda could not have done that alone and must
have had help from Iraq. The focus on al Qaeda was wrong, he had said in April, we must go
after Iraqi-sponsored terrorism. He had rejected my assertion and CIA's that there had
been no Iraqi-sponsored terrorism since 1993. Now this line of thinking was coming back.
By the afternoon on Wednesday, Secretary Rumsfeld was talking about broadening the
objectives of our response and 'getting Iraq.'... Later in the day, Secretary Rumsfeld complained that there were
no decent targets for bombing in Afghanistan and that we should consider bombing Iraq, which, he
said, had better targets. At first I thought he was joking. But he was serious and the
President did not reject out of hand the idea of attacking Iraq. Instead, he noted that
what we needed to do with Iraq was to change the government, not just hit it with more
cruise missiles, as Rumsfeld had implied."
Richard Clarke - White House Head Of Counterterrorism 1992
- 2003
Chapter 1, Evacuate The White House
'Against All Enemies' -
Edition first published in Great Britain by The Free Press in 2004
"Later, on the evening of the 12th, I
left the Video Conferencing Center and there, wandering alone around the Situation Room,
was the President. He looked like he wanted something to do. He grabbed a few of us and
closed the door to the conference room. 'Look', he told us, 'I know you have a lot to do
and all .... but I want you, as soon as you can, to go back over everything, everything.
See if Saddam did this. See if he's linked in any way....' 'Look into Iraq, Saddam,' the
President said testily and left us. Lisa Gordon-Hagerty stared after him with her mouth
hanging open. Paul Kurtz walked in, passing the President on the way out. Seeing our
expressions, he asked, 'Geez, what happened here.' 'Wolfowitz got to him, ' Lisa said shaking her head."
Richard Clarke - White House Head Of
Counterterrorism 1992 - 2003
Chapter 1, Evacuate The White House
'Against All Enemies' -
Edition first published in Great Britain by The Free Press in 2004
"Q: And what are the stakes
here? The diplomatic effort has been going on for a long time and it has not worked. In
fact, Iran has gone in the other direction. So what are the stakes here? |
"... what's happened is that the
United States looks at the Middle East through Israel. And the Arabs and the Persians look
at Israel as an outpost of the United States of the
West. We've lost this anti-colonial game and the
Iranians have won it. They've simply portrayed themselves as not as religious fanatics,
but as an anti-colonial power. And everybody in the Middle East, you look at the polls
across the board, even countries like Morocco, which are entirely Sunni, look to Tehran as
the great anti-imperial power. We've lost the ideological war."
Robert Baer, former CIA agent
Australian Broadcasting
Organisation, 26 February 2009
BBC, March 2005 - Bush Administration Made Plans For War And Iraq's Oil Before 9/11 Attacks
"The Bush administration made plans for war and for Iraq's oil before the 9/11 attacks, sparking a policy battle between neo-cons and Big Oil, BBC's Newsnight has revealed..... Two years ago today - when President George Bush announced US, British and Allied forces would begin to bomb Baghdad - protesters claimed the US had a secret plan for Iraq's oil once Saddam had been conquered. In fact there were two conflicting plans, setting off a hidden policy war between neo-conservatives at the Pentagon, on one side, versus a combination of 'Big Oil' executives and US State Department 'pragmatists'. 'Big Oil' appears to have won. The latest plan, obtained by Newsnight from the US State Department was, we learned, drafted with the help of American oil industry consultants. Insiders told Newsnight that planning began 'within weeks' of Bush's first taking office in 2001, long before the September 11th attack on the US....The industry-favoured plan was pushed aside by a secret plan, drafted just before the invasion in 2003, which called for the sell-off of all of Iraq's oil fields. The new plan was crafted by neo-conservatives intent on using Iraq's oil to destroy the Opec cartel through massive increases in production above Opec quotas. The sell-off was given the green light in a secret meeting in London headed by Ahmed Chalabi shortly after the US entered Baghdad, according to Robert Ebel. Mr Ebel, a former Energy and CIA oil analyst, now a fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, told Newsnight he flew to the London meeting at the request of the State Department.....Philip Carroll, the former CEO of Shell Oil USA who took control of Iraq's oil production for the US Government a month after the invasion, stalled the sell-off scheme.... Ariel Cohen, of the neo-conservative Heritage Foundation, told Newsnight that an opportunity had been missed to privatise Iraq's oil fields..... New plans, obtained from the State Department by Newsnight and Harper's Magazine under the US Freedom of Information Act, called for creation of a state-owned oil company favoured by the US oil industry. It was completed in January 2004 under the guidance of Amy Jaffe of the James Baker Institute in Texas. Formerly US Secretary of State, Baker is now an attorney representing Exxon-Mobil and the Saudi Arabian government.... "2001 Edward L. Morse, Chair |
"For the world
as a whole, oil companies are expected to keep finding and developing enough oil to offset
our seventy one million plus barrel a day of oil depletion, but also to meet new demand.
By some estimates there will be an average of two per cent annual growth in global oil
demand over the years ahead along with conservatively a three per cent natural decline in
production from existing reserves. That means by 2010 we will need on the order of an
additional fifty million barrels a day. So where is the oil going to come from?
Governments and the national oil companies are obviously in control of about ninety per
cent of the assets. Oil remains fundamentally a government business. While many regions of
the world offer great oil opportunities, the Middle East with two thirds of the world's oil and the lowest cost, is
still where the prize ultimately lies, even though companies are anxious for greater access there, progress
continues to be slow."
Dick Cheney, Chief Executive of Halliburton,
now Vice President of the United States
Speech at London
Institute of Petroleum, Autumn Lunch 1999
"Optimists about world oil reserves,
such as the Department of Energy, are getting increasingly lonely. The International
Energy Agency now says that world production outside the Middle Eastern Organization of
Petroleum Exporting Countries (opec) will peak in
1999 and world production overall will peak between 2010 and 2020. This projection is supported by influential
recent articles in Science and Scientific American. Some knowledgeable academic and
industry voices put the date that world production will peak even sooner—within the
next five or six years. The optimists who project large reserve quantities of over one
trillion barrels tend to base their numbers on one of three things: inclusion of heavy oil
and tar sands, the exploitation of which will entail huge economic and environmental
costs; puffery by opec nations lobbying for higher production quotas within the cartel; or
assumptions about new drilling technologies that may accelerate production but are
unlikely to expand reserves. Once production peaks, even though exhaustion of world
reserves will still be many years away, prices will begin to rise sharply. This trend will
be exacerbated by increased demand in the developing world....."
Richard G. Lugar and R. James Woolsey (Former Director of the
CIA)
The New
Petroleum - Foreign Affairs January/February 1999
"The United
States cannot afford to wait for the next energy crisis to marshal its intellectual and industrial resources.... Our growing
dependence on increasingly scarce Middle Eastern oil is a fool's game—there is no way
for the rest of the world to win. Our losses may come suddenly through war, steadily
through price increases, agonizingly through developing-nation poverty, relentlessly
through climate change—or through all of the above."
Richard G. Lugar and R. James Woolsey (Former Director
of the CIA)
The New
Petroleum - Foreign Affairs January/February 1999
"Years before George W. Bush entered the White House, and years before the Sept. 11 attacks set the direction of his presidency, a group of influential neo-conservatives hatched a plan to get Saddam Hussein out of power... The group was never secret about its aims. In its 1998 open letter to Clinton, the group openly advocated unilateral U.S. action against Iraq.... Of the 18 people who signed the letter, 10 are now in the Bush administration. As well as Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, they include Deputy Secretary of State
Richard Armitage ... ""We are writing you because we are convinced that
current American policy toward Iraq is not succeeding..... It hardly needs to be added that if Saddam does acquire
the capability to deliver weapons of mass destruction, as he is almost certain to do if we
continue along the present course, the safety of American troops in the region, of our
friends and allies like Israel and the moderate Arab states, and
a significant portion of the world’s supply of oil will all be put at hazard."
Open Letter To President Bill Clinton, 26 January 1998
Signed by: Elliott Abrams, Richard L. Armitage, William J. Bennett, Jeffrey
Bergner, John Bolton, Paula Dobriansky, Francis Fukuyama, Robert Kagan Zalmay Khalilzad,
William Kristol, Richard Perle, Peter W. Rodman, Donald Rumsfeld, William Schneider, Jr.,
Vin Weber., Paul Wolfowitz, R. James Woolsey, Robert B. Zoellick
"I think this is a very hard choice,
but the price - we think the price is worth it."
US Ambassador to the UN Madeline Albright,
in response to a question about the killing of 500,000 Iraqi children
as a result of US/UK pressured international sanctions against Iraq
CBS-TV '60 Minutes',
15 May 1996
The Occupation Of Saudi Arabia
"....[After the 1990 Iraqi invasion of
Kuwait] President Bush was hesitant about how America should respond. His foreign policy
alter ego, Secretary of State Jim Baker, and his Defense Secretary, Dick Cheney, were
reluctant to act. National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft, however, thought that Iraq
had just changed the strategic equation in a way that could not be permitted. So did
British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. The two
argued that nothing stood between the advance of units of the Iraqi army in Kuwait and the
immense Saudi oil fields. If we did nothing in response to Iraq's seizing Kuwait, Saddam
Hussein would think that he could get away with seizing the Saudis' eastern oil fields. If
that happened, Baghdad would control most of the world's readily available oil. They could
dictate to America. Reluctantly, Bush and his team decided that they needed to
defend the Saudi oil fields, and do so quickly. They
needed Saudi permission for the defensive deployment, but there were some in the Pentagon
and White House who thought U.S. forces needed to
protect the Saudi oil with or without Saudi
approval. The mission to persuade the Saudi King to accept U.S forces was given to Defense
Secretary Dick Cheney. He assembled a small team, including Under Secretary of Defense
Paul Wolfowitz, Central Command head Norman Schwarzkopf, Sandy Charles of the NSC, and me,
then the Assistant Secretary of State for Politico-Military Affairs... Cheney concluded
the presentation, promising that U.S forces would come only to defend the Kingdom.
President Bush wanted the King to know that he had the President's word that the U.S.
forces would leave as soon as the threat was over, or whenever ordered to do so by the
King. ..... Unknown to the Americans at the time, the intelligence chief, Prince Turki,
had been approached by the Saudi who had recruited Arabs to fight in the Afghan War
against the Soviets, Usama Bin Laden........ When Kuwait was invaded, he offered to make
them available to the King to defend Saudi Arabia, to drive Saddam out of Kuwait. After we
left the palace, perhaps bin Laden was told of the King's decision. His help would not be
required. He could not believe it; letting
nonbelievers into the Kingdom of the Two Holy Mosques was against the beliefs of the
Wahhabist branch of Islam. Large numbers of American military in the Kingdom would violate
Islam, the construction magnate's son thought. They would
never leave."
Richard Clarke - White House Head Of Counterterrorism 1992 - 2003
Chapter 3, Unfinished Mission, Unintended Consequences
'Against All Enemies' - Edition first published in Great
Britain by The Free Press in 2004
"For just so long Kuwait, a small
country at the head of the Persian Gulf, had been set free and independent from its
long-time British protector. And during that time Kuwait had developed its oil fields and
become immensely rich. Saddam Hussein claimed that Kuwait was part of Iraq. To have and to
hold it would put him on the way to achieving something that the Soviets had yearned for
right after the Second War and been denied by the intervention of the United Nations,
which was to be sovereign of the Gulf - and so, as Churchill foresaw and warned about,
soon to be able to conquer Europe without a war by possessing 60% of the oil Western
Europe lived by and so be able to dictate to countries like Britain, France, Germany, that
they should abandon their precious democratic ways and get themselves governments friendly
to Iraq.....[Following Saddam's invasion of Kuwait] President Bush - the first that is -
called a dawn meeting of the National Security Council at which the likely commander of
any military action, one General Schwarzkopf, expressed the general feeling that the
United States might fight for Saudi Arabia but hardly for Kuwait. President Bush told the
press there was no thought of American intervention. The United Nations anyway had voted
to impose a total embargo on Iraq. Two days after the invasion President Bush took a half
day out to keep a promise to the British prime minister who was addressing a conference in
Aspen, Colorado, a resort town in the Rockies. He found Mrs Thatcher in finer fighting
fettle than all but one of his own advisers. She stressed that fighting for Kuwait now
might be a necessary step to saving Saudi Arabia from invasion later on. ..... What so
swiftly transformed the views and policy of the United States and the onlooking
allies-to-be was the recognition, first pressed on President Bush by Mrs Thatcher and then
rather late in the day realised by the King of Saudi Arabia, that once he held Kuwait
there was nothing to stop Saddam from seizing the Saudi oil fields."
