[28] News from Absurdistan - Truth and Fiction in the Run-Up to The Attack on Iran

In school, I was told about US-pilots dropping bombs on Vietnamese villages; the teacher warned us of the deadly psychology of detachment, suggesting the bomber pilot was in a frame of mind as if indulging in a video game, blissfully oblivious of the real harm and destruction caused by his actions. I am not sure I want to believe that a combat pilot is ever in a position of playful detachment...but the effect of deadly indifference that my teacher had hoped to make me aware of is to be noticed every day among the German public.In school, I was told about US-pilots dropping bombs on Vietnamese villages; the teacher warned us of the deadly psychology of detachment, suggesting the bomber pilot was in frame of mind as if indulging in a video game, blissfully oblivious of the real harm and destruction caused by his actions. I am not sure I want to believe that a combat pilot is ever in a position of playful detachment...but the effect of deadly indifference that my teacher had hoped to make me aware of is to be noticed every day among the German public. We could not care less.

In his prepared statement to the U.S. House Foreign Affairs and Armed Services committees last week, Gen. David Petraeus claimed that Iran is using the Quds Force to turn Shi'ite militias into a "Hezbollah-like force" to "fight a proxy war against the Iraqi state and coalition forces in Iraq." But Petraeus then shattered that carefully constructed argument by volunteering in answering a question that the Quds Force, an elite unit of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, had essentially left Iraq. "The Quds force itself, we believe, by and large those individuals have been pulled out of the country as have the Lebanese Hezbollah trainers that were being used to augment that activity…." Petraeus' contradictory statements on the Quds force are emblematic of an administration propaganda line that has essentially fallen apart because it was so obviously out of line with reality. Nine months after the George W. Bush administration declared that it was going to go after Iranian agents in Iraq who were threatening U.S. troops, the U.S. military still has not produced any evidence that the Quds Force operatives in Iraq were engaged in assisting the militias fighting against U.S. troops. The U.S. military command in Iraq has failed to capture a single Quds Force member whom it could link to the Shi'ite militias. And the evidence that has emerged over the past nine months about Shi'ite militias and their relationship to Iran suggests that Quds force personnel in Iraq never had the mission of assisting Shi'ite militias, as claimed by the Bush administration. It appears that an increasing number of military intelligence officers in Iraq have concluded that the Quds force has been steering clear of working directly with Shi'ite militias attacking U.S. troops, in order to avoid giving the Bush administration a pretext for aggression against Iranian territory. In a military briefing presented in Baghdad on Feb. 11, an unnamed U.S. official stated flatly that weapons were being smuggled into the country by the Quds Force, but the briefers failed to present any specific evidence to back up the assertion. Since that briefing, the U.S. military command has captured the alleged deputy head and key logistical officer of the main Iraqi EFP, or armor-penetrating explosives, network and a Hezbollah operative who was a liaison with the network, as well as a number of what it called "suspected members" or "suspected leaders" of a "secret cell terrorist network known for facilitating the transport of and EFPs from Iran to Iraq." But the interrogations of these detainees have not led to the capture of a single Iranian official. Nor has the military been able to identify a link between any Iraqi militia member and any Iranian official. On July 6, Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, commander of U.S. operations south of Baghdad, told reporters his troops had not captured "anybody that we can tie to Iran." Even more devastating to the "proxy war" line, Lynch's spokesperson, Alayne Conway, acknowledged on Aug. 19 that they had not caught anyone supplying arms from Iran to the Iraqi Shi'ite militias. There has long been some evidence, however, of a link between Shi'ite networks for procuring EFPs and other arms and Lebanese Hezbollah. The leader of a Madhi Army group that was carrying out attacks against British forces, Ahmad Jawwad al-Fartusi, who was arrested in September 2005, had lived in Lebanon for several years and was known to have personal contact with Hezbollah, according to a March 27 New York Times report. Along with evidence of a growing relationship between Hezbollah and Moqtada al-Sadr's army, which has now culminated in a Sadr office in Beirut, such past links between the two Shi'ite groups suggest that Hezbollah's assistance to the Shi'ites need not have been ordered by Tehran. U.S. and British officials have acknowledged in the past that the EFP technology being used in Iraq might have entered Iraq from Hezbollah in Lebanon rather than from Iran. The premise that the Quds Force agents in Iraq were involved in training Shi'ites to carry out operations against U.S. troops was shattered when Lynch told reporters Aug. 19 that the Iranians were "facilitating the training of Shi'ite extremists" militiamen in Iraq. That clearly implied that the training was being done by Hezbollah. The Washington Post and other news outlets quoted Lynch's statement but nevertheless reported that Lynch had charged that Iranians were doing the training. A spokesperson for Lynch confirmed to IPS that Lynch had not made any allegation about Iranians training Shi'ites in Iraq. Petraeus dealt the final blow to the notion of a Quds Force training role when he noted that the Hezbollah trainers had also been withdrawn from the country. The briefing by U.S. military spokesman Brig. Gen. Kevin Bergner on July 2 was aimed primarily at advancing the theme that Hezbollah acts in Iraq as a "proxy" for Iran. But the real significance of the briefing – unreported in the news media – was the first suggestion by a U.S. official that the Quds Force personnel in Iraq might have avoided direct contacts with Shi'ite militias altogether. Asked by a journalist why the Quds Force would "subcontract" the training of Shi'ite militias to Hezbollah, Bergner answered that Hezbollah could "do things that perhaps they didn't want to have to do themselves in terms of interacting directly with special groups." Without mentioning any pullout of Quds force personnel, spokesperson Conway said on Aug. 19 that Gen. Lynch estimated that there were 50 Quds Force agents in his entire area of responsibility in southern Iraq. Four days later Lynch clarified that estimate, telling reporters that 30 of those estimated 50 agents were "surrogates" – presumably referring to Hezbollah operatives engaged in training Shi'ites in southern Iraq. Although it was buried in the Aug. 19 story inaccurately reporting Lynch's statement about training in Iraq, Megan Greenwell of the Washington Post reported the much more significant fact that "some military intelligence analysts have concluded there is no concrete evidence" linking the Quds Force in Iraq with the Shi'ite militias. The charge that Iran was using the Quds Force to fight a proxy war was an effort to raise tension with Iran by suggesting a potential reason for U.S. attack against Iran. Similarly, the pressure for targeting the Quds Force in Iraq late last year came from senior officials in the Bush administration who wished to demonstrate U.S. resolve to confront Iran, according to an in-depth account of the origins of the plan by the Washington Post's Dafna Linzer published Feb. 26. That policy was regarded with "skepticism" by the intelligence community, the State Department, and the Defense Department when it was proposed, Linzer wrote, because of the fear it would contribute to an escalation conflict with Iran. "This has little to do with Iraq," a senior intelligence officer told Linzer. "It's all about pushing Iran's buttons. It's purely political." (Inter Press Service) by Gareth PorterIn his prepared statement to the U.S. House Foreign Affairs and Armed Services committees last week, Gen. David Petraeus claimed that Iran is using the Quds Force to turn Shi'ite militias into a "Hezbollah-like force" to "fight a proxy war against the Iraqi state and coalition forces in Iraq."But Petraeus then shattered that carefully constructed argument by volunteering in answering a question that the Quds Force, an elite unit of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, had essentially left Iraq. "The Quds force itself, we believe, by and large those individuals have been pulled out of the country as have the Lebanese Hezbollah trainers that were being used to augment that activity…." Petraeus' contradictory statements on the Quds force are emblematic of an administration propaganda line that has essentially fallen apart because it was so obviously out of line with reality. Nine months after the George W. Bush administration declared that it was going to go after Iranian agents in Iraq who were threatening U.S. troops, the U.S. military still has not produced any evidence that the Quds Force operatives in Iraq were engaged in assisting the militias fighting against U.S. troops. The U.S. military command in Iraq has failed to capture a single Quds Force member whom it could link to the Shi'ite militias. And the evidence that has emerged over the past nine months about Shi'ite militias and their relationship to Iran suggests that Quds force personnel in Iraq never had the mission of assisting Shi'ite militias, as claimed by the Bush administration. It appears that an increasing number of military intelligence officers in Iraq have concluded that the Quds force has been steering clear of working directly with Shi'ite militias attacking U.S. troops, in order to avoid giving the Bush administration a pretext for aggression against Iranian territory. In a military briefing presented in Baghdad on Feb. 11, an unnamed U.S. official stated flatly that weapons were being smuggled into the country by the Quds Force, but the briefers failed to present any specific evidence to back up the assertion. Since that briefing, the U.S. military command has captured the alleged deputy head and key logistical officer of the main Iraqi EFP, or armor-penetrating explosives, network and a Hezbollah operative who was a liaison with the network, as well as a number of what it called "suspected members" or "suspected leaders" of a "secret cell terrorist network known for facilitating the transport of and EFPs from Iran to Iraq." But the interrogations of these detainees have not led to the capture of a single Iranian official. Nor has the military been able to identify a link between any Iraqi militia member and any Iranian official. On July 6, Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, commander of U.S. operations south of Baghdad, told reporters his troops had not captured "anybody that we can tie to Iran." Even more devastating to the "proxy war" line, Lynch's spokesperson, Alayne Conway, acknowledged on Aug. 19 that they had not caught anyone supplying arms from Iran to the Iraqi Shi'ite militias. There has long been some evidence, however, of a link between Shi'ite networks for procuring EFPs and other arms and Lebanese Hezbollah. The leader of a Madhi Army group that was carrying out attacks against British forces, Ahmad Jawwad al-Fartusi, who was arrested in September 2005, had lived in Lebanon for several years and was known to have personal contact with Hezbollah, according to a March 27 New York Times report. Along with evidence of a growing relationship between Hezbollah and Moqtada al-Sadr's army, which has now culminated in a Sadr office in Beirut, such past links between the two Shi'ite groups suggest that Hezbollah's assistance to the Shi'ites need not have been ordered by Tehran. U.S. and British officials have acknowledged in the past that the EFP technology being used in Iraq might have entered Iraq from Hezbollah in Lebanon rather than from Iran. The premise that the Quds Force agents in Iraq were involved in training Shi'ites to carry out operations against U.S. troops was shattered when Lynch told reporters Aug. 19 that the Iranians were "facilitating the training of Shi'ite extremists" militiamen in Iraq. That clearly implied that the training was being done by Hezbollah. The Washington Post and other news outlets quoted Lynch's statement but nevertheless reported that Lynch had charged that Iranians were doing the training. A spokesperson for Lynch confirmed to IPS that Lynch had not made any allegation about Iranians training Shi'ites in Iraq. Petraeus dealt the final blow to the notion of a Quds Force training role when he noted that the Hezbollah trainers had also been withdrawn from the country. The briefing by U.S. military spokesman Brig. Gen. Kevin Bergner on July 2 was aimed primarily at advancing the theme that Hezbollah acts in Iraq as a "proxy" for Iran. But the real significance of the briefing – unreported in the news media – was the first suggestion by a U.S. official that the Quds Force personnel in Iraq might have avoided direct contacts with Shi'ite militias altogether. Asked by a journalist why the Quds Force would "subcontract" the training of Shi'ite militias to Hezbollah, Bergner answered that Hezbollah could "do things that perhaps they didn't want to have to do themselves in terms of interacting directly with special groups." Without mentioning any pullout of Quds force personnel, spokesperson Conway said on Aug. 19 that Gen. Lynch estimated that there were 50 Quds Force agents in his entire area of responsibility in southern Iraq. Four days later Lynch clarified that estimate, telling reporters that 30 of those estimated 50 agents were "surrogates" – presumably referring to Hezbollah operatives engaged in training Shi'ites in southern Iraq. Although it was buried in the Aug. 19 story inaccurately reporting Lynch's statement about training in Iraq, Megan Greenwell of the Washington Post reported the much more significant fact that "some military intelligence analysts have concluded there is no concrete evidence" linking the Quds Force in Iraq with the Shi'ite militias. The charge that Iran was using the Quds Force to fight a proxy war was an effort to raise tension with Iran by suggesting a potential reason for U.S. attack against Iran. Similarly, the pressure for targeting the Quds Force in Iraq late last year came from senior officials in the Bush administration who wished to demonstrate U.S. resolve to confront Iran, according to an in-depth account of the origins of the plan by the Washington Post's Dafna Linzer published Feb. 26. That policy was regarded with "skepticism" by the intelligence community, the State Department, and the Defense Department when it was proposed, Linzer wrote, because of the fear it would contribute to an escalation conflict with Iran. "This has little to do with Iraq," a senior intelligence officer told Linzer. "It's all about pushing Iran's buttons. It's purely political." (Inter Press Service)

