Why Did We Invade Iraq Anyway?
Putting a Country in Your Tank
by Michael Schwartz
Lately,
even Democratic candidates for president have been weighing in on why
the U.S. must maintain a long-term, powerful military presence in Iraq.
Hillary Clinton, for example, used phrases like protecting our "vital
national security interests" and preventing Iraq from becoming a "petri
dish for insurgents," in a major policy statement. Barack Obama, in his
most important speech on the subject, talked of "maintaining our
influence" and allowing "our troops to strike directly at al Qaeda."
These arguments, like the constantly migrating justifications for
invading Iraq, serially articulated by the Bush administration, manage
to be vaguely plausible (with an emphasis on the "vaguely") and also
strangely inconsistent (with an emphasis on the "inconsistent").
That
these justifications for invading, or remaining, are unsatisfying is
hardly surprising, given the reluctance of American politicians to
mention the approximately $10-$30 trillion of oil lurking just beneath
the surface of the Iraq "debate" -- and not much further beneath the
surface of Iraqi soil. Obama, for example, did not mention oil at all
in his speech, while Clinton mentioned it twice in passing. President
Bush and his top officials and spokespeople have been just as reticent
on the subject.
Why then did the U.S. invade Iraq? Why is
occupying Iraq so "vital" to those "national security interests" of
ours? None of this makes sense if you don't have the patience to drill
a little beneath the surface – and into the past; if you don't take
into account that, as former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz
once put it, Iraq "floats on a sea of oil"; and if you don't consider
the decades-long U.S. campaign to control, in some fashion, Middle East
energy reservoirs. If not, then you can't understand the incredible
tenaciousness with which George W. Bush and his top officials have
pursued their Iraqi dreams or why -- now that those dreams are clearly
so many nightmares -- even the Democrats can't give up the ghost.
The Rise of OPEC
The
United States viewed Middle Eastern oil as a precious prize long before
the Iraq war. During World War II, that interest had already sprung to
life: When British officials declared Middle Eastern oil "a vital prize
for any power interested in world influence or domination," American
officials agreed, calling it "a stupendous source of strategic power
and one of the greatest material prizes in world history."
This
led to a scramble for access during which the United States established
itself as the preeminent power of the future. Crucially, President
Franklin Delano Roosevelt successfully negotiated an "oil for
protection" agreement with King Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia.
That was 1945. From then on, the U.S. found itself actively (if often
secretly) engaged in the region. American agents were deeply involved
in the overthrow of a democratically elected Iranian government in 1953
(to reverse the nationalization of Iran's oil fields), as well as in
the fateful establishment of a Baathist Party dictatorship in Iraq in
the early 1960s (to prevent the ascendancy of leftists who, it was
feared, would align the country with the Soviet Union, putting the
country's oil in hock to the Soviet bloc).
U.S. influence in
the Middle East began to wane in the 1970s, when the Organization of
the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) was first formed to coordinate
the production and pricing of oil on a worldwide basis. OPEC's power
was consolidated as various countries created their own oil companies,
nationalized their oil holdings, and wrested decision-making away from
the "Seven Sisters," the Western oil giants -- among them Shell,
Texaco, and Standard Oil of New Jersey -- that had previously dominated
exploration, extraction, and sales of black gold.
With all the
key oil exporters on board, OPEC began deciding just how much oil would
be extracted and sold onto international markets. Once the group
established that all members would follow collective decisions --
because even a single major dissenter might fatally undermine the
ability to turn the energy "spigot" on or off -- it could use the
threat of production restrictions, or the promise of expansion, to
bargain with its most powerful trading partners. In effect, a new power
bloc had emerged on the international scene that could -- in some
circumstances -- exact tangible concessions even from the United States
and the Soviet Union, the two superpowers of the time.
Though
the United States was largely self-sufficient in oil when OPEC was
first formed, the American economy was still dependent on trading
partners, particularly Japan and Europe, which themselves were
dependent on Middle Eastern oil. The oil crises of the early 1970s,
including the sometimes endless gas lines in the U.S., demonstrated
OPEC's potential.
It was in this context that the American
alliance with the Saudi royal family first became so crucial. With the
largest petroleum reserves on the planet and the largest production
capacity among OPEC members, Saudi Arabia was usually able to shape the
cartel's policies to conform to its wishes. In response to this simple
but essential fact, successive American presidents strengthened the
Rooseveltian alliance, deepening economic and military relationships
between the two countries. The Saudis, in turn, could normally be
depended upon to use their leverage within OPEC to fit the group's
actions into the broader aims of U.S. policy. In other words,
Washington gained favorable OPEC policies mainly by arming, and
propping up a Saudi regime that was chronically fragile.