Alistair Cooke's Letter From America
BBC
Online, 24 June 2002
"Energy is vital to a country's
security and material well-being. A state unable to provide its people with adequate
energy supplies or desiring added leverage over other people often resorts to force.
Consider Saddam Hussein's 1990 invasion of Kuwait, driven by his desire to control more of
the world's oil reserves, and the international response to this threat. The underlying goal of the U.N. force [in the 1991 Gulf
war], which included 500,000 American troops, was to ensure continued and unfettered
access to petroleum...."
Richard G. Lugar and R. James Woolsey (Former Director
of the CIA)
The New
Petroleum - Foreign Affairs January/February 1999
"We're
there because the fact of the matter is that part of the world controls the world supply
of oil, and whoever controls the supply of
oil, especially if it were a man like Saddam Hussein, with a large army and sophisticated
weapons, would have a stranglehold on the American economy and on — indeed on the
world economy."
Dick Cheney, US Secretary of Defense 1990
New York Times, 24
February 2006
"America
began a historic reshaping of its presence in the Middle East yesterday, announcing a
halt to active military operations in Saudi Arabia and the removal of almost all of
its forces from the kingdom within weeks. The withdrawal ends a contentious 12-year-old
presence in Saudi Arabia and marks the most dramatic in a set of sweeping changes in the
deployment of American forces after the war in Iraq. Withdrawal of 'infidel' American forces from Saudi Arabia has been one of the demands of Osama bin Laden, although a senior US military official said that this was
'irrelevant'.... Behind the dry talk of rearranging America's military 'footprint' in the
Gulf, the great imponderables were bin Laden and Muslim radicals' complaints about the
presence of 'infidels' in the birthplace of Islam. That presence was cited as one of the
main justifications for the September 11 attacks. Despite American insistence that the
withdrawal had not been 'dictated' by al-Qa'eda and that bin Laden was 'irrelevant', there
can be little doubt that undercutting a central plank of al-Qa'eda's platform is one of
several advantages offered by withdrawal from Saudi Arabia."
America to withdraw troops from Saudi Arabia
Daily
Telegraph, 30 April 2003
"America's
announcement of its intention to withdraw its military bases from Saudi Arabia
[following the moving of US troops into Iraq] answers Osama
bin Laden's most persistent demand. More than any other cause it was the presence of
'crusader' forces in the land of Islam's holiest sites - Mecca
and Medina - that turned bin Laden from Afghan jihadi [and US
ally] into an international terrorist [and US opponent]. A wealthy Saudi with royal connections, bin Laden fell out with the House of Saud largely because it permitted US
bases in the country. When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in
1990, bin Laden offered his own forces to the Saudi regime to help expel the Iraqis from
the Gulf. He was enraged when the Saudi royal family turned instead to Washington and more
than 500,000 US troops were sent. The same year the
Americans arrived, bin Laden fled Saudi - where he faced house arrest - and established
his base in Sudan. He and his al-Qa'eda forces moved to Afghanistan in 1996, issuing the
first of his international fatwas through the London-based Al Quds Al Arabi newspaper.
After railing against the persecution of Muslims around the world, bin Laden stated: 'The
latest and greatest of these aggressions incurred by Muslims since the death of the
Prophet … is the occupation of the land of the two Holy Places - the foundation of
the House of Islam, the place of the revelation, the source of the message and the place
of the noble Ka'ba, the Qiblah of Muslims, by the armies of the American Crusaders and
their allies. We bemoan this and can only say 'No power and power acquiring except through
Allah'. '.... The US withdrawal from Saudi will not be enough to satisfy bin Laden or his
followers. It may, however, make life easier for the Saudi regime, which has been
struggling to quell growing dissent within the kingdom over the presence of 'infidel'
soldiers."
Bin Laden's main demand is met
Daily
Telegraph, 30 April 2003
"A defector from Osama bin Laden's
terrorist army has given an American court rare details of how the group works. A secret
informant said the Saudi multi-millionaire's organisation was helped by the Hizbollah
guerrillas in Lebanon and the Sudanese government. Giving evidence at the trial of
four men accused of the bombing
of the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, Jamal Ahmed Fadl said he had
been one of the earliest members of al Qaeda - 'The Base'.Fadl, whose identity was kept
secret until he went into the witness box, has been working with American intelligence as
an informer since 1996. The 38-year-old Sudanese former militant told the court in New
York that he joined bin Laden in 1989 when he decided to set up al Qaeda following the
defeat of Soviet forces by Islamic militants in Afghanistan. Fadl quoted bin Laden's vow
to end the presence of American troops in his Saudi homeland, quoting the fugitive
terrorist as saying: 'We have to cut the head off the snake and stop them.' Fadl told the
jury.'The snake is America.' He described the political structure of al Qaeda, which he
said was involved in operations from Chechnya to Yemen. He said bin Laden moved his
headquarters to Sudan in 1989 and in 1991 declared
war on America after it established bases in Saudi Arabia. He was incensed by the presence of 'infidels' on territory sacred to
Muslims. Fadl told the court: 'He said, 'They can't let the American army stay in the
Gulf, taking our oil, taking our money. We have to do something to take them out. We have
to fight them'."
Bin Laden 'wanted to behead the US snake'
Daily
Telegraph, 19 June 2001
"The London cell had a vital part to
play. Allegedly led by Fawwaz, its primary role was to spread bin Laden's message around
the world, usually through Arab media outlets, a large number of which are based in
London. In 1996 he received and distributed bin
Laden's 'declaration of jihad against the Americans occupying the land of the two holy
mosques'. In February 1998, following a flurry of
calls from bin Laden's satellite phone, Fawwaz arranged for the publication of a fatwa on
all Americans, issued in the name of the International Islamic Front for Jihad on the Jews
and Crusaders."
Worldwide trail of bloodshed that leads to suburban London
Daily
Telegraph, 19 September 2001
"During the 1980s,
resistance fighters in Afghanistan developed a
world-wide recruitment and support network with
the aid of the USA, Saudi Arabia
and other states. After the 1989 Soviet withdrawal,
this network, which equipped, trained and funded thousands of Muslim fighters, came under
the control of Osama bin Laden..... After graduation, Bin Laden became deeply religious.
His exact date of arrival in Pakistan or Afghanistan remains disputed but some Western
intelligence agencies place it in the early 1980s. Azzam
and Prince Turki bin Faisal bin Abdelaziz, chief of security
of Saudi Arabia, were his early mentors, and later Dr Ayman Zawahiri, became his religious mentor. In 1982-1984
Azzam founded Maktab al Khidmatlil-mujahidin al-Arab (MaK), known commonly as the Afghan
bureau. As MaK's principal financier, Bin Laden was considered the deputy to Azzam, the
leader of MaK. Other leaders included Abdul Muizz, Abu Ayman, Abu Sayyaf, Samir Abdul
Motaleb and Mohammad Yusuff Abass. At the height of
the foreign Arab and Muslim influx into Pakistan-Afghanistan from 1984-1986, Bin Laden
spent time traveling widely and raising funds in the Arab world. He recruited several
thousand Arab and Muslim youths to fight the Soviet Union, and MaK channeled several billion dollars' worth of Western governmental
financial and material resources for the Afghan jihad. MaK worked closely with Pakistan, especially the Inter Services Intelligence
(ISI), the Saudi government and Egyptian governments, and the vast Muslim Brotherhood network.....At the end of the campaign Bin Laden returned to Saudi Arabia where
he helped Saudi Arabia to create the first jihad group in South Yemen under the leadership
of Tariq al Fadli. After Iraq's 1990 invasion of
Kuwait, the failure of Saudi rulers to honor their pledge to expel foreign troops when the
Iraqi threat diminished led Bin Laden to start a campaign against the Saudi royal house.
He claimed the Saudi rulers were false Muslims and it was necessary to install a true
Islamic state in Saudi Arabia. The Saudi regime
deported him in 1992 and revoked his citizenship in 1994. Meanwhile, the National Islamic
Front, led by Hasan al Turabi, came to power in Sudan and sent a delegation to Pakistan.
Bin Laden had moved his infrastructure of well-trained and experienced fighters from
Pakistan to Sudan beginning in 1989 and remained there until international pressure forced
him to return to Afghanistan."
'Blowback'
Jane's
Intelligence Review, 1 August 2001
The Carter Doctrine
"Twenty-nine years ago, President Jimmy Carter adopted the radical and dangerous policy of using military force to ensure U.S. access to Middle Eastern oil. 'Let our position be absolutely he clear,' he said in his State of the Union address on January 23, 1980. 'An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region [and thereby endanger the flow of oil] will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.' This principle — known ever since as the Carter Doctrine — led to U.S. involvement in three major wars and now risks further military entanglement in the greater Gulf area. It's time to repudiate this doctrine and satisfy U.S. energy needs without reliance on military intervention."Oil And Iraq
"In light of the subsequent history of
Iraq, it seems almost unthinkable that 30 years ago Britain sold millions of pounds of
military equipment to the country's Baathist government. Foreign Office papers, just
released by the National Archives in London, show that defence sales to Iraq in 1976
amounted to an estimated £70m. At this time, Saddam Hussein was the de facto leader of
Iraq - taking on a more prominent role than the ageing president, Gen Ahmad Hassan al-Bakr
- before formally taking power in 1979. ....in April
1976 - a month after the Memorandum of Understanding
was signed - a note from the British foreign and defence secretaries seems to contradict
the idea of restricting the supply of defence equipment to Iraq. Their memo to other
ministers reads: 'The confidence engendered by a more comprehensive supply of defence
equipment is likely to have a favourable effect upon general commercial relations between
the two countries.' Their note continues with a statement sure to interest critics of the
current conflict who suggest that the UK and US intervention was motivated by oil in Iraq.
'We could lose the goodwill we have been slowly and painfully trying to build up since the resumption of diplomatic relations aimed at gaining access to
large projects and the Iraqis' huge oil wealth.' It
adds: 'In light of the above considerations, it is recommended that we should tell the
Iraqis that we would be prepared to supply the optical version of Rapier [surface-to-air
missile], the Scorpion family of armoured vehicles and the 105mm Light Gun.'"
UK arms sales to 'respectable' Iraq
BBC Online, 28 December 2007
"The National Security Archive at
George Washington University today published on the Web a series of declassified U.S. documents detailing the U.S. embrace of Saddam
Hussein in the early 1980's, including the
renewal of diplomatic relations that had been suspended since 1967. The documents show
that during this period of renewed U.S. support for Saddam, he had invaded his neighbor
(Iran), had long-range nuclear aspirations that would 'probably' include 'an eventual
nuclear weapon capability,' harbored known terrorists in Baghdad, abused the human rights
of his citizens, and possessed and used chemical weapons on Iranians and his own people.
The U.S. response was to renew ties, to provide intelligence and aid to ensure Iraq would
not be defeated by Iran, and to send a high-level presidential envoy named Donald Rumsfeld
to shake hands with Saddam (20 December 1983). The declassified documents posted today
include the briefing materials and diplomatic reporting on two Rumsfeld trips to Baghdad,
reports on Iraqi chemical weapons use concurrent with the Reagan administration's decision
to support Iraq, and decision directives signed by President Reagan that reveal the
specific U.S. priorities for the region [which included] preserving access to oil...."
U.S. DOCUMENTS SHOW EMBRACE OF SADDAM HUSSEIN IN EARLY 1980s
DESPITE CHEMICAL WEAPONS, EXTERNAL AGGRESSION, HUMAN RIGHTS ABUSES
US National Security
Archive, George Washington University, Press Release 25 February 2003
"An investigation of US corporate
sales to Iraq, headed by Republican Congressman Donald Riegle and published in May 1994, listed some of the biological agents exported by US
corporations with George Bush's approval as head of the CIA and later as vice-president
under Ronald Reagan. The Iraqis are
reported to have acquired stocks of anthrax, brucellosis, gas gangrene, E. coli and
salmonella bacteria from US companies."