[27] News from Absurdistan - How To Wag The Dog

Due to pressing time constraints, I am posting this instead of a comment: It is worth keeping track of how the West is allowing itself to be dragged further and further into an unjust and horrific war of aggression.

I dedicate the below especially to a German audience that should but does not feel reminded of the greatest warmonger of German history. We Germans are used to news about an ever widening theatre of war. Nothing special to us. Does it affect our supper, or anything else we seriously care for?

My gut feeling is that unprecedented "blow back" in response to Western meddling and aggression will come from Pakistan. I do not know when, but it will affect our supper.

Hersh: Bush’s Case For Hitting Iran Has ‘Shifted,’ Now Focused On ‘Surgical Strikes’ As Way To ‘Sell’ It

Seymour Hersh, The New Yorker’s Pulitzer-Prize winning investigative journalist, writes in a new article entitled “Shifting Targets” that there has been “a significant increase in the tempo of attack planning” for war with Iran inside the Bush administration.

Most significantly, Hersh — who has been warning for months that the administration is seriously plotting for war with Iran — reports the administration has switched its rationale for war. The focus has shifted from a broad bombing attack against Iran’s nuclear facilities to “surgical” strikes again Revolutionary Guard Corps facilities in Tehran and elsewhere.

On CNN’s Late Edition this morning, Hersh said the administration has adopted what it views as a rationale that can win over the public and international allies, while accomplishing its key objective of initiating a military conflict:

You can sell [this approach]. It’s more logical. You can say to people, the American people, we’re only hitting those people that we think are trying to hit our boys and the coalition forces. And so that seems to be more sensible. Because the White House thinks they can actually pitch this, this would actually work. In other words, you can do a bombing and not have the world scream at us and also get the British on board.

Watch it:

In his article, Hersh writes, “This summer, the White House, pushed by the office of Vice-President Dick Cheney, requested that the Joint Chiefs of Staff redraw long-standing plans for a possible attack on Iran,” emphasizing the shift in rationale. The “shifting emphasis” is “gathering support among generals and admirals in the Pentagon.”

Hersh also reveals:

During a secure videoconference that took place early this summer, the President told Ryan Crocker, the U.S. Ambassador to Iraq, that he was thinking of hitting Iranian targets across the border and that the British “were on board.” At that point, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice interjected that there was a need to proceed carefully, because of the ongoing diplomatic track. Bush ended by instructing Crocker to tell Iran to stop interfering in Iraq or it would face American retribution.

The White House has even prepared a “Clinton did it too” defense for attacking Iran, according to Hersh. “If Democrats objected, the Administration could say, “Bill Clinton did the same thing; he conducted limited strikes in Afghanistan, the Sudan, and in Baghdad to protect American lives.”

[26] News from Absurdistan - Our Export Hit - Western-Style, Anti-Constitutional Democracy - Betraying the People Right, Left and Centre

This is from Stan Goff - and do watch his video which I have inserted at the end of this post:

In 2006, I recommended an across the board vote for Democrats. I did so in the sincere belief that the Democrats would be elected based on growing domestic opposition to the criminal military occupation of Iraq, and that those same Democrats would then disappoint all who voted on the issue of the war by backtracking, dissembling, and eventually endorsing this purely imperial adventure.

The idea was to expose the Democrats who were talking left and acting right, as usual, and hiding behind minority status as an excuse to do NOTHING to stop the slaughter in Iraq.

The Democratic Party, led by Big Ag, Big Pharma, Big Weapons, Big Insurance, and Wall Street (consolidated in the Democratic Leadership Council), did not disappoint my prognostications, and they did disappoint the voters who invested anti-imperial aspirations in the DP.

Now the Big Lie of the Democrats is the absence of the "veto-proof majority," a new low in the rationalization of both cowardice and opportunism. Since he said it so directly and clearly, I will quote Med School Professor Dr. John Walsh in his letter to the times... (kudos to Counterpunch for posting this letter):

From: John Walsh
Date: September 16, 2007 9:49:05 AM EDT
To: letters@nytimes.com
Subject: Frank Rich's column

To the editor:

In an otherwise excellent column today (9/16/2007) Frank Rich perpetuates the myth that the Democrats do not have the power to end the war because of an inevitable veto from Bush.

Nothing could be farther from the truth. The war demands funding, and a new supplemental funding will soon appear before Congress. That can be filibustered in the Senate, with only the 41 votes or abstentions required to sustain a filibuster. At that moment the legislation is dead. There is nothing to veto so Bush must come back with an acceptable bill. At the same time the Democrats could submit legislation to bring the occupying troops home quickly and safely. Let Bush veto that if he dares. There is already a national petition drive for this at FilibusterForPeace.org and every Senator has received a copy of it.

In the House one person Nancy Pelosi can accomplish the same thing. She can simply refuse to bring Bush's supplemental requests to the floor. In this she has veto power as surely as the president does.

So let us not hear from the Democrats that they do not have the power to end the war. Clearly they do. One must conclude that the Democrats support it. They pay for it and so they own it.

Sincerely,

John V. Walsh, MD
Professor of Physiology
University of Massachusetts Medical School
john.walsh@umassmed.edu

And for those who missed it, here is the 3 1/2 minute AV on the conquest of Iraq... and others.

