Conghaileach
25th October 2002, 18:57
SKULDUGGERY SINCE THE 1920'S: U.S. CORPORATIONS AND IRAQI OIL
By Richard Becker
How and why did U.S. involvement in Iraq begin?
In all the countless hours the corporate media devote to broadcasting
the Bush administration's lies and deceits about Iraq, that simple and
crucial question is almost never addressed. And for good reason. Since
its very beginning eight decades ago, U.S. policy toward Iraq has been
intensely focused on one objective: taking control of that country's
rich oil resources. The roots of U.S. intervention in Iraq lie in the
aftermath of World War I.
It was a war between capitalist empires. On one side were the German,
Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman (Turkish) Empires. On the other side was
the British-French- Russian imperial entente. Most of the Middle East
was under Ottoman control. The British, through their agent T.E.
Lawrence--known to moviegoers as "Law rence of Arabia"--promised Arab
leaders that if they fought with Britain against their Turkish rulers,
the British would support the creation of an independent Arab state
after the war. At the same time, the British, French and Russian
foreign ministries were secretly signing the Sykes-Picot
agreement. Sykes-Picot re-carved the Middle East. The agreement
was made public after the Russian Revolution of 1917 by the Bolshevik
party, which denounced it as imperialist. Mass revolts broke out all
over the Middle East when the Arab and Kurdish peoples discovered their
betrayal at the hands of the imperial "democracies."
The rebellions continued throughout the colonial period. Repression
was brutal in the extreme. In 1925, for instance, the British dropped
poison gas on the Kurdish town of Sulaimaniya in Iraq, the first time
that gas was deployed from warplanes. BRITAIN, FRANCE DIVIDE MIDDLE
EAST After the war ended in 1918, Britain and France proceeded with
their plans. Lebanon and Syria, they agreed, would be incorporated into
the French Empire. Palestine, Jordan and the two southern provinces of
Iraq--Baghdad and Basra--would become part of the far-flung British
Empire. What they didn't agree about was who would get Mosul province,
the northern area of present-day Iraq. According to the Sykes-Picot
accord, it was part of the French "sphere of influence." The British
were determined, however, to add Mosul, which was mainly Kurdish in
population, to their new Iraq colony. To back its claim, the British
army occupied Mosul four days after the Turkish surrender in October
1918-- and never left.
The resolution of the inter-imperialist struggle between Britain and
France over Mosul brought with it the beginning of the U.S. role in
Iraq. Mosul's importance to the big powers was based on its known but
as of then largely undeveloped oil resources. The United States had
entered World War I on the side of Britain and France in 1917, after
both its allies and enemies were largely exhausted. U.S. conditions for
entering the war included the demand that its economic and
political objectives be taken into account in the post-war world. Among
those objectives was access to new sources of raw materials,
particularly oil. In February 1919, Sir Arthur Hirtzel, a top British
colonial official, warned his associates, "It should be borne in
mind that the Standard Oil Company is very anxious to take over Iraq."
(Quoted in Peter Sluglett, "Britain in Iraq, 1914- 32," London,
1974) In the face of the British-French domination of the region, the
United States at first demanded an "Open Door" policy. U.S. oil
companies should be allowed to freely negotiate contracts with the new
puppet monarchy of King Faisal, whom the British had installed on the
throne in Iraq.
The solution to the victorious allies' conflict over Iraq was found in
dividing up Iraq's oil. The British kept Mosul as part of their new
Iraq colony. NOT ONE DROP FOR IRAQ Iraq's oil was split five ways:
23.75 percent each to Britain, France, Holland and the United States.
The remaining 5 percent went to an oil baron named Caloste Gulbenkian,
known as "Mr. Five-Percenter," who helped negotiate the
agreement. Exactly zero percent of Iraq's oil belonged to Iraq.
That's how it was to stay until the revolution of 1958. In 1927, major
oil exploration got under way. Huge deposits were discovered in Mosul
province. Two years later, the Iraqi Petroleum Co.--composed of Anglo-
Iranian (today British Petroleum), Shell, Mobil and Standard Oil of
New Jersey (Exxon)--was set up. Within a few years it totally
monopolized Iraqi oil production.