Who Armed Iraq?
Janes Defence News,
17 March 2003
"In the 1980s, a Virginia company
called American Type Culture Collection kept samples of Ames anthrax and sent them to labs around the world - including
ones in Iraq, which the United States was helping at the time."
DNA is just anthrax clue, not clincher
Philadelphia
Inquirer, 10 August 2008
"Iraq started the war [with Iran]
with a large Soviet-supplied arsenal, but needed additional weaponry as the conflict wore
on. Initially, Iraq advanced far into Iranian territory, but was driven back within
months. By mid-1982, Iraq was on the defensive against Iranian human-wave attacks. The
U.S., having decided that an Iranian victory would not serve its interests, began
supporting Iraq... The U.S., which followed developments in the Iran-Iraq war with
extraordinary intensity, had intelligence confirming Iran's accusations, and describing
Iraq's 'almost daily' use of chemical weapons, concurrent with its policy review and
decision to support Iraq in the war... Following further high-level policy review, Ronald
Reagan issued National Security Decision Directive (NSDD) 114, dated November 26, 1983,
concerned specifically with U.S. policy toward the Iran-Iraq war.... It states, 'Because of the real and psychological impact of a
curtailment in the flow of oil from the Persian Gulf on the international economic system,
we must assure our readiness to deal promptly with actions aimed at disrupting that
traffic.' It does not mention
chemical weapons.... Soon thereafter, Donald Rumsfeld .... was dispatched to the Middle
East as a presidential envoy. His December 1983 tour of regional capitals included
Baghdad, where he was to establish 'direct contact between an envoy of President Reagan
and President Saddam Hussein,'..."
Shaking Hands with Saddam
Hussein: The U.S. Tilts toward Iraq, 1980-1984
US National Security
Archive, George Washington University, 25 February 2003
"A victory by Tehran, which seemed
imminent, would pose a major threat to US interests in the Gulf, such as access to the region's oil.... For the next
five years, Washington would quietly ensure that Saddam received all the military
equipment he needed to stave off defeat, even precursor chemicals that could be used
against Iranian soldiers and Kurdish civilians.... How much more of this intimate relationship Saddam will recall when he gets
a public forum is undoubtedly a concern of many current and past administration
figures.... the CIA was tasked to ensure that its former charge not run short of either
weapons or vitally needed intelligence on the disposition of Iranian forces, a task,
according to a 1995 affidavit by Teicher, that then CIA director William Casey took to
with abandon. Casey, for example, used a Chilean arms company, Cardoen, to supply Iraq
with cluster bombs that he thought would be particularly effective against Iranian 'human
wave' tactics. In addition to the credit, equipment and covert military assistance,
Saddam also received diplomatic help from Washington at the United Nations and elsewhere
in fending off condemnations of his use of banned weapons during the war, as well as
efforts in Congress to cut off US help. The CIA was still providing intelligence and
other help when Saddam used poison gas that killed some 5,000 Kurdish non-combatants in
Halabja in March 1988."
Rumsfeld and his 'old friend' Saddam
Inter Press Service, 17
December 2003
"United Press International has
interviewed almost a dozen former U.S. diplomats, British scholars and former U.S.
intelligence officials to piece together the following account. The CIA declined to
comment on the report. While many have thought that Saddam first became involved with U.S.
intelligence agencies at the start of the September 1980 Iran-Iraq war, his first contacts
with U.S. officials date back to 1959, when he was part of a [failed] CIA-authorized
six-man squad tasked with assassinating then Iraqi Prime Minister Gen. Abd al-Karim
Qasim.... According to current and former U.S. officials, who spoke on condition of
anonymity, Iraq was then regarded as a key buffer and strategic asset in the Cold War with
the Soviet Union.... Washington watched in marked dismay as Qasim began to buy arms from
the Soviet Union and put his own domestic communists into ministry positions of 'real
power,' according to this official.... In the mid-1980s, Miles Copeland, a veteran CIA
operative, told UPI the CIA had enjoyed 'close ties' with Qasim's ruling Baath Party, just
as it had close connections with the intelligence service of Egyptian leader Gamel Abd
Nassar. In a recent public statement, Roger Morris, a former National Security Council
staffer in the 1970s, confirmed this claim, saying that the CIA had chosen the
authoritarian and anti-communist Baath Party 'as its instrument.' According to another
former senior State Department official, Saddam, while only in his early 20s, became a
part of a [failed] U.S. plot to get rid of Qasim.... during this time Saddam was making
frequent visits to the American Embassy where CIA specialists such as Miles Copeland and
CIA station chief Jim Eichelberger were in residence and knew Saddam, former U.S.
intelligence officials said.... In February 1963 Qasim was killed in a Baath Party
coup.... Noting that the Baath Party was hunting down Iraq's communist, the CIA provided
the submachine gun-toting Iraqi National Guardsmen with lists of suspected communists who
were then jailed, interrogated, and summarily gunned down, according to former U.S.
intelligence officials with intimate knowledge of the executions. Many suspected
communists were killed outright, these sources said. Darwish told UPI that the mass
killings, presided over by Saddam, took place at Qasr al-Nehayat, literally, the Palace of
the End....The CIA/Defense Intelligence
Agency relation with Saddam intensified after the start of the Iran-Iraq war in September
of 1980."
Saddam Key in Early CIA Plot
United Press International, 11 April 2003
"Iraq's story is
the tragic tale of a country conceived and baptized by an imperialist power for its own
aggrandizement that now may come to a crashing end because of the imperialist lust and
hubris of another. The inability of Iraq's current parliament, under American military
occupation, to hammer out a constitution that would satisfy the aspirations of all of its
major ethnic and sectarian segments — Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds — is a
reflection of its artificial and perennially tenuous common identity. It was a castle
built on sand dunes that was bound to collapse one day. Britain carved Iraq out of three
Mesopotamian vilayets (provinces) of the vanquished Ottoman Empire at the end of World War
I for its own political and economic convenience. Oil, the 20th-century's most prized
natural resource, had been discovered at Kirkuk, in the then vilayet of Mosul, before
World War I broke out, just as it had been struck, earlier, at Masjid-e-Suleiman in
Persia, today's Iran. Britain had to have its hands on the newly discovered black gold, necessitating its complete political mastery of the region surrounding
the Persian Gulf. Hence the three vilayets of Mosul in the north, Baghdad in the centre
and Basra in the southern part of Mesopotamia were cobbled together to midwife the birth
of Iraq. Knowing they couldn't get the disparate constituents of their artificial national
entity to agree on a local ruler, the British imperialists imported a king for the new
country from the Hejaz, the western end of today's Saudi Arabia, where earlier they had
bribed and cajoled its Ottoman-appointed sharif (vassal) to throw in his lot with them
against his paymasters. The ruling family of Iraq was transplanted from the Hejaz and one
of the sons of the sharif was proclaimed King of Iraq. The British didn't fancy democracy
for Iraq in the way their spiritual progeny, George W. Bush, does. They opted instead for
strongman rule in Iraq in order to give themselves unhindered access to its fabulous
riches for full exploitation. The Iraqis, themselves, experimented off and on with
parliamentary democracy — but not federalism — without much success. Iraq was
stalked and enthralled by one strongman after another, both during the monarchical and
post-monarchical periods. The rise of Saddam Hussein
in 1979 brought this process to its zenith. Of
course Iraq's ersatz unity came at the cost of wanton disregard, and at times brutal
suppression, of the rights of its Shiite majority over a span of eight long decades.
Surprisingly, nobody in the outside world ever felt a pang of sorrow for the wilful
disenfranchisement of Iraq's majority population the way voices of concern have been
raised in world capitals about the rights of its Sunni minority, now deemed threatened.
Bush and his neo-cons were the first to pay lip service to the rights of the Iraqi Shiites
in order to swing the majority behind their plans for the newly conquered country. But the
neo-cons were either too ignorant or too naive not to realize that the majority would want
to have its own way, and dictate its own agenda, which is quite a fundamental norm of
democracy throughout the world. The Iraqi Shiites have the bitter lesson of history on
their side not to put their faith in the unalloyed concept of a unitary Iraq that treated
them as second-class citizens and grew powerful at the expense of their resources, while
they grovelled in misery and penury. By the same token, the Shiites have the example of
the Kurdish areas of northern Iraq during the years since the end of the 1991 Gulf War as
a powerful magnet to attract them. The Kurdish areas thrived and prospered in virtual
isolation from Baghdad because of the American canopy over their heads. Hence the Shiite
insistence that a democratic Iraq must be pegged on a federal system, giving its three
constituent units the right to safeguard and promote their own economic and political
destiny. There is every reason to fear that the Oct. 15 referendum mandated by the
American-imposed interim constitution may well see the Sunnis reject the new draft
constitution. Ironically, the Bush neo-cons had woven the veto provision into the interim
constitution to conjure up a shield for their Kurdish proteges. Now the Sunnis may wield
it to torch the Bush dream of a united and democratic Iraq. The biggest losers would be
none other than the Americans, who thought of turning Iraq into the launch pad of Pax
Americana in that part of the world."
Karamatullah K. Ghori is a
former Pakistani diplomat who served as ambassador to Iraq from 1996 to 1999
Iraq: A nation built on sand
Toronto
Star, 1 September 2005
"Iraq has the second largest oil
reserves in the world, it is right in the midst of the major energy reserves in the world.
Its been a primary goal of US policy since World War II (like Britain before it) to
control what the State Department called 'a
stupendous source of strategic power' and one of the
greatest material prizes in history. Establishing a client state in Iraq would
significantly enhance that strategic power, a matter of great significance for the future.
As Zbigniew Brzezinski observed, it would provide the US with 'critical leverage' of its
European and Asian rivals, a conception with roots in early post-war planning. These are
substantial reasons for aggression -- not unlike those of the British when they invaded
and occupied Iraq over 80 years earlier, at the dawn of the oil age."
Noam Chomsky
Washington
Post, 24 March 2006
Oil And Suez
"The Suez Crisis, which occurred 50
years ago, was the full stop at the end of the British Empire. In 1945, at the close of
the Second World War, Britain still governed the world’s largest Empire, with an
independent Commonwealth of the Old Dominions. The Raj ruled India. Britain enjoyed a
strong influence in the oil-rich Middle East and was still a genuine world power, behind
the United States and the Soviet Union.... If one had to pick a day for the end of the
British Empire, it might be July 26, 1956, the day that President Nasser of Egypt
nationalised the Suez Canal.... In 1956 I was writing leaders for The Financial Times. I
had been commissioned to write a brief life of the Prime Minister, Anthony Eden, a man
whom I liked and admired. I had also become involved as an assistant speech writer to
Eden, specialising in economic policy..... In July to November 1956 I was a convinced
advocate of Eden’s Suez policy.....Middle
Eastern oil was as essential, in 1956 as now, to the economy and security of the United
States, Europe and world trade. So long as Britain
had influence in the Middle East, Britain would remain a real world power. Yet Britain
could not maintain that influence without American support. Nasser’s nationalisation
of the canal was a direct challenge to the West. Eden believed that the challenge had to
be met. Eisenhower and Dulles, his Secretary of State, were not prepared to meet it; at
the Suez Canal Users Conference held in London it became apparent that American policy
could not be trusted. Dulles promised action, which he failed to take. The shift of
Western power in the Middle East should have been a relay race, in which Britain would
transfer the baton to the United States. Eden was willing to transfer the baton in August
1956 but Eisenhower, with his re-election campaign much in mind, was not ready to take the
transfer. Only in October did Eden adopt the joint Anglo-French-Israeli plan that was
indeed a disaster. Eisenhower had made the mistake of leaving Eden with no better option.
The world community had an essential interest in the free flow of oil through the canal.
That could have been secured only by joint Anglo-American action. Eisenhower decided
against such action; Dulles’s conduct convinced Eden that he personally was hostile
and untrustworthy. The Suez Crisis was indeed the end of the Empire, but it was a blunder of American policy, for which the United States
is still paying a very high price."