[25] News from Absurdistan - Public Opinion Inundated with False Theories and Lies - Two More Examples

We are not running out of oil, not even under the discredited assumption of the fossil origin of oil. Incidentally, I do disagree with the author of the first of the two below articles on his simplistic claim that Big Oil is capable of dictating the price of oil. Oil is fungible, with a large number of players in a pretty active global market, so that corporations involved in the industry just do not have the clout to dominate the market in the various ways that they are incessantly and falsely accused of. Manipulations of the magnitude suggested by Engdahl, if feasible at all, are the prerogative of governments rather than of companies, however big. The latter simply lack the coercive power that is the exclusive privilege of runaway government - they cannot rob you of your money or force you in other ways as the government does routinely, thoroughly and with perfect impunity. And most people, at least in Germany, basically like it - so much so that they do not notice my fundamental point about the gigantic monopoly of coercion vested in government alone, notwithstanding their dissatisfaction with this aspect of it or another.

I will not cease to reiterate this all-important point: The many big crimes - from the Great Depression to the World Wars - habitually laid on the door step of "capitalism", i.e. vicious entrepreneurs and corporations, are in actual fact all the result of runaway government.

Our political system invites corporations and anyone else willing and capable of a less than negligible lobbying presence to help work out the crimes and get a reward for it. But the ultimate culprit are we, with our admission or active support of the varying kinds of totalitarianism worshipped by the majority of us.

Only comprehension of liberty and the political structure required to protect it can make us break out of the realm of paternalistic evil.

As for the second article below: Is it not striking that "men of science" such as the President of Columbia University are unguardedly pandering to special interests instead of caring for the facts concerning such a vital question as who it is that we are trying to wage war against? Our political system encompasses every part of society, leaving no branch of it depoliticised (free from corrupt conduct).

Under these conditions, honesty, integrity and unfailing commitment to truthfulness in private and public discourse are likely to be the exception rather than the rule.

People learn to live by different dispositions.

My criticism of the political "culture" of the West is an outcry against a system that destroys the incentives to be honest and conditions people to be disingenuous.

Confessions of an ‘ex’ Peak Oil believer

by F. William Engdahl

The good news is that panic scenarios about the world running out of oil anytime soon are wrong. The bad news is that the price of oil is going to continue to rise. Peak Oil is not our problem. Politics is. Big Oil wants to sustain high oil prices. Dick Cheney and friends are all too willing to assist.

On a personal note, I’ve researched questions of petroleum, since the first oil shocks of the 1970’s. I was intrigued in 2003 with something called Peak Oil theory. It seemed to explain the otherwise inexplicable decision by Washington to risk all in a military move on Iraq.

Peak Oil advocates, led by former BP geologist Colin Campbell, and Texas banker Matt Simmons, argued that the world faced a new crisis, an end to cheap oil, or Absolute Peak Oil, perhaps by 2012, perhaps by 2007. Oil was supposedly on its last drops. They pointed to our soaring gasoline and oil prices, to the declines in output of North Sea and Alaska and other fields as proof they were right.

According to Campbell, the fact that no new North Sea-size fields had been discovered since the North Sea in the late 1960’s was proof. He reportedly managed to convince the International Energy Agency and the Swedish government. That, however, does not prove him correct.

Intellectual fossils?

The Peak Oil school rests its theory on conventional Western geology textbooks, most by American or British geologists, which claim oil is a ‘fossil fuel,’ a biological residue or detritus of either fossilized dinosaur remains or perhaps algae, hence a product in finite supply. Biological origin is central to Peak Oil theory, used to explain why oil is only found in certain parts of the world where it was geologically trapped millions of years ago. That would mean that, say, dead dinosaur remains became compressed and over tens of millions of years fossilized and trapped in underground reservoirs perhaps 4-6,000 feet below the surface of the earth. In rare cases, so goes the theory, huge amounts of biological matter should have been trapped in rock formations in the shallower ocean offshore as in the Gulf of Mexico or North Sea or Gulf of Guinea. Geology should be only about figuring out where these pockets in the layers of the earth, called reservoirs, lie within certain sedimentary basins.

An entirely alternative theory of oil formation has existed since the early 1950’s in Russia, almost unknown to the West. It claims conventional American biological origins theory is an unscientific absurdity that is un-provable. They point to the fact that western geologists have repeatedly predicted finite oil over the past century, only to then find more, lots more.

Not only has this alternative explanation of the origins of oil and gas existed in theory. The emergence of Russia and prior of the USSR as the world’s largest oil producer and natural gas producer has been based on the application of the theory in practice. This has geopolitical consequences of staggering magnitude.

Necessity: the mother of invention

In the 1950’s the Soviet Union faced ‘Iron Curtain’ isolation from the West. The Cold War was in high gear. Russia had little oil to fuel its economy. Finding sufficient oil indigenously was a national security priority of the highest order.

Scientists at the Institute of the Physics of the Earth of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Geological Sciences of the Ukraine Academy of Sciences began a fundamental inquiry in the late 1940’s: where does oil come from?

In 1956, Prof. Vladimir Porfir’yev announced their conclusions: ‘Crude oil and natural petroleum gas have no intrinsic connection with biological matter originating near the surface of the earth. They are primordial materials which have been erupted from great depths.’ The Soviet geologists had turned Western orthodox geology on its head. They called their theory of oil origin the ‘a-biotic’ theory—non-biological—to distinguish from the Western biological theory of origins.

If they were right, oil supply on earth would be limited only by the amount of organic hydrocarbon constituents present deep in the earth at the time of the earth’s formation. Availability of oil would depend only on technology to drill ultra-deep wells and explore into the earth’s inner regions. They also realized old fields could be revived to continue producing, so called self-replentishing fields. They argued that oil is formed deep in the earth, formed in conditions of very high temperature and very high pressure, like that required for diamonds to form. ‘Oil is a primordial material of deep origin which is transported at high pressure via ‘cold’ eruptive processes into the crust of the earth,’ Porfir’yev stated. His team dismissed the idea that oil is biological residue of plant and animal fossil remains as a hoax designed to perpetuate the myth of limited supply.

Defying conventional geology

That radically different Russian and Ukrainian scientific approach to the discovery of oil allowed the USSR to develop huge gas and oil discoveries in regions previously judged unsuitable, according to Western geological exploration theories, for presence of oil. The new petroleum theory was used in the early 1990’s, well after the dissolution of the USSR, to drill for oil and gas in a region believed for more than forty-five years, to be geologically barren—the Dnieper-Donets Basin in the region between Russia and Ukraine.

Following their a-biotic or non-fossil theory of the deep origins of petroleum, the Russian and Ukrainian petroleum geophysicists and chemists began with a detailed analysis of the tectonic history and geological structure of the crystalline basement of the Dnieper-Donets Basin. After a tectonic and deep structural analysis of the area, they made geophysical and geochemical investigations.

A total of sixty one wells were drilled, of which thirty seven were commercially productive, an extremely impressive exploration success rate of almost sixty percent. The size of the field discovered compared with the North Slope of Alaska. By contrast, US wildcat drilling was considered successful with a ten percent success rate. Nine of ten wells are typically “dry holes.”

That Russian geophysics experience in finding oil and gas was tightly wrapped in the usual Soviet veil of state security during the Cold War era, and went largely unknown to Western geophysicists, who continued to teach fossil origins and, hence, the severe physical limits of petroleum. Slowly it begin to dawn on some strategists in and around the Pentagon well after the 2003 Iraq war, that the Russian geophysicists might be on to something of profound strategic importance.

If Russia had the scientific know-how and Western geology not, Russia possessed a strategic trump card of staggering geopolitical import. It was not surprising that Washington would go about erecting a “wall of steel”—a network of military bases and ballistic anti-missile shields around Russia, to cut her pipeline and port links to western Europe, China and the rest of Eurasia. Halford Mackinder’s worst nightmare--a cooperative convergence of mutual interests of the major states of Eurasia, born of necessity and need for oil to fuel economic growth--was emerging. Ironically, it was the blatant US grab for the vast oil riches of Iraq and, potentially, of Iran, that catalyzed closer cooperation between traditional Eurasian foes, China and Russia, and a growing realization in western Europe that their options too were narrowing.

The Peak King

Peak Oil theory is based on a 1956 paper done by the late Marion King Hubbert, a Texas geologist working for Shell Oil. He argued that oil wells produced in a bell curve manner, and once their “peak” was hit, inevitable decline followed. He predicted the United States oil production would peak in 1970. A modest man, he named the production curve he invented, Hubbert’s Curve, and the peak as Hubbert’s Peak. When US oil output began to decline in around 1970 Hubbert gained a certain fame.

The only problem was, it peaked not because of resource depletion in the US fields. It “peaked” because Shell, Mobil, Texaco and the other partners of Saudi Aramco were flooding the US market with dirt cheap Middle East imports, tariff free, at prices so low California and many Texas domestic producers could not compete and were forced to shut their wells in.

Vietnam success

While the American oil multinationals were busy controlling the easily accessible large fields of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iran and other areas of cheap, abundant oil during the 1960’s, the Russians were busy testing their alternative theory. They began drilling in a supposedly barren region of Siberia. There they developed eleven major oil fields and one Giant field based on their deep ‘a-biotic’ geological estimates. They drilled into crystalline basement rock and hit black gold of a scale comparable to the Alaska North Slope.