During the same period the al-Saud family, with Washington's backing,
conquered much of the neighboring Arabian peninsula. Saudi Arabia came
into being in the 1930s as a neocolony of the United States. The U.S.
embassy in Riyadh, the Saudi capital, was located in the ARAMCO (Arab
American Oil Co.) building. But the U.S. oil companies and their
government in Washington weren't satisfied. They wanted complete
control of the Middle East's oil, just as they had a near-monopoly of
the Western Hemi sphere's petroleum reserves. This meant displacing the
British, who were still top dog in the region. The U.S. opportunity
came as a result of World War II. While the United States and British
are generally depicted as the closest of wartime allies, the fact is
that they were at the same time fierce opponents.
The war greatly weakened the British Empire both at home and in the
loss of key colonies in Asia. In the early stages of the war, 1939-42,
it was a question whether Britain would survive. It it was never to
fully recover its former dominance. The United States, on the other
hand, grew increasingly powerful throughout the war--which the
Washington rulers had once again bided their time before entering. In
the latter stages of World War II, the Roosevelt and Truman
administrations, dominated by big banking, oil and other corporate
interests, were determined to restructure the post-war world to ensure
the dominant position of the United States.
The key elements in their strategy were: 1) U.S. military superiority
in nuclear and conventional weaponry; 2) U.S.- dominated corporate
globalization, using the International Monetary Fund and World Bank,
created in 1944, and establishment of the dollar as the world currency;
and 3) control of global resources, particularly oil. While the
fighting was still raging on the battlefields, a behind-the-scenes
struggle for global economic control was unfolding between the United
States and Britain. So intense was this battle that on March 4, 1944--
three months before the D-Day invasion at Normandy--British Prime
Minister Winston Churchill sent a message to President
Franklin Roosevelt that was unusual in its imperialist content
and hostile tone: "Thank you very much for your assurances about no
sheep's eyes [looking enviously--RB] on our oilfields in Iran and Iraq.
Let me reciprocate by giving you the fullest assurance that we have no
thought of trying to horn in upon your interests or property in Saudi
Arabia. My position in this as in all matters is that Great Britain
seeks no advantage, territorial or otherwise, as a result of this war.
On the other hand she will not be deprived of anything which rightly
belongs to her after having given her best services to the good cause,
at least not so long as your humble servant is entrusted with the
conduct of her affairs."
(Quoted in Gabriel Kolko, "The Politics of War," New York, 1968) What
this note clearly showed was that the U.S. leaders were so intent on
taking over Iran and Iraq, both important neocolonies of Britain, that
they had set off alarm bells in British ruling circles. Despite
Churchill's bluster, there was nothing the British could do to restrain
rising U.S. power. Within a few years, the British ruling class would
adapt to the new reality and accept the role of Washington's junior
partner. U.S. ROLE EXPANDS AFTER WW II In 1953, after the CIA coup
that put the shah (king) in power, the United States took control of
Iran. By the mid- 1950s, Iraq was jointly controlled by the United
States and Britain. Washington set up the Baghdad Pact, which included
its client regimes in Pakistan, Iran, Turkey and Iraq, along with
Britain, in 1955.
The Baghdad Pact, or CENTO--Central Treaty Organization, had two
purposes. First was to oppose the rise of Arab and other
liberation movements in the Middle East and south Asia. The
second purpose was to be another in a series of military alliances--
NATO, SEATO and ANZUS were the others--encircling the socialist camp
of the Soviet Union, China, Eastern Europe, north Korea and north
Vietnam. Iraq, the core of CENTO, was independent only in name.
The British maintained military airfields in Iraq. While the country
was extremely rich in oil--10 percent of the world's reserves--the
people lived in extreme poverty and hunger. Illiteracy was over 80
percent. There was one doctor for every 6,000 people, one dentist for
every 500,000. Iraq was ruled by a corrupt monarchy under King Faisal
II and a coterie of feudal landowners and merchant
capitalists. Underlying Iraq's poverty was the simple fact that Iraq
did not own its vast oil reserves.
