Secret US Plans for Iraq's Oil
By Greg Palast
OfficialWire
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 - protestors 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.
An Iraqi-born oil industry consultant
Falah Aljibury says he took part in the secret meetings in California,
Washington
and the Middle East. He described a State Department plan for a forced
coup d'etat.
Mr Aljibury himself told Newsnight that
he interviewed potential successors to Saddam Hussein on behalf of the
Bush administration.
Secret Sell-Off Plan
The industry-favored plan was pushed
aside by yet another 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, 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, flew to the London meeting, he told
Newsnight, at the request of the State Department.
Mr Aljibury, once Ronald Reagan's
"back-channel" to Saddam, claims that plans to sell off Iraq's oil, pushed
by the US-installed Governing Council in 2003, helped instigate the
insurgency and attacks on US and British occupying forces.
"Insurgents used this, saying, 'Look,
you're losing your country, your losing your resources to a bunch of
wealthy billionaires who want to take you over and make your life
miserable," said Mr Aljibury from his home near San Francisco.
"We saw an increase in the bombing of
oil facilities, pipelines, built on the premise that privatization is
coming."
Privatization Blocked by Industry
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.
Mr Carroll told us he made it clear to
Paul Bremer, the US occupation chief who arrived in Iraq in May 2003,
that: "There was to be no privatization of Iraqi oil resources or
facilities while I was involved."
The chosen successor to Mr Carroll, a
Conoco Oil executive, ordered up a new plan for a state oil company
preferred by the industry.
Ari Cohen, of the neo-conservative
Heritage Foundation, told Newsnight that an opportunity had been missed to
privatize Iraq's oil fields. He advocated the plan as a means to help the
US defeat Opec, and said America should have gone ahead with what he
called a "no-brainer" decision.
Mr Carroll hit back, telling Newsnight,
"I would agree with that statement. To privatize would be a no-brainer. It
would only be thought about by someone with no brain."
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 favored
by the US oil industry. It was completed in January 2004, Harper's
discovered, under the guidance of Amy Jaffe of the James Baker Institute
in Texas. Former US Secretary of State Baker is now an attorney. His law
firm, Baker Botts, is representing ExxonMobil and the Saudi Arabian
government.
Questioned by Newsnight, Ms Jaffe said
the oil industry prefers state control of Iraq's oil over a sell-off
because it fears a repeat of Russia's energy privatization. In the wake of
the collapse of the Soviet Union, US oil companies were barred from
bidding for the reserves.
Jaffe said "There is no question that
an American oil company ... would not be enthusiastic about a plan that
would privatize all the assets with Iraq companies and they (US companies)
might be left out of the transaction."
In addition, Ms. Jaffe says US oil
companies are not warm to any plan that would undermine Opec, "They [oil
companies] have to worry about the price of oil."
"I'm not sure that if I'm the chair of
an American company, and you put me on a lie detector test, I would say
high oil prices are bad for me or my company."
The former Shell oil boss agrees. In
Houston, he told Newsnight, "Many neo-conservatives are people who have
certain ideological beliefs about markets, about democracy, about this
that and the other. International oil companies without exception are very
pragmatic commercial organizations. They don't have a theology."
17 March 2005
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