Backed
by a tiny elite that used immense oil revenues to service its own
narrow interests, the Saudi royals subjected their impoverished
population to an oppressively authoritarian regime. Not surprisingly,
then, the "alliance" required increasing infusions of American military
aid as well political support in situations that were often
uncomfortable, sometimes untenable, for Washington. On its part, in an
era of growing nationalism, the Saudis found overt pro-American
policies difficult to sustain, given the pressures and proclivities of
its OPEC partners and its own population.
The Neocons Seize the Unipolar Moment
The
key year in the Middle East would be 1979, when Iranians, who had lost
their government to an American and British inspired coup in 1953,
poured into the streets. The American-backed Shah's brutal regime fell
to a popular revolution; American diplomats were taken hostage by
Iranian student demonstrators; and Ayatollah Khomeini and the mullahs
took power. The Iranian revolution added a combustible new element to
an already complex and unstable equation. It was, in a sense, the match
lit near the pipeline. A regime hostile to Washington, and not
particularly amenable to Saudi pressure, had now become an active
member of OPEC, aspiring to use the organization to challenge American
economic hegemony.
It was at this moment, not surprisingly,
that the militarization of American Middle Eastern policy came out of
the shadows. In 1980, President Jimmy Carter -- before his Habitat for
Humanity days -- enunciated what would become known as the "Carter
Doctrine": that Persian Gulf oil was "vital" to American national
interests and that the U.S. would use "any means necessary, including
military force" to sustain access to it. To assure that "access," he
announced the creation of a Rapid Deployment Joint Task Force, a new
military command structure that would be able to deliver personnel from
all the armed services, together with state-of-the-art military
equipment, to any location in the Middle East at top speed.
Nurtured
and expanded by succeeding presidents, this evolved into the United
States Central Command (Centcom), which ended up in charge of all U.S.
military activity in the Middle East and surrounding regions. It would
prove the military foundation for the Gulf War of 1990, which rolled
back Saddam Hussein's occupation of Kuwait, and therefore prevented him
from gaining control of that country's oil reserves. Though it was not
emphasized at the time, that first Gulf War was a crystalline
application of the Carter Doctrine -- that "any means necessary,
including military force," should be used to guarantee American access
to Middle Eastern oil. That war, in turn, convinced a shaky Saudi royal
family -- that saw Iraqi troops reach its border – to accept an ongoing
American military presence within the country, a development meant to
facilitate future applications of the Carter Doctrine, but which would
have devastating unintended consequences.
The peaceful
disintegration of the Soviet Union at almost the same moment seemed to
signal that Washington now had uncontested global military supremacy,
triggering a debate within American policy circles about how to utilize
and preserve what Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer first
called the "unipolar moment." Future members of the administration of
Bush the younger were especially fierce advocates for making aggressive
use of this military superiority to enhance U.S. power everywhere, but
especially in the Middle East. They eventually formed a policy advocacy
group, The Project for a New American Century, to develop, and lobby
for, their views. The group, whose membership included Dick Cheney,
Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and dozens of other key individuals who
would hold important positions in the executive branch after George W.
Bush took office, wrote an open letter to President Clinton in 1998
urging him to turn his "administration's attention to implementing a
strategy for removing Saddam's regime from power." They cited both the
Iraqi dictator's military belligerence and his control over "a
significant portion of the world's supply of oil."
Two years
later, the group issued a ringing policy statement that would be the
guiding text for the new administration. Entitled Rebuilding America's
Defenses, it advocated what would become known as a Rumsfeldian-style
transformation of the Pentagon. U.S. military preeminence was to be
utilized to "secure and expand'' American influence globally and
possibly, in the cases of North Korea and Iraq, used "to remove these
regimes from power and conduct post-combat stability operations." (The
document even commented on the problem of defusing American domestic
resistance to such an aggressive stance, noting ominously that public
approval could not be obtained without "some catastrophic and
catalyzing event -- like a new Pearl Harbor.")
Saddam's Iraq and Oil on the Brain
The
second Bush administration ascended to the presidency just as American
influence in the Middle East looked to be on the decline. Despite
victory in the first Gulf War and the fall of the Soviet Union,
American influence over OPEC and oil policies seemed under threat. That
sucking sound everyone suddenly heard was a tremendous increase in the
global demand for oil. With fears rising that, in the very near future,
such demand could put a strain on OPEC's resources, member states began
negotiating ever more vigorously for a range of concessions and
expanded political power in exchange for expanded energy production. By
this time, of course, the United States had joined the ranks of the
energy deficient and dependent, as imported oil surged past the 50%
mark.