THE IRAQI REVOLUTION But on July 14, 1958, Iraq was rocked by a
powerful social explosion. A military rebellion turned into a
countrywide revolution. The king and his administration were
suddenly gone, the recipients of people's justice. Washington and Wall
Street were stunned. In the week that followed, the New York Times, the
U.S. "newspaper of record," had virtually no stories in its first 10
pages other than those about the Iraqi Revolution. While another great
revolution that took place just six months later in Cuba is better
remembered today, Washington regarded the Iraqi upheaval as far more
threatening to its vital interests at the time. President Dwight D.
Eisenhower called it "the gravest crisis since the Korean War." The day
after the Iraqi Revolution, 20,000 U.S. Marines began landing in
Lebanon. The day after that, 6,600 British paratroopers were dropped
into Jordan.
This was what came to be known as the "Eisenhower Doctrine." The
United States would intervene directly--go to war--to prevent the
spread of revolution in the vital Middle East. U.S. and British
expeditionary forces went in to save the neocolonial governments in
Lebanon and Jordan. Had they not, the popular impulse from Iraq would
have surely brought down the rotten dependent regimes in Beirut and
Amman. But Eisenhower, his generals and his arch-imperialist Secretary
of State John Foster Dulles also had something else in mind: invading
Iraq, overturning the revolution and installing a new puppet government
in Baghdad. Three factors forced Washington to abandon that plan
in 1958: the sweeping character of the Iraqi Revolution;
the announcement by the United Arab Republic, which bordered Iraq, that
its forces would fight the imperialists if they sought to invade; and
the emphatic support of the People's Republic of China and the Soviet
Union for the revolution. The USSR began a mobilization of troops in
the southern Soviet republics close to Iraq. The combination of these
factors forced the U.S. leaders to accept the existence of the Iraqi
Revolution.
But Washington never really reconciled itself to the loss of
Iraq. Over the next three decades, the U.S. government applied many
tactics designed to weaken and undermine Iraq as an independent
country. At various times--such as after Iraq completed the
nationalization of the Iraqi Petroleum Co. in 1972 and signed a defense
treaty with the USSR--the United States gave massive military support
to right-wing Kurdish elements fighting Baghdad and added Iraq to its
list of "terrorist states." The United States supported the more
rightist elements within the post-revolution political structure
against the communist and left-nationalist forces. For example,
the United States applauded the suppression of the Iraqi Communist
Party and left-led labor unions by the Ba'ath Party government of
Saddam Hussein in the late 1970s.
In the 1980s, the United States encouraged and helped to fund and arm
Iraq in its war against Iran. U.S. domination of the latter was ended
by Iran's Islamic revolution in 1979. In reality, though, the U.S. aim
in the Iran-Iraq war was to weaken and destroy both countries. Ex-
Secretary of State Henry Kissinger revealed the real U.S. attitude
about the war when he said, "I hope they kill each other." The
Pentagon provided Iraq's air force with satellite photos of Iranian
targets. At the same time, as the Iran-Contra scandal revealed, the
United States was sending anti- aircraft missiles to Iran. The Iran-
Iraq war was a disaster, killing a million people and weakening both
countries.
COLLAPSE OF USSR AND GULF WAR
When the war finally ended in 1988, developments in the Soviet Union
were posing a new and even graver danger to Iraq, which had a military
and friendship treaty with the USSR. In pursuit of "permanent détente"
with the United States, the Gorbachev leadership in Moscow began to cut
its support for its allies in the developing world. In 1989, Gorbachev
went further and withdrew support for the socialist governments in
Eastern Europe, most of which then collapsed. This sharp shift in the
world relationship of forces--culminating with the collapse of the
Soviet Union itself two years later--constituted the greatest victory
for U.S. imperialism since World War II.
It also opened the door for the U.S. war against Iraq in 1991, and
more than a decade of sanctions/blockade and bombing that have
devastated Iraq and its people. Today, the Bush administration is
seeking to win public support for a new war against Iraq by talking
about "weapons of mass destruction" and "human rights." The reality is
that Washington is concerned about neither Iraq's diminished military
capacity nor human rights anywhere in the world.
What moves U.S. policy toward Iraq in 2002 is the same objective that
motivated Washington and Wall Street 80 years ago: oil.
- END -
(Copyright Workers World Service: Everyone is permitted to copy and
distribute verbatim copies of this document, but changing it is not
allowed. For more information contact Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY,
NY 10011; via e-mail: [email protected] Subscribe wwnews-
[email protected] Unsubscribe [email protected] Support the
voice of resistance http://www.workers.org/orders/donate.php)
By Richard Becker
How and why did U.S. involvement in Iraq begin?