Lord William Rees-Mogg
Suez: why I blame it on Ike
London Times, 24 July
2006
How Britain Conspired With Israel And France To Create And Incident That Would Allow The Invasion Of Suez - Click Here
"There's nothing like being surrounded
by a crowd chanting 'Death to America' on the day of the most historic U.S. presidential
Inauguration in memory to make an American foreign correspondent feel homesick....Anti-Americanism is a potent political trope here because it is
rooted in grievances. Just down the road from the
Khomeini shrine is the Behesht-e Zahra martyrs' cemetery--one of many such scattered plots
that contain the remains of more than 200,000 Iranian soldiers who died in the 1980-88
Iran-Iraq war. The widows and mothers who come here on Thursdays--the beginning of the
weekend in Iran--to wash graves and pass out sweets and fruit to strangers remember that
the rockets, jets and chemical weapons used to kill their sons and husbands were provided
to Saddam Hussein by the U.S. and Europe. 'Every strike against our country has come from
the United States,' says Azam Omrani, 63, whose son Amir died in the war. From the CIA-led coup in 1953
that reinstalled the Shah to the millions of dollars Washington spends on covert
operations and propaganda against their government today, Iranians believe the U.S. has
interfered in Iran's internal affairs. The effect has been to create a siege mentality
even among those Iranians who don't support the government."
Talking and Listening to Iran
TIME, 12 Februay 2009
"Fifty years ago this week, the CIA
and the British SIS orchestrated a coup d'etat that toppled the democratically elected
government of Mohammad Mossadegh. The prime minister and his nationalist supporters in
parliament roused Britain's ire when they nationalised the oil industry in 1951,
which had previously been exclusively controlled by the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company [later
renamed as BP]. Mossadegh argued that Iran should begin profiting from its vast oil reserves.
The British government tried to enlist the Americans
in planning a coup... The crushing of Iran's first democratic government ushered in more than two
decades of dictatorship under the Shah... The author of All the Shah's Men, New
York Times reporter Stephen Kinzer, argues that
the coup planted the seeds of resentment against the US in the Middle East, ultimately
leading to the events of September 11.... The coup and the culture of covert interference
it created forever changed how the world viewed the US, especially in poor, oppressive
countries. For many Iranians, the coup was a tragedy from which their country has never
recovered. Perhaps because Mossadegh represents a future denied, his memory has approached
myth."
The spectre of Operation Ajax
Guardian, 20 August 2003
"If the 15 British sailors currently
held by Iran's revolutionary guards are shocked by the hostility to Britain shown by their
captors, it will be less surprising to British diplomats engaged in the delicate process
of securing their release. Hostility to all things British is, as every foreign office
mandarin knows, the default mode of Iran's staunchly anti-western political leadership.
From its perspective, Britain - along with America - is in the vanguard of 'global
arrogance', Iranian political shorthand for the contemporary western interventionism whose alleged goal is to dominate and control the resources of developing nations such as Iran.... But this is not just President Ahmadinejad. The antipathy goes back
to colonial times, and the long and tortured history of British intervention in Iran. This
anti-British sentiment is shared by ordinary Iranians. Its resonance defies boundaries of
age, education, social class or political affiliation. In the eyes of a broad
cross-section of the population, Britain - as much,
or even more than, the US - is the real enemy. Four
decades after the sun set on its imperial might, the Machiavellian instincts of the 'old
coloniser' are believed to be alive, well and still acting against the interests of Iran.
For every mishap - whether a bombing, rising living costs or simply the advent of an
unpopular government - a hidden British hand is often thought to be at work..... In 1901,
William Knox D'Arcy, a London-based lawyer and businessman, was granted exploration rights
in most of Iran's oil fields for the princely sum of £20,000. It took several years for
D'Arcy's investment to bear fruit but when it did - after he struck oil in Masjid-e
Suleiman in 1908 - its effect was enduring and fateful. It turned out to be the world's
largest oil field to date and a year later, D'Arcy's concession was merged into the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (APOC). In 1913, with war clouds gathering in Europe, the British admiralty -
under Winston Churchill - discarded coal in favour of oil to power its battleships. To
safeguard the decision, the government bought a 51% stake in APOC. The importance of oil -
and Iran - in British imperial expansion was now explicit. It was a priority of which
Churchill, for one, would never lose sight.... anger over the arrogant behaviour of the
now-renamed Anglo-Iranian Oil Company - it later became BP - was leading inevitably to a
fateful confrontation between Britain and Iran. Resentment over Iran's paltry share of
company profits had festered for years. In 1947, out of an annual profit of £40m, Iran
received just £7m. Iranian anger was further fuelled by the treatment of oil-company
workers who were restricted to low-paid menial jobs and kept in squalid living conditions,
in contrast to the luxury in which their British masters lived. Attempts at persuading the
oil company to give Iran a bigger share of the profits and its workers a fairer deal
proved fruitless. The result was a standoff that created conditions ripe for a nationalist
revolt. Into this ferment walked Mohammad Mossadegh, a lawyer and leftwing secular nationalist
politician fated to go down as perhaps Iranian history's biggest martyr before British perfidy. Mossadegh
was elected prime minister in 1951 advocating a straightforward solution to the oil
question - nationalisation. It was a goal he carried out with single-minded zeal while
lambasting the British imperialists in tones redolent of a later Iranian leader, Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad. Within months, he had ordered the Iranian state to take over the oil company and expelled its
British management and workers. The company and the British government reacted furiously.
The Labour government of Clement Attlee imposed a naval blockade in the Gulf and asked the
UN security council to condemn Iran. Instead, the council embarrassingly came out in
Iran's favour. Meanwhile, Mossadegh - who often did business in his pyjamas - embarked on
an American tour in the naive belief that the US would back him against the British
'colonisers'. It was a serious misjudgment. The oil
company's executives were clamouring for a coup to overthrow Mossadegh. Attlee rebuffed the idea but when a Conservative government took office
in October 1951, led by Churchill, it fell on more sympathetic ears. With British power in
decline, however, Churchill was unable to mount such a venture alone. American help would
be needed. The result was Operation Ajax, a CIA-MI6
putsch that co-opted a loose coalition of
monarchists, nationalist generals, conservative mullahs and street thugs to overthrow
Mossadegh. With the economy teetering in the face of the British blockade, Mossadegh was
ousted after several days of violent street clashes. The shah, at that time
a weak figure, had fled to Rome fearing the coup would fail. When he heard the news of
Mossadegh's demise, he responded: 'I knew they loved me.' He subsequently returned to
install a brutally repressive regime - maintained in power by the notorious Savak secret
police -backed to the hilt by both America and Britain for the next 25 years.... After
the revolution, the Islamic authorities continued to draw on national resentment at more
than a century of British interference, damning Britain as the 'little Satan' (the US was
the 'Great Satan'). Such feelings were further fed by London's support for Saddam Hussein
during the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war, despite Baghdad having started the war and subsequently
resorting to chemical weapons. London and Tehran were at loggerheads again in 1989 after
the revolution's spiritual leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, issued a fatwa (religious
edict) sentencing the British author, Salman Rushdie, to death for blasphemy over his
novel, The Satanic Verses. The antipathy resurfaced most recently in June 2004 in an
incident with uncanny parallels to the current stand-off. Then, eight British sailors were
seized and paraded blindfold on state TV after allegedly straying into Iranian waters in
the Shatt al-Arab waterway, where the 15 currently in detention were intercepted and
arrested last Friday. On the previous occasion, the Britons were released following an
apology from the foreign secretary at the time, Jack Straw.... The British
RAF personnel and marines in Iran's captivity may well be oblivious to the
long-accumulated resentments that have provided the backdrop to their detentions. Perhaps
they are learning something of this tortured history from their captors."
A bitter legacy
Guardian, 30 March 2007
"Regional security issues,
particularly in the Middle East, will not move one iota until you sit around the table and
discuss the grievances that have accumulated over the last 56 years between Iran and the
international community - from 1953, when the CIA and
MI6 removed Mohammed Mossadegh, the first nationally
elected government, to the hostage crisis in 1979. This is the past, but the present is
fundamentally a competition of power in the Middle East between Iran, which has its own
specific ideology, and the United States and some of Iran's neighbors."
Director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), did Mohamed ElBaradei
Washington
Post, 1 February 2009
Secrets of History: The
CIA in Iran |
More Details |
"As millions of Iranians prepared for
revolution, and tension mounted on the streets of Tehran, the British Ambassador had a
more urgent matter in mind: Margaret Thatcher’s hair. Secret correspondence from 1978
released by the National Archives shows that Sir Anthony Parsons was desperate to reassure
the British Government that its interests would be safe under the weakening rule of the
Shah. He was distracted, however, by Mrs Thatcher, the Leader of the Opposition, who was
due to visit Iran in the spring of 1978 and wrote in advance to request a 'good local
hairdresser' who 'should bring Carmen rollers' to prepare her trademark bouffant. Sir
Anthony’s priorities should, perhaps, have been elsewhere. Months after receiving
assurances from Sir Anthony that the Shah would not be overthrown, the British Government
looked on aghast as revolution swept through Iran in early 1979, deposing the Shah and
leaving hundreds of millions of pounds of British investment at risk. Millions of Iranians
will take to the streets today to celebrate the 30th anniversary of those tumultuous
events. A series of encrypted telegrams sent to Britain by Sir Anthony show that his faith
in – and personal friendship with – the Shah may have blinded him to the civil
unrest on the streets around him. In 1977 Britain made £600 million of exports to Iran
and, in 1978, Iran supplied 14 per cent of
Britain’s oil. More than £1 billion of
military projects had either begun or were due to start in cooperation with Iran in 1978
when the Government sought assurances from Sir Anthony that British investments were
safe."
Ambassador in Iran dealt with Margaret Thatcher’s hair as revolution began
London Times,
10 February 2009
"Nowruz, the Persian new year, begins
with a televised message from the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei. Yesterday’s
alternative message from Barack Obama may have reached a smaller audience at first but it
is unlikely to take long for word of the speech to filter all the way through this nation
of 68 million. Mr Obama’s speech was broadcast with Farsi subtitles on Middle Eastern
satellite channels beamed illegally into four million Iranian homes....Mr Obama’s
remarks were welcomed by reformists as they gear up for a battle to unseat Mr Ahmadinejad
in June’s presidential elections. They seized on the regime’s intransigence as
evidence that rapprochement would be better conducted under their more moderate
government. 'Things cannot continue the way they are,' Mehdi Karoubi, a prominent
political reformist, told The Times. 'We can never
forget what the Americans did in the Fifties when they overthrew Mossadegh’s
Government but it doesn’t justify the
continuation of hostilities between us.'”
Behind the story: Barack Obama’s message will seep through
London
Times, 21 March 2009
"Iran cautiously welcomed Barack
Obama’s videotaped message for a 'new beginning' between the US and Tehran yesterday,
but said that the new Administration needed a change in attitude for relations between
them to improve. Aliakbar Javanfekr, an aide to President Ahmadinejad of Iran, reacted to
the appeal by saying: 'The Iranian nation has shown that it can forget hasty behaviour.'
Iran, he said, would 'not show its back' to Mr Obama if the US put its words into
practice, but the new Administration needed 'a fundamental change in attitude'....The
opaque nature of the Iranian leadership is one of those complications. The ultimate
authority over its nuclear programme is Mr Khamenei, not Mr Ahmadinejad. There also
indications that time is against Mr Obama. Admiral Mike Mullen, America’s top
military officer, said recently that Iran already had sufficient nuclear material for one
bomb. The level of mistrust is also profound. Mr Javanfekr blamed America’s 'hostile
policy towards Iran' for the tensions and said that the
country 'will never forget' the 1953 US-backed coup that overthrew the democratically
elected Prime Minister Mohamed Mossadegh."
Barack Obama tells Iran to choose between terror and peace
London
Times, 21 March 2009
"US President Barack Obama made a
major gesture of conciliation to Iran today when he admitted US involvement in the 1953
coup which overthrew the government of Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh. 'In the middle
of the Cold War, the United States played a role in the overthrow of a democratically
elected Iranian government,' Mr Obama said during his keynote speech to the Muslim world in Cairo. It is the first time a serving US president has publicly admitted American involvement in the coup.