They then went to Vietnam in the 1980s and offered to finance drilling costs to show that their new geological theory worked. The Russian company Petrosov drilled Vietnam’s White Tiger oilfield offshore into basalt rock some 17,000 feet down and extracted 6,000 barrels a day of oil to feed the energy-starved Vietnam economy. In the USSR, a-biotic-trained Russian geologists perfected their knowledge and the USSR emerged as the world’s largest oil producer by the mid-1980’s. Few in the West understood why, or bothered to ask.

Dr. J. F. Kenney is one of the only Western geophysicists who has taught and worked in Russia, studying under Vladilen Krayushkin, who developed the huge Dnieper-Donets Basin. Kenney told me in a recent interview that “alone to have produced the amount of oil to date that (Saudi Arabia’s) Ghawar field has produced would have required a cube of fossilized dinosaur detritus, assuming 100% conversion efficiency, measuring 19 miles deep, wide and high.” In short, an absurdity.

Western geologists do not bother to offer hard scientific proof of fossil origins. They merely assert it as a holy truth. The Russians have produced volumes of scientific papers, most in Russian. The dominant Western journals have no interest in publishing such a revolutionary view. Careers, entire academic professions are at stake after all.

Closing the door

The 2003 arrest of Russian Mikhail Khodorkovsky, of Yukos Oil, took place just before he could sell a dominant stake in Yukos to ExxonMobil after Khodorkovsky had a private meeting with Dick Cheney. Had Exxon got the stake they would have got control of the world’s largest resource of geologists and engineers trained in the a-biotic techniques of deep drilling.

Since 2003 Russian scientific sharing of their knowledge has markedly lessened. Offers in the early 1990’s to share their knowledge with US and other oil geophysicists were met with cold rejection according to American geophysicists involved.

Why then the high-risk war to control Iraq? For a century US and allied Western oil giants have controlled world oil via control of Saudi Arabia or Kuwait or Nigeria. Today, as many giant fields are declining, the companies see the state-controlled oilfields of Iraq and Iran as the largest remaining base of cheap, easy oil. With the huge demand for oil from China and now India, it becomes a geopolitical imperative for the United States to take direct, military control of those Middle East reserves as fast as possible. Vice President Dick Cheney, came to the job from Halliburton Corp., the world’s largest oil geophysical services company. The only potential threat to that US control of oil just happens to lie inside Russia and with the now-state-controlled Russian energy giants. Hmmmm.

According to Kenney the Russian geophysicists used the theories of the brilliant German scientist Alfred Wegener fully 30 years before the Western geologists “discovered” Wegener in the 1960’s. In 1915 Wegener published the seminal text, The Origin of Continents and Oceans, which suggested an original unified landmass or “pangaea” more than 200 million years ago which separated into present Continents by what he called Continental Drift.

Up to the 1960’s supposed US scientists such as Dr Frank Press, White House science advisor referred to Wegener as “lunatic.” Geologists at the end of the 1960’s were forced to eat their words as Wegener offered the only interpretation that allowed them to discover the vast oil resources of the North Sea. Perhaps in some decades Western geologists will rethink their mythology of fossil origins and realize what the Russians have known since the 1950’s. In the meantime Moscow holds a massive energy trump card.

And from:

http://www.antiwar.com/reese/?articleid=11686

US Politicians, Not Ahmadinejad, Have Blood on Their Hands

by Charley Reese

Ernest Hemingway explained the problem many years ago. The first thing politicians do to hide their mismanagement, he said, is inflate the currency; the second thing they do is go to war.

Our currency has been inflated and we are at war. The demonization of the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, which you saw take place in New York City and on American television, is just the first step in preparing the country for a third war.

The president of Columbia, Lee Bollinger, disgraced himself. Instead of introducing his invited guest speaker, he launched a tirade of abuse and insults. Obviously, he was in hot water with some of Columbia's big donors for inviting Ahmadinejad and chose that petty, shabby way of trying to ingratiate himself to the school's angry sugar daddies. All Bollinger succeeded in doing was making Ahmadinejad look good in comparison with him.

Whether you agree with Iran's president or not, he's the wrong guy to try to demonize. First of all, he is not a dictator. He is an elected president with very little power. He has to get past the legislature, and the real power rests with the senior cleric, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Khamenei controls foreign policy and is commander in chief of all of Iran's armed forces. The legislature rejected nearly all of Ahmadinejad's recommendations for ministers. When he tried to allow women to attend soccer games, the clerics overruled him.

The claims that Ahmadinejad denies the Holocaust and has called for the destruction of Israel are false. He has called for regime change, which is something American politicians do every time they find a country whose policies they disagree with. Regime change is a change of government, not genocide. As for the Holocaust, he said it raised two questions: Why put people in prison who question details of the official version, which is what several European countries do. Why should the Palestinians be made to pay for it? Both are good questions.

How American politicians can call Iran a dangerous country and claim that it poses a threat to the U.S. is a mystery. On second thought, it is not a mystery. It just tells you that the politicians think you and I are so stupid that we will fall for the exact same parade of lies and exaggerations that was used to justify the war against Iraq.

Think for yourself. Iran has no nuclear weapons, and its military is designed for defense. It has no offensive capability – no air force, no navy to speak of. Israel, on the other hand, is usually ranked as the fifth most powerful military state on the planet. It has more than 200 nuclear weapons and a superb air force.

Iran has said it has no desire to attack Israel or any other country. It has said its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes and that it has no desire for a nuclear weapon. The head cleric has issued a fatwa against nuclear weapons. And there is not one shred of evidence that Iran is pursuing a nuclear weapon.

Just remember the lies told to you before Iraq: that Saddam Hussein was pursuing a nuclear weapon; that he had enormous stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons. The only thing he really had was oil. That's why we went to war, and that's why the administration wants to go to war with Iran.

I've heard some politicians say that Ahmadinejad has "blood on his hands." Well, our $40 billion worth of intelligence cannot even determine if he was involved in the taking of the American embassy back in 1979. As for blood, American politicians have far more Iranian blood on their hands. We overthrew Iran's democratic government and installed the Shah and his secret police. We sided with and assisted Saddam Hussein when he invaded Iran. Tens of thousands of Iranians are dead because of America's foreign policy.

We truly have a corrupt and incompetent government in Washington.

Ron Paul - An Introduction

[24] News from Absurdistan - The Onion of Idiocy and More Slick Stuff...

...on the oil issue that demonstrates how badly controlled governments, such as the US administration, wage wars based on greedy incompetence, and inevitably fulfil their spoiling destination by "running" things, i.e. applying the bureaucratic approach any government gravitates towards that sees itself as a planning centre rather than as a humble facilitator of free individuals' endeavours to look after themselves and heed another man's liberty.

To the extent that the Iraq war was about oil, the underlying imperialist hankering relied on a simplistic robbery scheme, whose obtuseness is in large measure due to an egregious ignorance of the fact that there is - fortunately - a global oil market that can only be abolished by a feat the USA are not remotely capable of: total world domination.

The decision to attack Iraq can be explained only in terms of a multi layered mindset, an onion of idiocy, whose several skins share one quality: deadly simple-mindedness.

Oil is something one can easily redistribute by force from the good to the bad; the bad ones are a monolithic entity, namely a terrorist group called Al Qa'ida (or formerly a suicidal dictator bent on nuking America or any other slapstick bogeyman) with the prowess of a super-power and, thus, the quality of an opponent convenient to the mentality and the combat arsenal of a militarism no longer disciplined by the equilibrating circumstances of the Cold War.

All in all, an extreme instance of a government's natural disposition to brutally simplify matters to a level of "complexity" so sorry that it feels it can handle it.

The upshot of runaway government - the political ideal of the West - is a mighty machinery producing in superabundance the very trait that its media sycophants attach (amongst other auxiliary lies like the possession of WMD) to feeble "enemies" - such as Iran, recently - to make them look formidable enough to justify their annihilation: compulsive irrationality.



Greenspan's Oil Claim in Context
by Dilip Hiro and Tom Engelhardt
TomDispatch

Before the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, discussion of Iraqi oil was largely taboo in the American mainstream, while the "No Blood for Oil" signs that dotted antiwar demonstrations were generally derisively dismissed as too simpleminded for serious debate. American officials rarely even mentioned the word "oil" in the same sentence with "Iraq." When President Bush referred to Iraqi oil, he spoke only of preserving that country's "patrimony" for its people, a sentiment he and Great Britain's Prime Minister Tony Blair emphasized in a statement they issued that lacked either the words "oil" or "energy" just as Baghdad fell: "We reaffirm our commitment to protect Iraq's natural resources, as the patrimony of the people of Iraq, which should be used only for their benefit."

That May, not long after the president declared "major combat" at an end in Iraq, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz did point out the obvious – that Iraq was a country that "floats on a sea of oil." He also told a congressional panel: "The oil revenue of that country could bring between 50 and 100 billion dollars over the course of the next two or three years. We're dealing with a country that could really finance its own reconstruction, and relatively soon."