In all the countless hours the corporate media devote to broadcasting
the Bush administration's lies and deceits about Iraq, that simple and
crucial question is almost never addressed. And for good reason. Since
its very beginning eight decades ago, U.S. policy toward Iraq has been
intensely focused on one objective: taking control of that country's
rich oil resources. The roots of U.S. intervention in Iraq lie in the
aftermath of World War I.
It was a war between capitalist empires. On one side were the German,
Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman (Turkish) Empires. On the other side was
the British-French- Russian imperial entente. Most of the Middle East
was under Ottoman control. The British, through their agent T.E.
Lawrence--known to moviegoers as "Law rence of Arabia"--promised Arab
leaders that if they fought with Britain against their Turkish rulers,
the British would support the creation of an independent Arab state
after the war. At the same time, the British, French and Russian
foreign ministries were secretly signing the Sykes-Picot
agreement. Sykes-Picot re-carved the Middle East. The agreement
was made public after the Russian Revolution of 1917 by the Bolshevik
party, which denounced it as imperialist. Mass revolts broke out all
over the Middle East when the Arab and Kurdish peoples discovered their
betrayal at the hands of the imperial "democracies."
The rebellions continued throughout the colonial period. Repression
was brutal in the extreme. In 1925, for instance, the British dropped
poison gas on the Kurdish town of Sulaimaniya in Iraq, the first time
that gas was deployed from warplanes. BRITAIN, FRANCE DIVIDE MIDDLE
EAST After the war ended in 1918, Britain and France proceeded with
their plans. Lebanon and Syria, they agreed, would be incorporated into
the French Empire. Palestine, Jordan and the two southern provinces of
Iraq--Baghdad and Basra--would become part of the far-flung British
Empire. What they didn't agree about was who would get Mosul province,
the northern area of present-day Iraq. According to the Sykes-Picot
accord, it was part of the French "sphere of influence." The British
were determined, however, to add Mosul, which was mainly Kurdish in
population, to their new Iraq colony. To back its claim, the British
army occupied Mosul four days after the Turkish surrender in October
1918-- and never left.
The resolution of the inter-imperialist struggle between Britain and
France over Mosul brought with it the beginning of the U.S. role in
Iraq. Mosul's importance to the big powers was based on its known but
as of then largely undeveloped oil resources. The United States had
entered World War I on the side of Britain and France in 1917, after
both its allies and enemies were largely exhausted. U.S. conditions for
entering the war included the demand that its economic and
political objectives be taken into account in the post-war world. Among
those objectives was access to new sources of raw materials,
particularly oil. In February 1919, Sir Arthur Hirtzel, a top British
colonial official, warned his associates, "It should be borne in
mind that the Standard Oil Company is very anxious to take over Iraq."
(Quoted in Peter Sluglett, "Britain in Iraq, 1914- 32," London,
1974) In the face of the British-French domination of the region, the
United States at first demanded an "Open Door" policy. U.S. oil
companies should be allowed to freely negotiate contracts with the new
puppet monarchy of King Faisal, whom the British had installed on the
throne in Iraq.
The solution to the victorious allies' conflict over Iraq was found in
dividing up Iraq's oil. The British kept Mosul as part of their new
Iraq colony. NOT ONE DROP FOR IRAQ Iraq's oil was split five ways:
23.75 percent each to Britain, France, Holland and the United States.
The remaining 5 percent went to an oil baron named Caloste Gulbenkian,
known as "Mr. Five-Percenter," who helped negotiate the
agreement. Exactly zero percent of Iraq's oil belonged to Iraq.
That's how it was to stay until the revolution of 1958. In 1927, major
oil exploration got under way. Huge deposits were discovered in Mosul
province. Two years later, the Iraqi Petroleum Co.--composed of Anglo-
Iranian (today British Petroleum), Shell, Mobil and Standard Oil of
New Jersey (Exxon)--was set up. Within a few years it totally
monopolized Iraqi oil production.