The CIA, with British backing, masterminded the coup after Mossadegh nationalised the oil
industry, run until then in by the British-owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. For many
Iranians, the coup demonstrated duplicity by the United States, which presented itself as
a defender of freedom but did not hesitate to use underhand methods to get rid of a
democratically elected government to suit its own economic and strategic interests. Mr
Obama also said: 'For many years, Iran has defined itself in part by its opposition to my
country, and there is in fact a tumultuous history between us. 'Since the Islamic
Revolution, Iran has played a role in acts of hostage-taking and violence against US
troops and civilians. This history is well known. 'Rather than remain trapped in the past,
I've made it clear to Iran's leaders and people that my country is prepared to move
forward. The question now is not what Iran is against, but rather what future it wants to
build.' Shortly after Mr Obama's inauguration on January 20, Iranian President Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad demanded apologies for 'crimes' he said the United States had committed
against Iran, starting with the 1953 coup."
Obama admits involvement in Iran coup
Agence
France Presse, 5 June 2009
"It would have been unthinkable only a
few years ago, but one of Ireland’s most republican counties is celebrating the life
of the founder of Britain’s intelligence agencies. William Melville was born in the
Kerry village of Sneem to a publican’s family and fled his roots to forge a stellar
career in London as a detective fighting terrorism. When he 'retired' in 1903 from the
Metropolitan Police at the height of his fame, he went on to establish the forerunner of
MI5, providing the inspiration for James Bond’s boss in Ian Fleming’s books....
In 1903 Melville announced that he was retiring to spend more time with his family and
garden. Instead he moved into offices in Victoria Street, adjacent to Scotland Yard, and
under the nameplate William Morgan, General Agent, created a cover story that allowed him
to gather intelligence for the War Office. He reported under the alias 'M'. In that year
the War Office set up a Directorate of Military Operations and Melville was head-hunted
for the role of field operative to act as a controller for agents abroad as well as to
undertake missions himself. One of his first was to
help to secure British access to Persian oil. In this he succeeded by derailing French
negotiations and allowing a British syndicate to seal the deal. The company that emerged
from the machinations became BP. In 1909 the Secret
Service Bureau was set up to coordinate intelligence work under two sections, home and
foreign, which became, respectively, MI5 and MI6. As the bureau’s chief detective, Melville set up a register of
aliens to track suspicious foreigners."
M: Britain's first spymaster was an Irishman who played patriot game
London
Times, 2 July 2007
"At the beginning of the 20 Century
King Edward VII ruled over a vast empire with interests in every part of the world. India
became increasingly important because it was the second pillar of British power in the
world. Moving the Indian army about was extremely important in extending British interests
and British influence across the globe and the Suez canal was of course the quick way to
do that. It's very important for the British geopolicital position to ensure
the Suez canal remains safe and secure. With this aim in mind Britain had become the only
European power to establish a major foothold in the Middle East, in the principalities
around the Persian Gulf, in Aden, and in Egypt.... Pouring over a map of the Levant, Sykes and Picot personally drew in
the areas they wished to see under their control. Their secret deal amounted to the
virtual carve up of the Middle East.... [France was to have Greater Syria and] ... the area... known as Iraq with its strategic ports,
railways, and oil... was to be under British rule. ... Palestine.... was envisaged
as an international zone, except for Haiffa. What the British wanted was the oil of Iraq
and they concentrated on getting Iraq and getting a way from Iraq to the Meditteranian in
order to transport this oil. So they got Haiffa on the Palestinian coast and they got most
of Iraq. ... Unaware of these secret dealings
behind their backs Hussein and Feisal proclaimed independence and in June 1916 attacked
the Turkish troops... The Turkish garrason at Mecca was soon overun and the sea port at
Jiddha seized... In a pincer movement Britain had launched a campaign from the south west to ensure control of the Suez canal and the Levant, and from the South East it was
fighting to secure the oil wells of Iraq... In the east the Ottoman area of Messoptamia, which included the oil
fields of Mossul, was given to Britain as the mandate for Iraq. ... this was
basically the importance of the Sykes-Picot agreement, to divide what was called the
fertile crescent between Iraq and Syria, and let Britain get access to the oil of the area
and be able to exploit it in the future...."
Promises & Betrayals
The History Channel & Gulf Research Center
Content Productions 2002
Broadcast Monday 14th March 2005 on History
Channel - 53 Minutes
"[Gertrude Bell] was one of the
world's most powerful women at the beginning of the 20th century, a key shaper of the
version of the Middle East over which our soldiers are killing and dying, for us, right
now.....In 1914, the British indeed brought war to Mesopotamia. From their long-held
(since the 17th century) base in Basra, they sent an army north along the Euphrates River
toward Baghdad. But here's where things stop looking like an old Imperial expedition and
more like the nightmare battlefield of the 20th century. Over three months, the British
lost 25,000 men during a siege at Kut. It was, at the height of British power, the
nation's biggest military disaster to that time. Iraq was a battleground in the First
World War for one reason. As Wallach describes the British position at the beginning of
the war, their 'unrivaled navy delivered goods around the world and brought home
three-quarters of (the country's) food supply. To
maintain its superiority, in 1911 the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, had
ordered a major change, switching the nation's battleships from coal-burning engines to
oil. Far superior to the traditional ships, these
new oil-burning vessels could travel faster, cover a greater range, and be refueled at
sea; what's more, their crews would not be exhausted by having to refuel, and would
require less manpower.' Wallach continues, 'Britain
had been the world's leading provider of coal, but she had no oil of her own. In 1912, Churchill signed an
agreement for a major share in the Anglo-Persian oil company, with its oil wells in
southern Persia and refineries at Abadan, close to Basra. It was essential for Britain to
protect that vital area...the British either
wouldn't or couldn't put together an Iraqi government. In truth, they weren't totally
convinced they wanted to sponsor an Iraqi state at all. Churchill favored letting most of
Iraq go, fortifying only the oil fields near Basra.... Many officials wanted to pull out of Mesopotamia altogether, except for the Persian Gulf.
Bell and a few others, like T.E. Lawrence, argued for making and backing an Arab kingdom
in Iraq. Bell's party eventually persuaded Churchill that Arab monarchies with British
power behind them would make for a more stable region, cheaper
in the long run as a provider of oil.... Carefully
drawing a red line across the face of it, [Sir Percy Cox] assigned a chunk of the Nejd to
Iraq; then to placate Ibn Saud, he took almost two thirds of the territory of Kuwait and
gave it to Arabia. Last, drawing two zones, and declaring that they should be neutral, he
called one the Kuwait neutral zone and the other the Iraq neutral zone. When a
representative of Ibn Saud pressed Cox not to make a Kuwait neutral zone, Sir Percy asked
him why. 'Quite candidly,' the man answered, 'because we think oil exists there.' 'That,'
replied the High Commissioner, 'is exactly why I have made it a neutral zone. Each side
shall have a half-share.' The agreement, signed by all three sides at the beginning of
December 1922, confirmed the boundary lines drawn so carefully by Gertrude Bell. But for
seventy years, up until and including the 1990 Gulf War involving Iraq and Kuwait, the
dispute over the borders would continue.' With the creation of Saudi Arabia, Jordan and
Iraq, the map of the modern Middle East was complete. The British managed to keep their
royal surrogates in Iraq until 1958, when military officers shot the young king (Faisal's
grandson), his regent and prime minister."
Gertrude Bell and the Birth of Iraq
Anderson Valley Advertiser, 26
May 2004
"Less than a year ago it seemed that
Indian soldiers might actually be sent off to support the military occupation of Iraq by
the United States. Elections have set aside that discussion, and I hope it has been buried
forever. Once before during World War I, India's manpower had been used with profligacy to
extend another superpowers' quest for oil and influence in Iraq — then made up of the
three Ottoman vilayets of Basra, Mosul and Baghdad. Of the roughly 1.3 million Indian
combatants and non-combatants sent overseas to fight for the British empire, the largest
chunk were routed to Mesopotamia. The refineries of
the Anglo-Persian Oil Company in Abadan provided a crucial reason for seizing Basra. In 1911, recognising the vital
importance of oil for the British navy, Winston Churchill had acquired 90 per cent stake
for the British government in this corporation. Easy
victories at the outset encouraged the idea that the Indian Expeditionary Force could
march right up to Baghdad."
Iraq: on duty once again?
The
Hindu, 21 May 2004
"In late 1915 and early 1916, a
British official and a Frenchman hammered out an understanding for the postwar order in
Mesopotamia. Known by their names as the Sykes-Picot agreement, it rather casually
assigned Mosul in northeatern Mesopotamia, one of the most promising potential oil
regions, to a future French sphere of influence. This 'surrender' of Mosul immediately
outraged many officials in the British government, and strenuous effort was thereafter
directed towards undermining it. The issue became more urgent in 1917 when British forces
captured Baghdad. For four centuries, Mesopotamia had been part of the Ottoman Empire.
That Empire which had once stretched from the Balkans to the Persian Gulf, was now over, a
casualty of war. A host of independent and semi-independent nations, many of them rather
arbitrarily drawn on the map, would eventually take its place in the Middle East. But, at
the moment, in Mesopotamia, Britain had the controlling hand. It was the wartime petroleum
shortage of 1917 and 1918 that really drove home the necessity of oil to British interests
and pushed Mesopotamia [Iraq] back to center stage. Prospects for oil development within
the empire were bleak, which made supplies from the Middle East of paramount importance. Sir Maurice Hankey, the extremely powerful secretary of the War Cabinet,
wrote to Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour that, 'oil in the next war will occupy the place
of coal in the present war, or at least a parallel place to coal. The only big potential supply that we can get under British
Control is the Persian [Iranian] and Mesopotamian [Iraqi] supply.' Therefore, Hankey said,
'control over these oil supplies becomes a first-class British war aim.' But the newly born 'public diplomacy' had to be considered..... Foreign
Secretary Balflour worried that explicitly pronouncing Mesopotamia a war aim would seem
too old-fashionably imperialistic. Instead, in August 1918, he told the Prime Ministers of
the Dominions that Britain must be the 'guiding spirit' in Mesopotamia, as it would
provide the one natural resource the British empire lacked. 'I do not care under what
system we keep the oil,' he said, 'but I am quite clear it is all-important for us that
this oil should be available.' To help make sure this would happen, British forces,
already elsewhere in Mesopotamia, captured Mosul after the armistice was signed with
Turkey."
Daniel Yergin - The Prize, 1991
First
published in Great Britain by Simon and Schuster Ltd, 1991
"In 'Imperial Quest for Oil: Iraq
1910-1918,' the German historian Helmut Mejcher detailed the policy debate that took place
within the British government. 'There is no military advantage in pushing forward in
Mesopotamia,' Sir Maurice Hankey, the Secretary of the War Cabinet, wrote to Lloyd George.