But his relatively obscure comments, as well as his oil-based miscalculations, passed largely unnoticed in the mainstream. Had Iraq then produced a significant percentage of the globe's toys rather than possessing the planet's third largest oil reserves, the prewar media would undoubtedly have been chock-a-block full of worried discussions about our children and the coming video drought; on the other hand, that there might have been any significant connections between the motivations of top administration officials planning an invasion and global oil flows or the garrisoning of the oil heartlands of the planet was clearly a laughable thought. It didn't matter that our vice president, when the CEO of a major energy firm, had worried quite publicly about global energy supplies, that our president had failed in the oil business, and that our national security adviser had once had a Chevron double-hulled oil tanker, the Condoleezza Rice, named in her honor. Now, it turns out that, among the simpleminded was former Federal Reserve head Alan Greenspan.

Middle Eastern expert Dilip Hiro, whose newest book Blood of the Earth: The Battle for the World's Vanishing Oil Resources, focuses on oil and blood as well as recent the geopolitics of Iraqi oil (pp. 137-148), considers Greenspan's recent oil statement in the context of the historical record. Tom

How the Bush Administration's Iraqi Oil Grab Went Awry

by Dilip Hiro

Here is the sentence in The Age of Turbulence, the 531-page memoir of former Federal Reserve chief Alan Greenspan, that caused so much turbulence in Washington last week: "I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil." Honest and accurate, it had the resonance of the Bill Clinton's election campaign mantra, "It's the economy, stupid." But, finding himself the target of a White House attack – an administration spokesman labeled his comment, "Georgetown cocktail party analysis" – Greenspan backtracked under cover of verbose elaboration. None of this, however, made an iota of difference to the facts on the ground.

Here is a prosecutor's brief for the position that "the Iraq War is largely about oil":

The primary evidence indicating that the Bush administration coveted Iraqi oil from the start comes from two diverse but impeccably reliable sources: Paul O'Neill, the Treasury Secretary (2001-2003) under President George W. Bush; and Falah Al Jibury, a well-connected Iraqi-American oil consultant, who had acted as President Ronald Reagan's "back channel" to Iraqi President Saddam Hussein during the Iraq-Iran War of 1980-88. The secondary evidence is from the material that can be found in such publications as the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.

According to O'Neill's memoirs, The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O'Neill, written by journalist Ron Suskind and published in 2004, the top item on the agenda of the National Security Council's first meeting after Bush entered the Oval Office was Iraq. That was Jan. 30, 2001, more than seven months before the 9/11 attacks. The next National Security Council (NSC) meeting on Feb. 1 was devoted exclusively to Iraq.

Advocating "going after Saddam" during the Jan. 30 meeting, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said, according to O'Neill, "Imagine what the region would look like without Saddam and with a regime that's aligned with U.S. interests. It would change everything in the region and beyond. It would demonstrate what U.S. policy is all about." He then discussed post-Saddam Iraq – the Kurds in the north, the oil fields, and the reconstruction of the country's economy. (Suskind, p. 85)

Among the relevant documents later sent to NSC members, including O'Neill, was one prepared by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). It had already mapped Iraq's oil fields and exploration areas, and listed American corporations likely to be interested in participating in Iraq's petroleum industry.

Another DIA document in the package, entitled "Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield Contracts," listed companies from 30 countries – France, Germany, Russia, and Britain, among others – their specialties and bidding histories. The attached maps pinpointed "super-giant oil field," "other oil field," and "earmarked for production sharing," and divided the basically undeveloped but oil-rich southwest of Iraq into nine blocks, indicating promising areas for future exploration. (Suskind, p. 96)

According to high-flying oil insider Falah Al Jibury, the Bush administration began making plans for Iraq's oil industry "within weeks" of Bush taking office in January 2001. In an interview with the BBC's Newsnight program, which aired on March 17, 2005, he referred to his participation in secret meetings in California, Washington, and the Middle East, where, among other things, he interviewed possible successors to Saddam Hussein.

By January 2003, a plan for Iraqi oil crafted by the State Department and oil majors emerged under the guidance of Amy Myers Jaffe of the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy at Rice University. It recommended maintaining the state-owned Iraq National Oil Company, whose origins dated back to 1961 – but open it up to foreign investment after an initial period in which U.S.-approved Iraqi managers would supervise the rehabilitation of the war-damaged oil infrastructure. The existence of this group would come to light in a report by the Wall Street Journal on March 3, 2003.

Unknown to the architects of this scheme, according to the same BBC Newsnight report, the Pentagon's planners, apparently influenced by powerful neocons in and out of the administration, had devised their own super-secret plan. It involved the sale of all Iraqi oil fields to private companies with a view to increasing output well above the quota set by the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) for Iraq in order to weaken, and then destroy, OPEC.

Secondary Evidence

On Oct. 11, 2002 the New York Times reported that the Pentagon already had plans to occupy and control Iraq's oilfields. The next day the Economist described how Americans in the know had dubbed the waterway demarcating the southern borders of Iraq and Iran "Klondike on the Shatt al-Arab," while Ahmed Chalabi, head of the U.S.-funded Iraqi National Congress and a neocon favorite, had already delivered this message: "American companies will have a big shot at Iraqi oil – if he gets to run the show."

On Oct. 30, Oil and Gas International revealed that the Bush administration wanted a working group of 12 to 20 people to (a) recommend ways to rehabilitate the Iraqi oil industry "in order to increase oil exports to partially pay for a possible U.S. military occupation government," (b) consider Iraq's continued membership of OPEC, and (c) consider whether to honor contracts Saddam Hussein had granted to non-American oil companies.

By late October 2002, columnist Maureen Dowd of the New York Times would later reveal, Halliburton, the energy services company previously headed by Vice President Dick Cheney, had prepared a confidential 500-page document on how to handle Iraq's oil industry after an invasion and occupation of Iraq. This was, commented Dowd, "a plan [Halliburton] wrote several months before the invasion of Iraq, and before it got a no-bid contract to implement the plan (and overbill the U.S.)." She also pointed out that a Times' request for a copy of the plan evinced a distinct lack of response from the Pentagon.

In public, of course, the Bush administration built its case for an invasion of Iraq without referring to that country's oil or the fact that it had the third largest reserves of petroleum in the world. But what happened out of sight was another matter. At a secret NSC briefing for the president on February 24, 2003, entitled, "Planning for the Iraqi Petroleum Infrastructure," a State Department economist, Pamela Quanrud, told Bush that it would cost $7-8 billion to rebuild the oil infrastructure, if Saddam decided to blow up his country's oil wells, according to Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward in his 2004 book, Plan of Attack (pp. 322-323). Quanrud was evidently a member of the State Department group chaired by Amy Myers Jaffe.

When the Anglo-American troops invaded on March 20, 2003, they expected to see oil wells ablaze. Saddam Hussein proved them wrong. Being a staunch nationalist, he evidently did not want to go down in history as the man who damaged Iraq's most precious natural resource.

On entering Baghdad on April 9, the American troops stood by as looters burned and ransacked public buildings, including government ministries – except for the Oil Ministry, which they guarded diligently. Within the next few days, at a secret meeting in London, the Pentagon's scheme of the sale of all Iraqi oil fields got a go-ahead in principle.

The Bush administration's assertions that oil was not a prime reason for invading Iraq did not fool Iraqis though. A July 2003 poll of Baghdad residents – who represented a quarter of the Iraqi national population – by the London Spectator showed that while 23 percent believed the reason for the Anglo-American war on Iraq was "to liberate us from dictatorship," twice as many responded, "to get oil." (Cited in Dilip Hiro, Secrets and Lies: Operation "Iraqi Freedom" and After, p. 398.)

As Iraq's principal occupier, the Bush White House made no secret of its plans to quickly dismantle that country's strong public sector. When the first American proconsul, retired Gen. Jay Garner, focused on holding local elections rather than privatizing the country's economic structure, he was promptly sacked.

Hurdles to Oil Privatization Prove Impassable

Garner's successor, L. Paul Bremer III, found himself dealing with Philip Carroll – former chief executive officer of the American operations of (Anglo-Dutch) Royal Dutch Shell in Houston – appointed by Washington as the Iraqi oil industry's supreme boss. Carroll decided not to tinker with the industry's ownership and told Bremer so. "There was to be no privatization of Iraqi oil resources or facilities while I was involved," Carroll said in an interview with the BBC's Newsnight program on March 17, 2005.

This was, however, but a partial explanation for why Bremer excluded the oil industry when issuing Order 39 in September 2003 privatizing nearly 200 Iraqi public sector companies and opening them up to 100 percent foreign ownership. The Bush White House had also realized by then that denationalizing the oil industry would be a blatant violation of the Geneva Conventions which bar an occupying power from altering the fundamental structure of the occupied territory's economy.

There was, as well, the vexatious problem of sorting out the 30 major oil development contracts Saddam's regime had signed with companies based in Canada, China, France, India, Italy, Russia, Spain, and Vietnam. The key unresolved issue was whether these firms had signed contracts with the government of Saddam Hussein, which no longer existed, or with the Republic of Iraq which remained intact.

Perhaps more important was the stand taken by Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the senior Shi'ite cleric in the country and a figure whom the occupying Americans were keen not to alienate. He made no secret of his disapproval of the wholesale privatization of Iraq's major companies. As for the minerals – oil being the most precious – Sistani declared that they belonged to the "community," meaning the state. As a religious decree issued by a grand ayatollah, his statement carried immense weight.