During the same period the al-Saud family, with Washington's backing,
conquered much of the neighboring Arabian peninsula. Saudi Arabia came
into being in the 1930s as a neocolony of the United States. The U.S.
embassy in Riyadh, the Saudi capital, was located in the ARAMCO (Arab
American Oil Co.) building. But the U.S. oil companies and their
government in Washington weren't satisfied. They wanted complete
control of the Middle East's oil, just as they had a near-monopoly of
the Western Hemi sphere's petroleum reserves. This meant displacing the
British, who were still top dog in the region. The U.S. opportunity
came as a result of World War II. While the United States and British
are generally depicted as the closest of wartime allies, the fact is
that they were at the same time fierce opponents.
The war greatly weakened the British Empire both at home and in the
loss of key colonies in Asia. In the early stages of the war, 1939-42,
it was a question whether Britain would survive. It it was never to
fully recover its former dominance. The United States, on the other
hand, grew increasingly powerful throughout the war--which the
Washington rulers had once again bided their time before entering. In
the latter stages of World War II, the Roosevelt and Truman
administrations, dominated by big banking, oil and other corporate
interests, were determined to restructure the post-war world to ensure
the dominant position of the United States.
The key elements in their strategy were: 1) U.S. military superiority
in nuclear and conventional weaponry; 2) U.S.- dominated corporate
globalization, using the International Monetary Fund and World Bank,
created in 1944, and establishment of the dollar as the world currency;
and 3) control of global resources, particularly oil. While the
fighting was still raging on the battlefields, a behind-the-scenes
struggle for global economic control was unfolding between the United
States and Britain. So intense was this battle that on March 4, 1944--
three months before the D-Day invasion at Normandy--British Prime
Minister Winston Churchill sent a message to President
Franklin Roosevelt that was unusual in its imperialist content
and hostile tone: "Thank you very much for your assurances about no
sheep's eyes [looking enviously--RB] on our oilfields in Iran and Iraq.
Let me reciprocate by giving you the fullest assurance that we have no
thought of trying to horn in upon your interests or property in Saudi
Arabia. My position in this as in all matters is that Great Britain
seeks no advantage, territorial or otherwise, as a result of this war.
On the other hand she will not be deprived of anything which rightly
belongs to her after having given her best services to the good cause,
at least not so long as your humble servant is entrusted with the
conduct of her affairs."
(Quoted in Gabriel Kolko, "The Politics of War," New York, 1968) What
this note clearly showed was that the U.S. leaders were so intent on
taking over Iran and Iraq, both important neocolonies of Britain, that
they had set off alarm bells in British ruling circles. Despite
Churchill's bluster, there was nothing the British could do to restrain
rising U.S. power. Within a few years, the British ruling class would
adapt to the new reality and accept the role of Washington's junior
partner. U.S. ROLE EXPANDS AFTER WW II In 1953, after the CIA coup
that put the shah (king) in power, the United States took control of
Iran. By the mid- 1950s, Iraq was jointly controlled by the United
States and Britain. Washington set up the Baghdad Pact, which included
its client regimes in Pakistan, Iran, Turkey and Iraq, along with
Britain, in 1955.
The Baghdad Pact, or CENTO--Central Treaty Organization, had two
purposes. First was to oppose the rise of Arab and other
liberation movements in the Middle East and south Asia. The
second purpose was to be another in a series of military alliances--
NATO, SEATO and ANZUS were the others--encircling the socialist camp
of the Soviet Union, China, Eastern Europe, north Korea and north
Vietnam. Iraq, the core of CENTO, was independent only in name.
The British maintained military airfields in Iraq. While the country
was extremely rich in oil--10 percent of the world's reserves--the
people lived in extreme poverty and hunger. Illiteracy was over 80
percent. There was one doctor for every 6,000 people, one dentist for
every 500,000. Iraq was ruled by a corrupt monarchy under King Faisal
II and a coterie of feudal landowners and merchant
capitalists. Underlying Iraq's poverty was the simple fact that Iraq
did not own its vast oil reserves.
THE IRAQI REVOLUTION But on July 14, 1958, Iraq was rocked by a
powerful social explosion. A military rebellion turned into a
countrywide revolution. The king and his administration were
suddenly gone, the recipients of people's justice. Washington and Wall
Street were stunned. In the week that followed, the New York Times, the
U.S. "newspaper of record," had virtually no stories in its first 10
pages other than those about the Iraqi Revolution. While another great
revolution that took place just six months later in Cuba is better
remembered today, Washington regarded the Iraqi upheaval as far more
threatening to its vital interests at the time. President Dwight D.