However, Hankey went on, 'would it not be an advantage, before the end of the war, to
secure the valuable oil wells in Mesopotamia?' Arthur Balfour, the Foreign Secretary,
derided Hankey’s 'purely Imperialist War Aim,' but Lloyd George followed
Hankey’s advice, and in the fall of 1918 British troops marched into Mosul. Under the
San Remo Agreement, which was completed in 1920, the northern province became part of
Iraq, a League of Nations protectorate under British control. Faisal, the third son of
Hussein, the Sharif of Mecca, was installed as king of the new country. The French, who
considered Mosul to be within their colonial sphere of influence, demanded compensation
for the British démarche, and they obtained a promise that Paris would receive a quarter
of any future Iraqi oil revenues. Meanwhile, Walter Teagle, the formidable head of
Standard Oil of New Jersey, America’s largest oil company (and the precursor of
ExxonMobil), headed for London to stake his firm’s claim. 'It should be borne in mind
that the Standard Oil Company is very anxious to take over Iraq,' Sir Arthur Hirtzel, a
British colonial officer, warned his colleagues. Before the war, an Armenian entrepreneur
named Calouste Gulbenkian had established the Turkish Petroleum Company, with the backing
of Royal Dutch/Shell and Anglo-Persian (later renamed British Petroleum), to explore for
commercial deposits of oil in Mesopotamia. In 1925, King Faisal granted the Turkish
Petroleum Company a monopoly on oil exploration in Iraq for seventy-five years, along with
the sole authority to determine how much oil would be pumped and at what price it would be
sold. In return, the government in Baghdad would get a small royalty on each barrel
produced. This one-sided arrangement became the model for subsequent deals between Western
oil companies and Arab governments in the nineteen-thirties and forties. The Turkish
Petroleum Company quickly struck oil. In October, 1927, a team of geologists was drilling
near Kirkuk, a hundred and fifty miles north of Baghdad. One morning, a roar was heard in
the drilling area, and a great gusher burst from the ground, carrying rocks fifty feet
above the derrick. 'The countryside was drenched with oil, the hollows filled with
poisonous gas,' the energy expert Daniel Yergin recounts in 'The Prize,' his panoramic
history of the oil industry. 'Whole villages in the area were threatened, and the town of
Kirkuk itself was in danger. Some seven hundred tribesmen were quickly recruited to build
dikes and walls to try to contain the flood of oil.' Intensive discussions followed about
how to restructure the now immensely valuable Turkish Petroleum Company. In July, 1928,
the interested parties agreed to divide the business between its founder, Gulbenkian, who
got five per cent of the equity, and four Western companies: Royal Dutch/Shell,
Anglo-Persian, Compagnie Française des Pétroles, and an American consortium led by
Teagle’s Standard Oil. In 1929, three years before Iraq gained independence, the
Turkish Petroleum Company was renamed the Iraq Petroleum Company, but the Westerners
remained in control—a situation that prevailed for decades. As the twentieth century
progressed, the United States gradually usurped Britain’s role as the dominant
military power in the Middle East. Economic self-interest drove this strategic shift. In
1940, the United States produced two-thirds of the entire world’s oil supply. During
the Second World War, however, fears arose that American reserves might eventually be
depleted, and Harold Ickes, the Secretary of the Interior, published an article entitled
'We’re Running Out of Oil!' When American officials began to look covetously at
Britain’s Middle East reserves, Winston Churchill was moved to write to Franklin D.
Roosevelt and point out that some people in London feel 'that we are being hustled.' In
one of a series of cables, Roosevelt tried to reassure Churchill: 'Please do accept my
assurances that we are not making sheep’s eyes at your oil fields in Iraq or
Iran.'”
Beneath The Sand
New Yorker, 14
July 2003
"Iraq is the product of a lying
empire. The British carved it duplicitously from ancient history, thwarted Arab hopes,
Ottoman loss, the dunes of Mesopotamia and the mountains of Kurdistan at the end of the
first world war. Unsurprisingly, anarchy and insurrection were there from the start. The
British responded with gas attacks by the army in the south, bombing by the fledgling RAF
in both north and south. When Iraqi tribes stood up for themselves, we unleashed the
flying dogs of war to 'police' them. Terror bombing, night bombing, heavy bombers, delayed
action bombs (particularly lethal against children) were all developed during raids on
mud, stone and reed villages during Britain's League of Nations' mandate. The mandate
ended in 1932; the semi-colonial monarchy in 1958. But during the period of direct British
rule, Iraq proved a useful testing ground for newly forged weapons of both limited and
mass destruction, as well as new techniques for controlling imperial outposts and vassal
states. The RAF was first ordered to Iraq to quell Arab and Kurdish and Arab uprisings, to
protect recently discovered oil reserves, to guard Jewish settlers in Palestine and to
keep Turkey at bay. Some mission, yet it had already proved itself an effective imperial
police force in both Afghanistan and Somaliland (today's Somalia) in 1919-20. British and
US forces have been back regularly to bomb these hubs of recalcitrance ever since. Winston
Churchill, secretary of state for war and air, estimated that without the RAF, somewhere
between 25,000 British and 80,000 Indian troops would be needed to control Iraq. Reliance
on the airforce promised to cut these numbers to just 4,000 and 10,000. Churchill's
confidence was soon repaid. An uprising of more than 100,000 armed tribesmen against the
British occupation swept through Iraq in the summer of 1920. In went the RAF. It flew
missions totalling 4,008 hours, dropped 97 tons of bombs and fired 183,861 rounds for the
loss of nine men killed, seven wounded and 11 aircraft destroyed behind rebel lines. The
rebellion was thwarted, with nearly 9,000 Iraqis killed. Even so, concern was expressed in
Westminster: the operation had cost more than the entire British-funded Arab rising
against the Ottoman Empire in 1917-18. The RAF was vindicated as British military
expenditure in Iraq fell from £23m in 1921 to less than £4m five years later. This was
despite the fact that the number of bombing raids increased after 1923 when Squadron
Leader Arthur Harris - the future hammer of Hamburg and Dresden, whose statue stands in
Fleet Street in London today - took command of 45 Squadron. Adding bomb-racks to Vickers
Vernon troop car riers, Harris more or less invented the heavy bomber as well as night
'terror' raids. Harris did not use gas himself - though the RAF had employed mustard gas
against Bolshevik troops in 1919, while the army had gassed Iraqi rebels in 1920 'with
excellent moral effect'. Churchill was particularly keen on chemical weapons, suggesting
they be used 'against recalcitrant Arabs as an experiment'. He dismissed objections as
'unreasonable'. 'I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised
tribes [to] spread a lively terror ' In today's terms, 'the Arab' needed to be
shocked and awed. A good gassing might well do the job."
Our last occupation
Guardian, 19 April
2003
"The most important news from Iraq last week was not the
much ballyhooed constitutional pact by Shias and Kurds, nor the tragic stampede deaths of
nearly 1,000 pilgrims in Baghdad. The U.S. Air Force's senior officer, Gen. John Jumper,
stated U.S. warplanes would remain in Iraq to fight resistance forces and protect the
American-installed regime 'more or less indefinitely.' Jumper's bombshell went largely
unnoticed due to Hurricane Katrina. Gen. Jumper let the cat out of the bag. While
President George Bush hints at eventual troop withdrawals, the Pentagon is busy building
four major, permanent air bases in Iraq that will require heavy infantry protection.
Jumper's revelation confirms what this column has long said: The Pentagon plans to copy
Imperial Britain's method of ruling oil-rich Iraq. In the 1920s, the British cobbled
together Iraq from three disparate Ottoman provinces to control newly-found oil fields in
Kurdistan and along the Iranian border. London installed a puppet king and built an
army of sepoy (native) troops to keep order and put down minor uprisings. Government
minister Winston Churchill authorized use of poisonous mustard gas against Kurdish
tribesmen in Iraq and Pushtuns in Afghanistan (today's Taliban). The RAF crushed all
revolts. It seems this is what Jumper has in mind. Mobile U.S. ground intervention forces
will remain at the four major 'Fort Apache' bases guarding Iraq's major oil fields. These
bases will be 'ceded' to the U.S. by a compliant Iraqi regime. The U.S. Air Force will
police the Pax Americana with its precision-guided munitions and armed drones. The USAF
has developed an extremely effective new technique of wide area control. Small numbers of
strike aircraft are kept in the air around the clock. When U.S. ground forces come under
attack or foes are sighted, these aircraft deliver precision-guided bombs. This tactic has
led Iraqi resistance fighters to favour roadside bombs over ambushes against U.S. convoys.
The USAF uses the same combat air patrol tactic in Afghanistan, with even more
success. The U.S. is also developing three major air bases in Pakistan, and others across
Central Asia, to support its plans to dominate the region's oil and gas reserves."
U.S. the New Saddam
Toronto Sun, 4 September 2005
"During World War I (1914-18),
strategists for all the major powers increasingly perceived oil as a key military asset,
due to the adoption of oil-powered naval ships, new horseless army vehicles such as trucks
and tanks, and even military airplanes. Use of oil during the war increased so rapidly
that a severe shortage developed in 1917-18. The strategists also understood that oil
would assume a rapidly-growing importance in the civilian economy, making it a vital
element in national and imperial economic strength and a source of untold wealth to those
who controlled it. Already in the United States, John D. Rockefeller, founder of Standard
Oil Company, was the world’s richest person. The British government, ruling over the
largest colonial empire, already controlled newly-discovered oil in Persia (now Iran)
through the Anglo-Persian Oil Company. Since Britain lacked oil in the home islands,
British strategists wanted still more reserves to assure the future needs of their empire.
An area of the Ottoman Empire called Mesopotamia (now Iraq), shared the same geology as
neighboring Persia, so it appeared especially promising. Just before war broke out in
1914, British and German companies had negotiated joint participation in the newly-founded
Turkish Petroleum Company that held prospecting rights in Mesopotamia. The war ended the
Anglo-German oil partnership and it exposed the territories of the German-allied Ottoman
Empire to direct British attack. As war continued, oil seemed ever more important and
shortages ever more menacing to the imperial planners. ...... To this end, British forces
raced to capture the key northern city of Mosul several days after the armistice was
signed. Britain thus outmaneuvered the French, establishing a military fait accompli in
the oil zone of Northern Mesopotamia. The French were furious. France, too, lacked oil
fields in its home terriorites, and its politicians and imperial strategists saw
Mesopotamia as a key resource for France’s future industrial and military might. In
the months after the armistice, nothing caused greater friction between the two allies
than the oil question. During the Versailles Peace Conference, British Prime Minister
David Lloyd George and his French counterpart Georges Clemenceau nearly came to blows over
Mesopotamian (Iraqi) oil, according to eyewitness accounts. US President Wooddrow Wilson
apparently intervened and only barely restrained them.... Finally, in the secret San Remo
Agreement of 1920, the two rivals agreed to give Britain political control over all
Mespoltamia, in return for France taking over the German quarter share in the Turkish
Petroleum Company. All this before a drop of oil had been discovered in the disputed
territory! The French government was not satisfied with its secondary role in world oil,
fearing the might of the big British and US companies. In an effort to strengthen and
'liberate' France, the government in Paris set up the Compagnie Francaise des Pétroles in
1924 to take up the French share in Mesopotamia – now a British colony renamed Iraq .
Further French legislation in 1928 referred to the company as an instrument to curtail
'the Anglo Saxon oil trusts' and to develop Mesopotamian oil as a strategic resource of
the French empire. The uneasy settlement between the British and the French did not end
the great power dispute over Iraq’s oil, however. The United States government and US
oil companies were furious at the Anglo-French agreement, which left nothing for them!
Before the end of 1920, following the companies’ strategic prompting, the US press
began to denounce the Anglo-French accord as 'old-fashioned imperialism.' In Washington,
some talked of sanctions and other measures against these ungrateful recent allies.
Relations between Washington and London cooled swiftly and a young State Department legal
advisor named Allen Dulles drew up a memorandum insisting that the Turkish Petroleum
Company (TPC) concession agreement with the dismembered Ottoman Empire was now legally
invalid and would no longer be recognized by the United States. Soon London bowed to this
transatlantic pressure and signaled that it was ready for a deal that would give the US a
'fair' share. In response, Washington told its major oil companies that they should act as
a consortium in future negotiations. Walter Teagle, Chairman of Jersey Standard (later
Exxon), the biggest US company, took the lead role as negotiator for the consortium. Thus
began lengthy secret talks in London. No oil had yet been found, but prospects had
brightened. In October 1927, the British exploration team under D’Arcy hit a gusher,
proving oil reserves in large quantities near Kirkuk in northern Iraq. In July 1928, the
quarreling parties finally reached a famous accord, known as the 'Red Line Agreement,'
which brought the US consortium into the picture with just under a quarter of the shares
and an agreement to jointly develop fields in many other Middle East countries falling
within the red line marked on the map by the negotiators. Throughout this phase, as in all
later phases of Iraq’s oil history, major international powers combined national
military force, government pressure and private corporate might to win and hold
concessions for Iraq’s oil. The defeated and dismembered Ottoman Empire and its
defeated ally Germany lost all oil rights they might otherwise have claimed. At the same
time, the three victors of the war – Britain, France and the United States –
shared out Iraqi oil among themselves on a basis of relative power. The dominant colonial
power, Britain, came out with nearly a half share, while the two lesser powers on the
regional stage – the US and France – each won close to a quarter share."
Great Power Conflict over Iraqi Oil: the World War I Era
Global Policy
Forum, October 2002
"The U.S. is playing today roughly the
same role with respect to Iraq’s oil riches that Britain did early last century.