Even more effective was the violent reaction of the industry's employees to the rumors of privatization. In his Newsnight interview Jibury said, "We saw an increase in the bombing of oil facilities and pipelines built on the premise that privatization is coming."

In the immediate aftermath of the invasion, much equipment was looted from pipelines, pumping stations, and other oil facilities. By August 2003, four months after American troops entered Baghdad, oil output had only inched up to 1.2 million barrels per day, about two-fifths of the pre-invasion level. The forecasts (or dreams) of American planners' that oil production would jump to 6 million barrels per day by 2010 and easily fund the occupation and reconstruction of the country, were now seen for what they were – part of the hype disseminated privately by American neocons to sell the idea of invading Iraq to the public.

With the insurgency taking off, attacks on oil pipelines and pumping stations averaged two a week during the second half of 2003. The pipeline connecting a major northern oil field near Kirkuk – with an export capacity of 550,000-700,000 barrels per day – to the Turkish port of Ceyhan became inoperative. Soon, the only oil being exported was from fields in the less disturbed, predominately Shi'ite south of Iraq.

In September 2003, President Bush approached Congress for $2.1 billion to safeguard and rehabilitate Iraq's oil facilities. The resulting Task Force Shield project undertook to protect 340 key installations and 4,000 miles (6,400 km) of oil pipeline. It was not until the spring of 2004 that output again reached the prewar average of 2.5 million barrels per day – and that did not hold. Soon enough, production fell again. Iraqi refineries were, by now, producing only two-fifths of the 24 million liters of gasoline needed by the country daily, and so there were often days-long lines at service stations.

Addressing the 26th Oil and Money conference in London on Sept. 21, 2005, Issam Chalabi, who had been an Iraqi oil minister in the late 1980s, referred to the crippling lack of security and the lack of clear laws to manage the industry, and doubted if Iraq could return to the 1979 peak of 3.5 million barrels per day before 2009, if then.

Meanwhile, the Iraqi government found itself dependent on oil revenues for 90 percent of its income, a record at a time when corruption in its ministries had become rampant. On Jan. 30, 2005, Stuart W. Bowen, the special inspector general appointed by the U.S. occupation authority, reported that almost $9 billion in Iraqi oil revenue, disbursed to the ministries, had gone missing. A subsequent congressional inspection team reported in May 2006 that Task Force Shield had failed to meet its goals due to "lack of clear management structure and poor accountability," and added that there were "indications of potential fraud" which were being reviewed by the inspector general.

The endorsement of the new Iraqi constitution by referendum in October 2005 finally killed the prospect of full-scale oil privatization. Article 109 of that document stated clearly that hydrocarbons were "national Iraqi property." That is, oil and gas would remain in the public sector.

In March 2006, three years after the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq, the country's petroleum exports were 30-40 percent below pre-invasion levels.

Bush Pushes for Iraq's Flawed Draft Hydrocarbon Law

In February 2007, in line with the constitution, the draft hydrocarbon law the Iraqi government presented to parliament kept oil and gas in the state sector. It also stipulated recreating a single Iraqi National Oil Company that would be charged with doling out oil income to the provinces on a per-capita basis. The Bush administration latched onto that provision to hype the 43-article Iraqi bill as a key to reconciliation between Sunnis and Shi'ites – since the Sunni areas of Iraq lack hydrocarbons – and so included it (as did Congress) in its list of "benchmarks" the Iraqi government had to meet.

Overlooked by Washington was the way that particular article, after mentioning revenue-sharing, stated that a separate Federal Revenue Law would be necessary to settle the matter of distribution – the first draft of which was only published four months later in June.

Far more than revenue sharing and reconciliation, though, what really interested the Bush White House were the mouthwatering incentives for foreign firms to invest in Iraq's hydrocarbon industry contained in the draft law. They promised to provide ample opportunities to America's Oil Majors to reap handsome profits in an oil-rich Iraq whose vast western desert had yet to be explored fully for hydrocarbons. So Bush pressured the Iraqi government to get the necessary law passed before the parliament's vacation in August – to no avail.

The Bush administration's failure to achieve its short-term objectives does not detract from the overarching fact – established by the copious evidence marshaled in this article – that gaining privileged access to Iraqi oil for American companies was a primary objective of the Pentagon's invasion of Iraq.

Dilip Hiro is the author of Secrets and Lies: Operation "Iraqi Freedom" and After, as well as, most recently, Blood of the Earth: The Battle for the World's Vanishing Oil Resources, both published by Nation Books.

Copyright 2007 Dilip Hiro

[23] News from Absurdistan - Oil and War

Click on the title of this post to learn something about war as an inappropriate means of gaining meaningful control over oil.

The last four posts dealt with "war and oil" and go to show that Alan Greenspan's nonsensical pronouncement that the Iraq evasion "was not about oil, while it was about oil" (my rephrasing of his words quoted in the below: "[20] News from Absurdistan...") reveals just how confused "the best and brightest" of our great Western "civilization" are, and that a person tends to qualify for that category largely by dint of being a con-man, a poker-faced poser, talking or staring at another man longer than the interlocutor can endure the notion that the word of an "authority" like Alan Greenspan might be a lot less worth than the listener's own hard thinking.

Corruption breeds con-men. Our present political system breeds corruption in a big way...complete the syllogism for yourself.

In the self-righteous West, political consent for major issues such as war is once again driven by irrational insinuations, conceit and vulgarisation. All the "paraphernalia" of the holocaust are in place and operative, including the genocide of the Iraqi people, but we could not care less.

The lies hurled at the "enemy" - "known" to be irrational beasts trying to exterminate us etc. - are projections of our conduct.

We do not understand what we are thinking. We do not comprehend what we are doing. And then, trivially, we do not know what we are talking about. But we talk, and talk, and talk...and the cycle of blindness starts anew.

[22] News from Absurdistan - Blood for Oil?

A deliberation dating back to the year 2003:


Is the war with Iraq about oil? The anti-war movement seems to think so. I am not so sure.

If access to oil were of concern to Bush and Blair, one might have expected members of their administrations to hint as much. The Thatcher and Bush senior administrations, after all, were quite open about the role oil played in justifying the first go-around in Kuwait. At the time, polls in the United States revealed broad public support for that argument. Why the supposed reticence now?

A Litany of Flawed Arguments

It’s difficult to know exactly what is being alleged when one is confronted by the slogan “No Blood for Oil!”

If the argument is that war is being waged primarily to ensure global access to Iraqi oil reserves, then it flounders upon misunderstanding. The only thing preventing Iraqi oil from flooding the world market is the United Nations’ partial embargo on Iraqi exports. Surely it would have occurred to Bush and Blair that lifting the embargo would be about $100 billion cheaper (and less risky politically) than going to war.

If, instead, the argument is that war is being undertaken to rape Iraqi reserves, flood the market with oil, bust the OPEC cartel, and provide cheap energy to western consumers, then war would be a dagger pointed at the heart of “Big Oil.” That’s because low prices = low profits. Moreover, it would wipe out “Little Oil”--the small-time producers in Texas, Oklahoma, and the American Southwest that Bush has long considered his best political friends. It’s impossible to square this story with the allegation that Bush is a puppet of the oil industry.

In fact, if oil company “fat cats” were calling the shots--as is often alleged by the protesters--Bush almost certainly would not have gone to war. He instead would have embraced the Franco-German-Russian plan of muscular but indefinite inspections, because keeping the world on the precipice of uncertainty regarding conflict would have been the best guarantee that oil prices (and thus oil profits) would remain high.

If the argument is that “Big Oil” is less interested in high prices than it is with outright ownership of the Iraqi reserves, then how to account for Secretary of State Colin Powell’s repeated promise that the oil reserves will be transferred to the Iraqi government after a new leadership is established? Do the protestors think this high-profile public commitment is a bald-faced lie? Moreover, if ownership of the Iraqi oil reserves is the real goal of this war, I’m forced to wonder why the U.S. didn’t seize the Kuwaiti fields more than 10 years ago.

If the argument is that this war is aimed at installing a regime more inclined to grant oil contracts to American and British firms than to French and Russian firms, then it invites a similar charge that France and Russia oppose war primarily to protect their cozy economic relationships with the existing Iraqi regime. Regardless, only one or two U.S. or U.K. firms in this scenario would “win” economically, while the rest would lose, because increased production would lower global oil prices and thus profits. Because no one knows who would win the post-war oil contract “lottery,” it makes little sense for the oil industry (or the politicians who supposedly cater to them) to support war.

Moreover, the profit opportunities afforded by Iraqi oil development contracts are overstated. The post-war Iraqi regime would certainly want most of the profits from development to be captured by the new government, whose reconstruction needs will prove monumental. In fact, Powell has repeatedly hinted Iraqi oil revenues would be used for exactly that purpose. Big money in the oil industry goes to those who own their reserves or who secure favorable development contracts, not to those who are forced to surrender most of the rents through negotiation.