Eisenhower called it "the gravest crisis since the Korean War." The day
after the Iraqi Revolution, 20,000 U.S. Marines began landing in
Lebanon. The day after that, 6,600 British paratroopers were dropped
into Jordan.
This was what came to be known as the "Eisenhower Doctrine." The
United States would intervene directly--go to war--to prevent the
spread of revolution in the vital Middle East. U.S. and British
expeditionary forces went in to save the neocolonial governments in
Lebanon and Jordan. Had they not, the popular impulse from Iraq would
have surely brought down the rotten dependent regimes in Beirut and
Amman. But Eisenhower, his generals and his arch-imperialist Secretary
of State John Foster Dulles also had something else in mind: invading
Iraq, overturning the revolution and installing a new puppet government
in Baghdad. Three factors forced Washington to abandon that plan
in 1958: the sweeping character of the Iraqi Revolution;
the announcement by the United Arab Republic, which bordered Iraq, that
its forces would fight the imperialists if they sought to invade; and
the emphatic support of the People's Republic of China and the Soviet
Union for the revolution. The USSR began a mobilization of troops in
the southern Soviet republics close to Iraq. The combination of these
factors forced the U.S. leaders to accept the existence of the Iraqi
Revolution.
But Washington never really reconciled itself to the loss of
Iraq. Over the next three decades, the U.S. government applied many
tactics designed to weaken and undermine Iraq as an independent
country. At various times--such as after Iraq completed the
nationalization of the Iraqi Petroleum Co. in 1972 and signed a defense
treaty with the USSR--the United States gave massive military support
to right-wing Kurdish elements fighting Baghdad and added Iraq to its
list of "terrorist states." The United States supported the more
rightist elements within the post-revolution political structure
against the communist and left-nationalist forces. For example,
the United States applauded the suppression of the Iraqi Communist
Party and left-led labor unions by the Ba'ath Party government of
Saddam Hussein in the late 1970s.
In the 1980s, the United States encouraged and helped to fund and arm
Iraq in its war against Iran. U.S. domination of the latter was ended
by Iran's Islamic revolution in 1979. In reality, though, the U.S. aim
in the Iran-Iraq war was to weaken and destroy both countries. Ex-
Secretary of State Henry Kissinger revealed the real U.S. attitude
about the war when he said, "I hope they kill each other." The
Pentagon provided Iraq's air force with satellite photos of Iranian
targets. At the same time, as the Iran-Contra scandal revealed, the
United States was sending anti- aircraft missiles to Iran. The Iran-
Iraq war was a disaster, killing a million people and weakening both
countries.
COLLAPSE OF USSR AND GULF WAR
When the war finally ended in 1988, developments in the Soviet Union
were posing a new and even graver danger to Iraq, which had a military
and friendship treaty with the USSR. In pursuit of "permanent détente"
with the United States, the Gorbachev leadership in Moscow began to cut
its support for its allies in the developing world. In 1989, Gorbachev
went further and withdrew support for the socialist governments in
Eastern Europe, most of which then collapsed. This sharp shift in the
world relationship of forces--culminating with the collapse of the
Soviet Union itself two years later--constituted the greatest victory
for U.S. imperialism since World War II.
It also opened the door for the U.S. war against Iraq in 1991, and
more than a decade of sanctions/blockade and bombing that have
devastated Iraq and its people. Today, the Bush administration is
seeking to win public support for a new war against Iraq by talking
about "weapons of mass destruction" and "human rights." The reality is
that Washington is concerned about neither Iraq's diminished military
capacity nor human rights anywhere in the world.
What moves U.S. policy toward Iraq in 2002 is the same objective that
motivated Washington and Wall Street 80 years ago: oil.
- END -
(Copyright Workers World Service: Everyone is permitted to copy and
distribute verbatim copies of this document, but changing it is not
allowed. For more information contact Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY,
NY 10011; via e-mail: [email protected] Subscribe wwnews-
[email protected] Unsubscribe [email protected] Support the
voice of resistance http://www.workers.org/orders/donate.php)