In the meantime, key ally Saudi Arabia was further
weakened by the rise of al-Qaeda, which took as its main goal the
overthrow of the royal family, and its key target -- think of those
unintended consequences -- the American troops triumphantly stationed
at permanent bases in the country after Gulf War I. They seemed to
confirm the accusations of Osama bin Laden and other Saudi dissidents
that the royal family had indeed become little but a tool of American
imperialism. This, in turn, made the Saudi royals increasingly
reluctant hosts for those troops and ever more hesitant supporters of
pro-American policies within OPEC.
The situation was
complicated further by what was obvious to any observer: The potential
future leverage that both Iraq and Iran might wield in OPEC. With the
second and third largest oil reserves on the planet -- Iran also had
the second largest reserves of natural gas -- their influence seemed
bound to rise. Iraq's, in particular, would be amplified substantially
as soon as Saddam Hussein's regime was freed from severe limitations
imposed by post-war UN sanctions, which prevented it from either
developing new oil fields or upgrading its deteriorating energy
infrastructure. Though the leaders of the two countries were enemies,
having fought a bitter war in the 1980s, they could agree, at least, on
energy policies aimed at thwarting American desires or demands -- a
position only strengthened in 1998 when the citizens of Venezuela, the
most important OPEC member outside the Middle East, elected the
decidedly anti-American Hugo Chavez as president. In other words, in
January 2001, the new administration in Washington could look forward
to negotiating oil policy not only with a reluctant Saudi royal family,
but also a coterie of hostile powers in a strengthened OPEC.
It
is hardly surprising, then, that the new administration, bent on
unipolarity anyway and dreaming of a global Pax Americana, wasted no
time implementing the aggressive policies advocated in the PNAC
manifesto. According to then Secretary of the Treasury Paul O'Neill in
his memoir The Price of Loyalty, Iraq was much on the mind of Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld at the first meeting of the National Security
Council on January 30, 2001, seven months before the 9/11 attacks. At
that meeting, Rumsfeld argued that the Clinton administration's Middle
Eastern focus on Israel-Palestine should be unceremoniously dumped.
"[W]hat we really want to think about," he reportedly said, "is going
after Saddam." Regime change in Iraq, he argued, would allow the U.S.
to enhance the situation of the pro-American Kurds, redirect Iraq
toward a market economy, and guarantee a favorable oil policy.
The
adjudication of Rumsfeld's recommendation was shuffled off to the
mysterious National Energy Policy Development Group that Vice President
Cheney convened as soon as Bush took occupancy of the Oval Office. This
task force quickly decided that enhanced American influence over the
production and sale of Middle East oil should be "a primary focus of
U.S. international energy policy," relegating both the development of
alternative energy sources and domestic energy conservation measures to
secondary, or even tertiary, status. A central goal of the
administration's Middle East focus would be to convince, or coerce,
states in that region "to open up areas of their energy sectors to
foreign investment"; that is, to replace government control of the oil
spigot -- the linchpin of OPEC power -- with decision-making by
multinational oil companies headquartered in the West and responsive to
U.S. policy needs. If such a program could be extended even to a
substantial minority of Middle Eastern oil fields, it would prevent
coordinated decision-making and constrain, if not break, the power of
OPEC. This was a theoretically enticing way to staunch the loss of
American power in the region and truly turn the Bush years into a new
unipolar moment in the Middle East.
Having determined its
goals, the Task Force began laying out a more detailed strategy.
According to Jane Mayer of the New Yorker, the most significant
innovation was to be a close collaboration between Cheney's energy crew
and the National Security Council (NSC). The NSC evidently agreed "to
cooperate fully with the Energy Task Force as it considered the
'melding' of two seemingly unrelated areas of policy: 'the review of
operational policies towards rogue states,' such as Iraq, and 'actions
regarding the capture of new and existing oil and gas fields.'"
Though
all these deliberations were secret, enough of what was going on has
emerged in these last years to demonstrate that the "melding" process
was successful. By March of 2001, according to O'Neill, who was a
member of both the NSC and the task force:
"Actual
plans.... were already being discussed to take over Iraq and occupy it
-- complete with disposition of oil fields, peacekeeping forces, and
war crimes tribunals -- carrying forward an unspoken doctrine of
preemptive war."