If the argument is that the United States is going to war to tame OPEC (accomplished, presumably, by ensuring a puppet regime holds the second largest reserves within the cartel), then it runs up against the fact that the United States has never had much complaint with OPEC. Occasional posturing notwithstanding, both have the same goal: stable prices between $20 and $28 a barrel. The cartel wants to keep prices in that range because it maximizes their profits. The United States wants to keep prices in that range because it ensures the continued existence of the oil industry in the United States (which would completely disappear absent OPEC production constraints) without doing too much damage to the American economy. The United States doesn’t need a client state within the cartel, particularly when the cost of procuring such a state will reach into the hundreds of billions of dollars.

The Importance of Oil

Oil is, however, relevant to the war in one respect: Whoever controls those reserves sits atop a large source of potential revenue which, in the hands of a rogue state, could bankroll a sizeable and dangerous military arsenal. That’s why the United States and Great Britain care more about containing the ambitions of Saddam Hussein than, say, the ambitions of Robert Mugabe.

Still, if seizing oil fields from anti-western regimes is the name of the game, why aren’t U.S. troops massing on the Venezuelan border and menacing Castro “Mini-Me” Hugo Chavez?

While everyone loves a nice, tidy political morality play, I doubt there is one to be found here. The argument that the war with Iraq is fundamentally about oil doesn’t add up.

[21] News from Absurdistan - Going to War for Oil

Many people fear that a hostile foreign oil producer will be able to damage Americans and, for that reason, think that the U.S. government should ensure U.S. access to oil.

But a foreign government cannot cause Americans to line up for gasoline.

Only price controls imposed by U.S. governments can do that, which is what they did in the 1970s.

A hostile foreign oil producer cannot inflict more than a small amount of harm on Americans by refusing to sell oil to Americans, unless this oil producer is willing to cut its own output.

If a hostile foreign oil producer maintains output but cuts exports to the United States, it initiates a game of musical chairs in which the number of chairs equals the number of players. Different buyers will be linked with different sellers than before the hostile producer reduced its oil exports to the United States, but the cost to Americans of switching suppliers would be negligible.

The only way a foreign oil producer can harm Americans is by cutting output, but that producer will then harm itself and also harm all other oil users, not just U.S. consumers. This harm is likely to be well under 0.5 percent of U.S. gross domestic product (GDP).

Ironically, war for oil could well drive the price of oil higher, not lower, thus costing Americans twice—as taxpayers and as oil users.

[20] News from Absurdistan - It Has Nothing To Do With Oil

One does not know where to start in commenting on the list of shifting rationales presented to defend and, indeed, commend the American War in Iraq. Weapons of mass destruction - did not work. Democratisation at the barrel of a gun - did not work. In fact, the crusaders of democracy show little respect for democratic outcomes when the elected regime is not complicit. Nation building - did not work, little wonder. Ah, we had to do it (attacking Iraq) because our oil supplies are threatened (America does not depend on Iraqi oil - unimportant nicety). And also, there are terrorists all over the place who threaten us...Well, terrorists have always been around and will continue to be around forever. But the answer to that is not to break a fly on the wheel - or in the thematically more powerful German imagery: to shoot with canons at sparrows. You are a lot more likely to be struck by lightning than to get killed by a terrorist. But we have to make the target the size of our military prowess. That is how Al Qa'ida, a bunch of dispersed fighters, if it is a definable entity at all, is being blown up in the media to take on the proportions of a Super-Power. That is one of the reasons why no one went seriously after Osama Bin Laden. Had we have caught him, there would have been no occasion to conduct a nice little war in Afghanistan. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, of course, are a great way to increase the number of terrorists (many of whom would appear a lot more congenial to you and me, if we were more in the habit of asking ourselves what is actually being done to them and how we would feel and react if our homes, kin, friends and fellow-countrymen were subjected to the daily terror they have to endure), which is good news to the state, because it creates excuses to extend its powers and to perpetuate international aggression. It is a different issue that cannot be covered extensively in this post, just how egregious the racism is that the mainstream Western views on Afghanistan and Iraq imply. Germans, for instance, with the generous support of the media, tend to divide the population of Afghanistan in two parts: the good ones deserving foreign aid, and the bad ones deserving to be ferreted out by German Tornados and killed by American soldiers (the Germans are absolutely in favour of the killing but decline for some mysterious reason to actually perform it themselves). The concept of the "Untermensch" ("the sub-human") is alive and kicking in Germany, so much so that my fellow countrymen often feel I am being obtrusive when confronting them with the 500 000 Iraqis that have perished as a result of Western embargo measures and bombardments (prior to the present war), those very dead that Albright openly considers a price "worth it". As if Iraqi lives ever matter to the West. And when confronted with a study that puts the Iraqi casualties (killed by American forces) at 10 000 a month, my fellow Germans turn into accountants of death, asking me not to worry, for the true figure cannot be higher than 2 000. The list of reasons given to justify the war in Iraq should contain: tyranicide. But that did not work either. Though Saddam (our foster child and long-standing good friend) is dead, the purpose of killing him was to make life better for the people of Iraq, an end hardly achieved, if one looks at the living conditions of Iraqis since the War broke out and the fact that more Iraqis have died as a consequence of this war than as a result of Saddam's oppressive regime. What else have we got on the list of heroic excuses to make Western soldiers practice their trade on foreign soil? Ah, long after "mission accomplished", we encounter the need to stabilise by war a region utterly destabilised by - war. If matters were not so serious, one could speak of a grand comedy. The "surge" was meant to buy domestic politicians time for reconciliation, this aim being the yardstick initially announced as the criterion for success or failure. Of course, no progress has been made along these predefined lines, to the contrary, and, of course, at the time of reckoning, no one talks about the utter failure of the "surge". General Betrayus, stylised to act as a deus ex machina and ultimate fountain of wisdom, even admits that he does not know whether the ongoing efforts make America(ns) safer. Which is not his job anyway, being a politician wearing the uniform of a spineless career soldier. Why should he care, with the public (especially the politically mandated public) completely unperturbed by the most blatant acts of corruption. Congress has abrogated its constitutional duty to declare war and to end it, as the case may be, delegating all power in the matter to the President, who predictably goes looking for the next fuse to light. The President, happily accepting the invitation, construes his role as the commander-in-chief as extending to all matters American, rather than as confined to conducting military action in the context of a war declared and defined in terms of its goals, purposes and conditions of termination by Congress. Being the boss of General Betrayus, he had little reluctance to overcome before instating the slimy underling as the arbiter on the issue of whether the war should be continued in the fashion willed by the "Decider" or in ways more in line with his opponents. (Look at the so far penultimate post in this blog, containing a report on the sorry fact that the most powerful and most richly endowed governmental agencies are allowed to proliferate virtually unaudited. Democracy (better: pluralistic, strictly anti-constitutional monarchy) as a general justification to do anything one wishes to once in power has reached the point that Lord Acton captured in his famous dictum: "Power corrupts, Absolute power corrupts absolutely.") Now, mix this kind of seriousness in monitoring the actions of the President with the "imperialist reflex" (see below) alertly alive even among his critics and you will get...anything the King of America deigns to have - diverging nuances to it being part of the quid pro quo of corruption that keeps the system running and the presidential dictator on top of it. One of the many shocking aspects of the facile, spurious, damnably retroactive and logically erratic efforts to legitimise the genocidal aggression against Iraq is a tendency in many to effectively take the position: Well, if the war is to secure our supplies of oil, then waging it does make sense, after all. (We have to be realists, don't we, and look after ourselves.) This is actually the stance taken by Alan Greenspan, who commenting on his recently published book, defends the war against Iraq, citing a scenario that never existed (Saddam using nuclear weapons, cutting off the Hormuz Straits and controlling Kuwait and Saudi Arabia) and equally fantastically arguing (in response to the question below by an interviewer) that the Administration may conceivably have thought oil was not an issue in the war : "...In other words, the administration went to war saying it was all about weapons of mass destruction." "I believe that they believed that," Greenspan said. "I'm not saying that they believed it was about oil. I'm saying it is about oil and that I believe it was necessary to get Saddam out of there." Frankly, I do not understand Greenspan beyond the point I made about his position - but who ever did understand him, and was he ever supposed to be intelligible, as former head of the most secretive Federal Reserve? He seems to be saying that the Administration did not believe they were going to war because of oil - while, in fact, the war was nonetheless about oil. The poor Administration, with not a clue of the goings-on in the world, idealistically tried to rid the region of WMD that never existed, thereby launching a war that unbeknownst to them in actual fact "was about oil". So there, the public must be idiots. Is this what Greenspan is trying to say? Well, sometimes conspicuousness is the best camouflage - maybe Greenspan is quite simply an idiot. At any rate, here you have it from the horse's mouth: Something as deadly serious as war is dealt with as if logic did not matter. Here we have the case of a man inebriated with power and his own importance. http://rawstory.com//news/2007/Greenspan_Lefty_bloggers_totally_unfair_with_0917.html What I call the "imperialist reflex" has taken root in our minds pervasively. In essence it is an attitude holding that all it takes to be involved in a "just" war of aggression is to feel strongly enough about this interest or the other. Like our need for oil. This is not the place to explain that it will never be possible to control oil supplies short of conquering all major oil producing countries of the world, a task that is as impossible as it is reprehensible and, indeed dumb - as there is no country in the world with a substantial oil base that would not be happy to thrive on that resource by peaceful trade, while keeping oil flowing under conditions of war is practically impossible or prohibitively expensive. Unfortunately, the "imperialist reflex" is so deep seated that even the "doveish" succumb to it, more or less unthinkingly. Recently, a commentator of The New Yorker suggested in a radio interview on NPR ("Talk of the Nation") that those intending to withdraw from Iraq are a facile lot, forgetting that it remains paramount to the US/the West to protect its interest in the region. That takes us back to square one, i.e. all that it takes to have a right to meddle abroad militarily and otherwise is the perception of an interest. This is a recipe for permanent warfare and the abandonment of any principles that would preclude unjust war. The war against Iran is a foregone conclusion. Indeed, any war that Washington might wish to lead will take place essentially unresisted. All that we are left with to end or not to instigate war in the first place is the physical inability of the West to wage war. We are committed to a killing frenzy that will only stop when the West collapses eventually. The West has ceased to be a civilization. Greenspan Misses Cheney's Memo: Spills the Beans on Oil