History has a habit of repeating itself, albeit with different nuances and different
actors. In this two-part series, we shall review the intricacies of oil-related events in
Iraq .... Discovery of oil in 1908 at Masjid-i Suleiman in Iran – an event that
changed the fate of the Middle East – gave impetus to quest for oil in Mesopotamia.
Oil pursuits in Mesopotamia were concentrated in Mosul, one of three provinces or
'vilayets' constituting Iraq under the Ottoman rule. Mosul was the northern province, the
other two being Baghdad (in the middle) and Basra (in the south) provinces. Foreign
geologists visited the area under the disguise of archeologists. For a good part of the
last century, interests of national governments were closely linked with the interests of
oil companies, so much so that oil companies were de facto extensions of foreign-office
establishments of the governments. The latter actively lobbied on behalf of the oil
companies owned by their respective nationals. The oil companies, in return, would
guarantee oil supply to respective governments – preferably at a substantial
discount..... Among the foreign powers the British, seeing Iraq as a gateway to their
Indian colony and oil as lifeblood for their Imperial Navy, were most aggressive in their
pursuits in Mesopotamia, aspiring to gain physical control of the oil region. Winston
Churchill, soon after he became First Lord of the Admiralty in 1911, declared oil to be of
paramount importance for the supremacy of the Imperial Navy. Churchill was educated about
the virtues of oil by none other than Marcus Samuel, the founder of Shell. During the war,
Sir Maurice Hankey, secretary of the War Cabinet, advised Foreign Secretary Arthur Belfour
in writing that control of the Persian and Mesopotamian oil was a 'first-class British war
aim.' Britain captured the towns of Basra, Baghdad and Mosul, capitals of the provinces
bearing the same names, in November 1914, March 1917 and November 1918, respectively.
Mosul was captured 15 days after Britain and Turkey signed the Mudros Armistice ending
hostilities at the end of the war, an event that drew protests from the Turkish delegation
at the Lausanne Peace Conference four years later. In
1913 Churchill sent an expeditionary team to the Persian Gulf headed by Admiral Slade to
investigate oil possibilities in the region. More or
less coincident with Admiral Slade expedition, Britain signed a secret agreement with the
sheikh of Kuwait who, while ostensibly pledging allegiance to the Ottoman Sultan in
Istanbul, promised exclusive oil rights to the British. Kuwait became a British
protectorate in November 1914. The British were so concerned about the security of their
oil supply prior to the war that they wanted to have guaranteed British dominance in any
oil company exploiting Mesopotamian oil. The government favored Anglo-Persian Oil Company
(APOC, predecessor of BP) over Royal Dutch/Shell (RDS) in TPC. APOC, already holding oil
concession in Iran but not one of the original participants in TPC, was 100 percent
British while RDS, an original participant, was 40 percent British....World War I augured
another fundamental change in the oil scene in Mesopotamia: assertiveness on the part of
the American government for an 'open-door policy' on oil concessions. Forcefully advanced
by President Wilson, the policy meant equal access for American capital and interests. The
policy was in response to reluctance of European oil companies to welcome American
companies to the Mesopotamian oil scene....A rising demand for oil, fuel shortages and
price increases during the war, and rumors of depleting domestic resources soon after the
war rallied the American administration to give active support to American oil companies
in search of foreign oil. Mesopotamia would not be a preserve for the European oil
interests, Washington decided. The British initially tried to foil the American efforts by
stonewalling American requests and by refusing access to American geologists who wanted to
survey oil potential in the region. Britain’s tactics drew strong protest from
Washington. The American government withheld its recognition of the Draft Mandate for Iraq
on the grounds that it sanctioned discrimination against nationals of other countries. The
San Remo agreement, in particular, caused consternation in Washington and catapulted the
State Department and American oil companies into action. Walter Teagle, the head of Jersey
(later Exxon), became the spokesperson for American corporate oil interests.....The
Lausanne Peace Conference held in November 1922-February 1923 (1st session) in Switzerland
marked the height of political brinkmanship and skullduggery in oil politics. The 'Mosul
question,' i.e. whether Mosul belonged to Turkey or whether it would be included within
the borders of a newly created Iraq, was taken up by a special Council dealing with
territorial issues. The Turkish delegation, headed by Foreign Minister Ismet Pasha, came
to the Conference with explicit instructions from Ankara to keep Mosul within Turkey, in
accord with the National Pact ('Misak-i Milli') adopted by the last Ottoman parliament in
January 1920. The British had a totally different agenda..... Lord Curzon argued that the
policy of His Majesty’s Government on Mosul was not in any way related to oil, that
instead it was guided by the desire to protect interests of Iraqi people consistent with
its mandatory obligations, that he had never spoken to an oil magnate or an oil
concessionaire regarding Mosul oil, but that a company called TPC had obtained a
concession from the Ottoman government [in June 1914] before the war that his government
had concluded was valid, that his government and TPC had no monopolistic designs on Iraqi
oil, and that the Iraqis would be the chief beneficiaries of oil exploitation in Iraq.
He added that Turkey would benefit as well. Considering British
governments past knee-deep involvement in Mesopotamian oil, and TPC’s monopolistic
charter (see below) and exclusionary tactics, it was almost surreal that Lord Curzon would
make such statements, including the intimation that he was unaware of oil-related
developments surrounding Mosul. At the time of the Lausanne Conference the British, Dutch,
French and American oil companies were negotiating the future of TPC in London, and Lord
Curzon was kept fully informed on the progress of these negotiations. The American
observer at the Conference was bemused at Lord Curzon’s high-principled claims. In a
vague, convoluted language, he remarked that the character of TPC concession should be
evaluated by an impartial tribunal and that his government had not given up on the
'open-door' policy. In a subsequent diplomatic note to Britain, the State Department
expressed its discomfort on some of the claims made by Lord Curzon at the Conference.
Lord Curzon also misled and appeased a war-weary British
public by making similar statements in British press. The British public was longing for peace and did not want a new military
conflict for the sake of oil. Similar attempts by
the government at the Parliament were less successful. Some members of the Parliament
expressed deep skepticism on Britain’s motivations on Mosul, including one MP who
complained about the 'vein of hypocrisy' running through Britain’s policy on Mosul.
The government repeatedly ignored requests from MPs to produce the so-called oil
concession agreement, or state clearly its terms.... in 1921, when Lord Curzon was already
the Foreign Minister, Whitehall was forced to admit that the TPC concession was on shaky
legal grounds. That did not deter Lord Curzon from making his preposterous claims a year
later at Lausanne. With no solution in sight, and after receiving veiled threats from Lord
Curzon on renewed hostilities in Iraq (which prompted a worried France to urge Turkey not
to turn down the British proposal), Ankara reluctantly agreed in March 1923 to British
proposal to refer the Mosul question to the League Nations for arbitration if direct
negotiations with Britain failed. These talks, indeed, bore no fruit, and Britain took the
Mosul question to the League of Nations. When the Lausanne Conference (2nd session) ended
in July 24, 1923, the communiqué issued officially recognized these developments. The
British, however, failed in their efforts to have inserted into the treaty a clause
indicating Ankara’s acceptance of the so-called TPC concession. In January 1923,
Britain, as the mandatory power, pressured Iraq to forego its right to 20 percent
participation in TPC, voiding the provision that was included in the 1920 San Remo
Agreement signed with France....In March 1925, TPC concluded an oil concession agreement
with Iraq. The agreement, to be in effect for 75 years, stipulated that TPC would be and
remain a British company registered in Great Britain....Discovery of the Kirkuk field was
the second major oil-related event in the Middle East history after Masjid-i Suleiman in
Iran. The event marked the fulfillment of a long-hoped dream for the TPC partners and
shaped the destiny of Iraq, in fact the Middle East, until our times. The field, with
reserves of 16 billion barrels, or 2150 million tons, lived up to expectations as to its
immense size. In June 1929 TPC changed its name to Iraq Petroleum Company (IPC)."
Oil in Iraq: The Byzantine Beginnings
Global
Policy Forum April 25, 2003
"In April 1932, a British-dominated
international consortium, British Oil Development Company (BODC), obtained a 75-year oil
concession for territory lying west of Tigris and north of 33rd parallel. The consortium
was intended to be a competitor to IPC in Iraq. Ten years later, before it would start
production, BODC was bought out by Mosul Petroleum Company (MPC), a fully owned subsidiary
of IPC. Likewise, in December 1938, Basra Petroleum Company (BPC), another subsidiary of
IPC, obtained a 75-year concession for the rest of Iraq. Thus all of Iraq, with the
exception of the 'transferred territory,' came under IPC’s control. Competition was
entirely eliminated. IPC was not meant to be a profit-making enterprise. It operated as a
production and transport company that delivered oil to its shareholders at export
terminals (initially Haifa in Palestine and Tripoli in Lebanon) in proportion to
participation interest. The partners were charged a nominal fee for the oil. Real profits
were made by the partners which shipped, refined and sold the oil in foreign markets.
(Until 1948 some of the crude was refined in Haifa). Until 1940 or so, IPC maintained a
strategy to delay production in Iraq. The strategy was aimed at protecting the interests
of the British, American and Dutch partners, who had crude production of their own in
areas outside Iraq and wanted to shield such production from competition. CFP and
Gulbenkian, who had production interests only in Iraq, opposed the delay strategy; but
with their minority shareholding, they had limited success. For good reason, the policy of
retarding production irritated the Iraqi government as well. During its operation IPC was
frequently at loggerheads with the Iraqi government on a number of issues. The oil revenue
structure, the pace of oil development, building refineries, participation in
shareholding, and representation at company’s board, were the chief areas of dispute.
The disputes led to nationalization of Iraq’s oil industry in 1972.... As destiny
would have it, Iraq’s oil development was affected not so much by internal conflicts
but by external factors. Iraq significantly benefited from the Iran oil crisis in the
early 1950’s, but suffered during the Suez crisis. The biggest setbacks were during
the Iraq-Iran war and the Gulf War. And now, the American-led Iraq War has brought a new
era of destruction and uncertainty. The players in the big Mesopotamian oil game included
an assortment of foreign countries and nationalistic oil companies that had a symbiotic
and at times incestuous relationship with each other. What lip service was paid to free
trade and competition, both in word and on paper, was soon discarded and forgotten when
rhetoric clashed with self-interest. In many ways, these were not glorious days for the
oil companies. Nor were the governments that knowingly supported the monopolistic designs
and sometimes clandestine undertakings of these companies without blame..... Judging the
players, the British played big poker and won. For Britain, oil was an instrument of
imperial ambitions, and at times blood was the sacrifice that had to be accepted –
e.g., 2500 British lives lost during the internal uprising in Iraq in 1920. The British
camouflaged their true intentions on oil through pretexts, e.g., their righteous claim of
being the trustees of Iraqi people’s rights on oil. The Americans were more open in
their intentions, although their tacit acceptance of the self-denial clause left them cold
and dry on charges of hypocrisy. Lacking the colonial over-drive of the British, and
having relinquished Mosul to British control in San Remo in return for the German share in
TPC, the French were relegated to play second fiddle in the big Anglo-American grab for
oil in the Middle East. The French never trusted the British, and later the Americans, but
were reconciled to their dominance on matters of oil. As for the Dutch, they were the
easiest winners. Thanks to 40 percent British share in RD Shell, the Dutch virtually got a
free ride on the back of the British. At the beginning of WWI, RD Shell acquiesced to
British control in order to operate freely on the high seas.....The Turks were the big
losers in the oil game. The major reason for that, of course, was defeat during WWI and
the headaches that the defeat brought. But Turks, the Ottoman Turks in particular, trailed
the West in science and technology, which put them behind in appreciating the strategic
value of oil. It is a poignant historical irony that
at the time Admiral Slade expedition was surveying the Persian Gulf region for oil on
instructions from Winston Churchill in 1913, Grand
Vizier (Chief Minister) Mahmut Sevket Pasha, in blissful ignorance, was telling his
cabinet in Istanbul that Qatar and Kuwait were 'unimportant desert' sheikdoms that were
not worth creating conflict with Britain."