by Ray McGovern

For those still wondering why President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney sent our young men and women into Iraq, the secret is now "largely" out. No, not from the lips of former secretary of state Colin Powell. It appears we shall have to wait until the disgraced general/diplomat draws nearer to meeting his maker before he gets concerned over anything more than the "blot" that Iraq has put on his reputation. Rather, the uncommon candor comes from a highly respected Republican doyen, economist Alan Greenspan, chairman of the Federal Reserve from 1987 to 2006, whom the president has praised for his "wise policies and prudent judgment." Sadly for Bush and Cheney, Greenspan decided to put prudence aside in his new book, The Age of Turbulence, and answer the most neuralgic issue of our times – why the United States invaded Iraq. Greenspan writes: "I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil." Everyone knows? Would that it were so. But it’s hardly everyone. Sometimes I think it’s hardly anyone. There are so many, still, who "can’t handle the truth," and that is all too understandable. I have found it a wrenching experience to be forced to conclude that the America I love would deliberately launch what the Nuremburg Tribunal called the "supreme international crime" – a war of aggression – largely for oil. For those who are able to overcome the very common, instinctive denial, for those who can handle the truth, it really helps to turn off the Sunday football games early enough to catch up on what’s going on. 60 Minutes On January 11, 2004, viewers of CBS’ 60 Minutes saw another of Bush’s senior economic advisers, former treasury secretary Paul O’Neill discussing The Price of Loyalty, his memoir about his two years inside the Bush administration. O’Neill, a plain speaker, likened the president’s behavior at cabinet meetings to that of "a blind man in a roomful of deaf people." How does he manage? Cheney and "a praetorian guard that encircled the president" help Bush make decisions off-line, blocking contrary views. Cheney has a Rumsfeldian knack for aphorisms that don’t parse in the real world – like "deficits don’t matter." To his credit, O’Neill picked a fight with that and ended up being fired personally by Cheney. In his book, Greenspan heaps scorn on that same Cheneyesque insight. O’Neill made no bones about his befuddlement over the president’s diffident disengagement from discussions on policy – except, that is, for Bush’s remarks betraying a pep-rally-cheerleader fixation with removing Saddam Hussein and occupying Iraq. Why Iraq? 'Largely Oil' O’Neill began to understand better after Bush’s inauguration when the discussion among his top advisers abruptly moved to how to divvy up Iraq’s oil wealth. Just days into the job, President Bush created the Cheney energy task force with the stated aim of developing "a national energy policy designed to help the private sector." Typically, Cheney has been able to keep secret its deliberations and even the names of its members. But a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit forced the Commerce Department to turn over task force documents, including a map of Iraqi oilfields, pipelines, refineries, terminals, and potential areas for exploration; a Pentagon chart "Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield Contracts;" and another chart detailing Iraqi oil and gas projects – all dated March 2001. On the 60 Minutes, program on December 15, 2002, Steve Croft asked then-defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, "What do you say to people who think this [the coming invasion of Iraq] is about oil?" Rumsfeld replied: "Nonsense. It just isn’t. There – there – there are certain... things like that, myths that are floating around. I’m glad you asked. I – it has nothing to do with oil, literally nothing to do with oil." Au Contraire Greenspan’s indiscreet remark adds to the abundant evidence that Iraq oil, and not weapons of mass destruction, was the priority target long before the Bush administration invoked WMD as a pretext to invade Iraq. In the heady days of "Mission Accomplished," a week after the president landed on the aircraft carrier, then-deputy defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz virtually bragged about the deceit during an interview. On May 9, 2003, Wolfowitz told Vanity Fair: "The truth is that for reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S. government bureaucracy, we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on, which was weapons of mass destruction as the core reason..." That was seven weeks after the invasion; no weapons of mass destruction had been found; and Americans were growing tired of being told that this was because Iraq was the size of California. Eventually, of course, Wolfowitz’ boss Rumsfeld was forced to concede, as he did to me during our impromptu TV debate on May 4, 2006: "It appears that there were not weapons of mass destruction there." But three years before, during that heady May of 2003 when all else seemed to be going along swimmingly, the inebriation of apparent success led to another glaring indiscretion by Wolfowitz. During a relaxed moment in Singapore late that month, Wolfowitz reminded the press that Iraq "floats on a sea of oil," and thus added to the migraine he had already given folks in the White House PR shop. But wait. For those of us absorbing more than FOX channel news, the primacy of the oil factor was a no-brainer. The limited number of invading troops were ordered to give priority to securing the oil wells and oil industry infrastructure immediately and let looters have their way with just about everything else (including the ammunition storage depots!). Barely three weeks into the war, Rumsfeld famously answered criticism for not stopping the looting: "Stuff happens." No stuff happened to the Oil Ministry. Small wonder that, according to O’Neill, Rumsfeld tried hard to dissuade him from writing his book and has avoided all comment on it. As for Greenspan’s book, Rumsfeld will find it easier to dodge questions from the Washington press corps from his sinecure at the Hoover Institute at Stanford. Eminence Grise...or Oily The other half of what Col. Larry Wilkerson, Colin Powell’s former chief of staff at the State Department, calls the "Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal" is still lurking in the shadows. What changed Cheney’s mind toward Iraq from his sensible attitude after the Gulf War when, as defense secretary, he defended President George H. W. Bush’s decision not to attempt to oust Saddam Hussein and conquer Iraq? Here is what Cheney said in August 1992: "...how many additional American casualties is Saddam worth?...not that damned many. So I think we got it right...when the president made the decision that we were not going to go get bogged down in the problems of trying to take over and govern Iraq." Cheney’s rather transparent remarks as CEO of Halliburton in autumn 1999 suggest what lies behind the cynical exploitation of genuine patriotism to recruit throwaway soldiers to trade for the chimera of control over the oil in Iraq: "Oil companies are expected to keep developing enough oil to offset oil depletion and also to meet new demand...So where is the oil going to come from? Governments and the national oil companies are obviously in control of 90 percent of the assets. Oil remains fundamentally a government business. The Middle East with two-thirds of the world’s oil and the lowest cost is still where the prize ultimately lies." Not only Cheney, but also many of the captains of the oil industry were looking on Iraq with covetous eyes before the war. Most people forget that the Bush/Cheney administration came in on the heels of severe shortages of oil and natural gas in the U.S., and the passing of a milestone at which the United States had just begun importing more than half of the oil it consumes. One oil executive confided to a New York Times reporter a month before the war: "For any oil company, being in Iraq is like being a kid in F.A.O. Schwarz." Canadian writer Linda McQuaig, author of It's the Crude, Dude: War, Big Oil, and the Fight for the Planet (2004), has noted that decades from now it will seem to everyone a real no-brainer. Historians will calmly discuss the war in Iraq and identify oil as one of the key factors in the decision to launch it. They will point to growing US dependence on foreign oil, the competition with China, India, and others for a share of the diminishing world supply of this precious, nonrenewable resource, and the fact that Iraq "floats on a sea of oil." It will all seem so obvious as to provoke little more than a yawn. Other Factors Behind the Invasion There were, to be sure, other factors behind the ill-starred attack on Iraq – the Bush administration’s determination to acquire large, permanent military bases in the area outside of Saudi Arabia, for one. But that factor can be viewed as a subset of the energy motivation – the need to have substantial influence over the extraction and disposition of the oil in Iraq. In other words, the felt need for what the Pentagon prefers to call "enduring" military bases in the Middle East is a function of its strategic importance which, in turn, is a function – you guessed it – of its natural resources. Not only oil, but natural gas and water as well. I find the evidence persuasive that the other major factor in the Bush/Cheney decision to make war on Iraq was the misguided notion that this would make that part of the world safer for Israel. Indeed, the so-called "neoconservatives" still running U.S. policy toward the Middle East continue to have great difficulty distinguishing between what they perceive to be the strategic interests of Israel and those of the United States. And in my view, they show themselves extremely myopic on both counts.