Oil in Iraq: The Byzantine Beginnings
Global Policy
Forum, 26 April 2003
How Britain, Not Saddam,
Was The First To Gas The Kurds
"Winston Churchill's finest hour may,
yet again, be upon us. More than 50 years after he won the war and lost the election,
Churchill is the man of the moment. On the night of September 11 his biography was on the
bedside table of the then New York mayor, Rudolph Giuliani; now his bust sits on the Oval
office desk of George Bush....There is a certain irony in the timing of this transatlantic
adulation. As Tony Blair and Bush trot the globe warning of the evils of chemical weapons,
Churchill hardly stands out as a role model. As president of the air council in 1919, he
wrote: 'I do not understand the squeamishness about the use of gas. I am strongly in favour of using poisonous gas against uncivilised
tribes.' A few
years later mustard gas was used against the Kurds."
Churchill - the truth
Guardian, 30
September 2002
"Who was the
first high government official to authorize use of mustard gas against rebellious Kurdish
tribesmen in Iraq? If your answer was Saddam Hussein's cousin, the notorious 'Chemical
Ali' -- aka Ali Hassan al-Majid -- you're wrong. The correct answer: Sainted Winston
Churchill. As colonial secretary and secretary for war and air, he authorized the RAF in
the 1920s to routinely use mustard gas against rebellious Kurdish tribesmen in Iraq and against Pashtun tribes on British
India's northwest frontier. Iraq's U.S.-installed regime has just announced al-Majid, one
of Saddam's most brutal henchmen, will stand trial next week for war crimes. Al-Majid is
accused of ordering the 1988 gassing of Kurds at Halabja that killed over 5,000 civilians.
He led the bloody suppression of Iraq's Shias, killing tens of thousands. These were the
same Shias whom former U.S. president George Bush called to rebel against Saddam's regime,
then sat back and did nothing while they were crushed. The Halabja atrocity remains murky.
The CIA's former Iraq
desk chief claims Kurds who died at Halabja were killed by cyanide gas, not nerve gas, as
is generally believed. At the time, Iraq and Iran were locked in the ferocious last
battles of their eight-year war. Halabja was caught between the two armies that were
exchanging salvos of regular and chemical munitions. Only Iran had cyanide gas. If the CIA
official is correct, the Kurds were accidentally killed by Iran, not Iraq. But it's also possible al-Majid ordered
an attack. Kurds in that region had rebelled against Iraq and opened the way for invading
Iranian forces. What's the difference between the U.S. destroying the rebellious Iraqi
city of Fallujah and Saddam destroying rebellious Halabja? What difference does it make if
you're killed by poison gas, artillery or 2,000-pound bombs? 'Chemical Ali' was a brute of
the worst kind in a regime filled with sadists. I personally experienced the terror of
Saddam's sinister regime over 25 years, culminating in threats to hang me as a spy. Saddam
Hussein and his entourage should face justice. But not in political show trials just
before U.S.-'guided' Iraqi elections nor in Iraqi kangaroo courts. They should be sent to
the UN's war crimes tribunal in The Hague, where Saddam should be charged with the
greatest crime he committed -- the invasion of Iran, which caused one million casualties.
Britain, the U.S., Kuwait and Saudi Arabia convinced Iraq to invade Iran, then covertly
supplied Saddam with money, arms, intelligence, and advisers. Meanwhile, Israel secretly
supplied Iran with $5 billion US in American arms and spare parts while publicly
denouncing Iran for terrorism. Who supplied 'Chemical Ali' with his mustard and nerve gas? Why, the West, of
course. In late 1990, I discovered four British technicians in Baghdad who told me they
had been 'seconded' to Iraq by Britain's ministry of defence and MI6 intelligence to make
chemical and biological weapons, including anthrax, Q-fever and plague, at a secret
laboratory at Salman Pak. The Reagan administration and Thatcher government were up to
their ears in backing Iraq's aggression, apparently with the intention to overthrow Iran's
Islamic government and seize its oil. Italy, Germany, France, South Africa, Belgium, Yugoslavia,
Brazil, Chile and the USSR all aided Saddam's war effort against Iran, which was even more
a victim of naked aggression than was Kuwait in 1991. I'd argue senior officials of those
nations that abetted Saddam's aggression against Iran and supplied him with chemicals and
gas should also stand trial with Ali and Saddam. What an irony it is to see U.S. forces in
Iraq now behaving with much the same punitive ferocity as Saddam's army and police --
bombing rebellious cities, arresting thousands, terrorizing innocent civilians, torturing
captives and sending in tanks to crush resistance. In other words, Saddamism without
Saddam. A decade ago, this column predicted that when the U.S. finally overthrew Saddam,
it would need to find a new Saddam. Finally, let's not forget that when Saddam's regime committed many of its
worst atrocities against rebellious Kurds and Shiites, it was still a close ally of
Washington and London. The West paid for and supplied Saddam's bullets, tanks, gas and
germs. He was our regional SOB. Our hands are very far from clean."
Eric Margolis - West Has Bloodied Hands
Toronto Sun, 19 December 2004
"Speaking of biochemical war in
Mesopotamia/Iraq, [T.E] Lawrence wrote several newspaper editorials on the subject. In a
letter to the Sunday Times of London, Lawrence, using a sharp and twisted wit, spelled out
to the British public what Churchill had been privately considering. At this writing, Lawrence had no foreknowledge of the plans of the
Colonial Office for biochemical war to be waged on Mesopotamia. 'How long will we permit millions of pounds, thousands of Imperial
troops and tens of thousands of Arabs to be sacrificed on behalf of a form of Colonial
administration which can benefit nobody but its administrators?' Lawrence asked. 'It is
odd we do not use poison gas on these occasions. By gas attacks, the whole population of offending
districts [in Iraq] could be wiped out neatly; and as a method of government it would be
no more immoral than the present system.'"
A long history of conflict
WorldNetDaily, 31
August 2000
"Britain bears some responsibility
for the Kurdish problem. It ignored the 1920 Treaty of Sèvres, which promised Kurds their
independence, and surplanted it with the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne with Turkey, leading to
the division and subjugation of the Kurdish people. Restive Kurds in Iraq subsequently
were bombed and gassed into acquiescence by the RAF and British Army. Mr Talabani now
looks to the British to make amends by safeguarding the rights of Iraq’s Kurdish
minority. 'When I met Tony Blair once, I told him that as a student I had taken part in
many demonstrations saying ‘British go home’,' he said."
Kurd who will seal Saddam's fate
London
Times, 24 February 2005
"Even in the darkest days of 1940,
working in the government bunkers beneath central London with German bombs raining down on
the city above, Wendy Maxwell had no doubt the Allies would win World War Two. The source
of her optimism was the man her boss worked with day and night, British Prime Minister
Winston Churchill. 'Even through the evacuation from Dunkirk, the Battle of Britain, the
blitz, the fall of Singapore we never, never thought we wouldn't win,' she told Reuters on
Wednesday at the opening of the first museum in Britain dedicated to Churchill. He
insisted that the museum did not gloss over Churchill's multiple mistakes in his long
career – including the disastrous Dardanelles Campaign in 1915 during World War One
and using gas against Kurds in 1920 during
the British occupation of Iraq."
Britain opens museum of Winston Churchill's life
Reuters,
9 February 2005
"Citing Churchill to support
Bush’s war to rid Iraq of alleged weapons of mass destruction was particularly ironic
in light of Churchill’s own record with respect to WMDs in Iraq. As colonial
secretary in 1919, Churchill wanted to use gas against the ‘unco-operative Arabs’ in Iraq. He explained, in
terms that Saddam might have used to justify his gassing of Iraqi Kurds, ‘I do not
understand the squeamishness about the use of gas. I am strongly in favour of using poison
gas against uncivilised tribes.’"
Churchill for dummies
The Spectator, 24 April 2004
"Laid waste, a chaotic post-invasion
Iraq may now well be policed by old and new imperial masters promising liberty, democracy
and unwanted exiled leaders, in return for oil, trade and submission. Only the last of
these promises is certain. The peoples of Iraq, even those who have cheered passing
troops, have every reason to mistrust foreign invaders. They have been lied to far too
often, bombed and slaughtered promiscuously. Iraq is the product of a lying empire. The
British carved it duplicitously from ancient history, thwarted Arab hopes, Ottoman loss,
the dunes of Mesopotamia and the mountains of Kurdistan at the end of the first world war.
Unsurprisingly, anarchy and insurrection were there from the start. The British responded
with gas attacks
by the army in the south, bombing by the fledgling RAF in both north and south....Adding
bomb-racks to Vickers Vernon troop car riers, Harris more or less invented the heavy
bomber as well as night 'terror' raids. Harris did not use gas himself - though the RAF
had employed mustard gas against Bolshevik troops in 1919, while the army had gassed Iraqi
rebels in 1920 'with excellent moral effect'. Churchill was particularly keen on chemical
weapons, suggesting they be used 'against recalcitrant Arabs as an experiment'. He
dismissed objections as 'unreasonable'. 'I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against
uncivilised tribes _ [to] spread a lively terror _' In today's terms, 'the Arab' needed to be shocked and awed. A good
gassing might well do the job."
Our last occupation: Gas, chemicals, bombs: Britain has used them all before in Iraq
Guardian,
19 April 2003
"Recently, Winston Churchill's
grandson published an article in the Wall Street Journal titled: 'My grandfather invented
Iraq.' In the article he mentions: 'My grandfather's experience has lessons for us'. What
he failed to disclose was that this so-called 'invention' was connected with treachery and
betrayal. Britain which built an empire through cruel, greedy and dishonest schemes now
behaves self-righteous, making every attempt to conceal the toxic passages of history. It
is therefore worthwhile to scrutinize historical facts to understand today's crisis in
Iraq, because history ignored will lead to history repeated. Forces and events that
contributed to the creation of Iraq are highly controversial. The Sykes-Picot Agreement,
Paris Peace Conference, and Cairo conference are genres of political dominance of the
imperial powers, which shifted borders and annexed territories inventing conceptions of
dependency through mandates and protectorates. When
the British first entered Basra in 1914, their real intentions were to protect the
potential oil fields and secure communications routes to India... Britain merged the provinces Baghdad, Basra and Mosul into a new
entity, the state of Iraq, inhabited by three different groups of people: Shias, Sunnis
and Kurds. Problems appeared as the British administration did not give administrative
posts to the local people. Soon imperial order penetrated at all levels. Under the British
rule the Iraqis were subjected to pay more taxes than to the Ottomans. They armed
themselves and revolted against the British rulers in 1920. To
crush the rebellion Churchill, at that time the Secretary of State for War, introduced new
tactics - bombing as means of shock and awe. He encouraged the usage of mustard gas
stating: 'I do not understand the squeamishness
about the use of gas, I am strongly in favour of using poison gas against uncivilised
tribes'. He argued that gas fired from ground-based guns or dropped from aircraft, would
cause only discomfort or illness but not death. Others protested saying gas would
permanently damage eyesight and kill sickly persons and children who are most vulnerable
to such a situation. Churchill remained unimpressed arguing that the usage of gas is a
'scientific expedient' and it 'should not be prevented by the prejudices of those who do
not think clearly'.... In 1920, the Times published an article from the English diplomat,
T. E. Lawrence, known as Lawrence of Arabia, who gave a full account of the circumstances
in Iraq: 'We said we went to Mesopotamia to defeat Turkey. We said we stayed to deliver
Arabs from the oppression of the Turkish government, and to
make available for the world its resources of corn and oil....We keep 90,000 men with aeroplanes, armoured cars, gunboats and
armoured trains... Our government is worse than the old Turkish system... We have killed
about 10,000 Arabs in this rising summer... How long will we permit millions of pounds,
thousands of imperial troops, tens of thousands of Arabs to be sacrificed on behalf of
colonial administration which can benefit nobody but its administrators?.'.... The parameter for Iraq's future was set at the Cairo Conference.
Churchill's main ambition was to preserve the route to India, protect potential oil
resources and control Iraq politically through the British mandate."
The origins of shock and awe
Sunday Observer (Sri Lanka),
23 April 2003
Before And After The Invention Of The Oil Driven Internal Combustion Engine
Imperial
History Of The Middle East |
NLPWESSEX,
natural law publishing |