O'Neill also reported that, by the time of the
9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the plan for
conquering Iraq had been developed and that Secretary of Defense
Rumsfeld indeed urged just such an attack at the first National
Security Council meeting convened to discuss how the U.S. should react
to the disaster. After several days of discussion, an attack on Iraq
was postponed until after al-Qaeda had been wiped out and the Taliban
driven from power in Afghanistan. It took only until January 2002 --
three months of largely successful fighting in Afghanistan -- before
the "administration focus was returning to Iraq." It wasn't until
November 2002, though, that O'Neill heard the President himself endorse
the invasion plans, which took place the following March 20th.
The Logic of Regime Change
With
this background, it's easier to understand the recent brief, but highly
significant, flurry of controversy over a single sentence in The Age of
Turbulence, the bestselling, over-500-page memoir by longtime Federal
Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan. He wrote simply, as if this were
utterly self-evident: "I am saddened that it is politically
inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is
largely about oil." As the first major government official to make such
a statement, he was asked repeatedly to explain his thinking,
particularly since his comment was immediately repudiated by various
government officials, including White House spokesman Tony Fratto, who
labeled it "Georgetown cocktail party analysis."
His
subsequent comments elaborated on a brief explanation in the memoir:
"It should be obvious that as long as the United States is beholden to
potentially unfriendly sources of oil and gas, we are vulnerable to
economic crises over which we have little control." Since former ally
Saddam Hussein was, by then, unremittingly unfriendly, Greenspan felt
that (as he told Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward) "taking Saddam
out was essential" in order to make "certain that the existing system
[of oil markets] continues to work." In an interview at Democracy Now!
he elaborated on this point, explaining that his support for ousting
Hussein had "nothing to do with the weapons of mass destruction," but
rather with the economic "threat he could create to the rest of the
world" through his control over key oil reserves in the Persian Gulf
region.
Greenspan's argument echoes the logic expressed by the
Project for a New American Century and other advocates of aggressive
military solutions to the threat of OPEC power. He was concerned that
Saddam Hussein, once an ally, but by then a sworn enemy of U.S.
interests in the Middle East, would control key oil flows. That, in
turn, might allow him to exercise economic, and so political, leverage
over the United States and its allies.
The former Fed chief
then elaborated further, arguing that the threat of Saddam could be
eliminated "by one means or another" -- either by "getting him out of
office or getting him out of the control position he was in." Replacing
Saddam with a friendly, pro-American government seemed, of course, like
such a no-brainer. Why have a guy like that in a "control position"
over oil, after all? (And think of the possibility of taking those
embarrassing troops out of Saudi Arabia and stationing them at large
permanent bases in nearby, well-situated, oil-rich Iraq.) Better by
far, as the Cheney Energy Task put it, "to open up areas of [Iraq's]
energy sectors to foreign investment." Like the Task Force members,
Greenspan believed that removing oil -- not just from Saddam's control,
but from the control of any Iraqi government -- would permanently
remove the threat that it or a broken OPEC could continue to wield
economic leverage over the United States.
Revealingly enough,
Greenspan saw the invasion of Iraq as a generically conservative action
-- a return, if anything, to the status quo ante that would preserve
unencumbered American access to sufficient Middle Eastern oil. With
whole new energy-devouring economies coming on line in Asia, continued
American access seemed to require stripping key Middle Eastern nations
of the economic and political power that scarcity had already begun to
confer. In other words, Greenspan's conservative urge implied exactly
the revolutionary changes in the political and economic equation that
the Bush administration would begin to test out so disastrously in Iraq
in March 2003. It's also worth remembering that Iraq was only
considered a first pit stop, an easy mark for invasion and occupation.
PNAC-nurtured eyes were already turning to Iran by then as indicated by
the classic prewar neocon quip, "Everyone wants to go to Baghdad. Real
men want to go to Tehran."
And beyond this set of radical
changes in the Middle East lay another set for the rest of the world.
In the twenty-first century, expanding energy demand will, sooner or
later (probably sooner), outdistance production. The goal of unfettered
American access to sufficient Middle Eastern oil would, if achieved and
sustained, deprive other countries of sufficient oil, or require them
to satisfy U.S. demands in order to access it. In other words,
Greenspan's conservative effort to preserve American access implied a
dramatic increase in American leverage over all countries that depended
on oil for their economic welfare; that is, a radical transformation of
the global balance of power.
Notice that these ambitions, and
the actions taken to implement them, rested on a vision of an imperial
America that should, could, and would play a uniquely dominant,
problem-solving role in world affairs. All other countries would, of
course, continue to be "vulnerable to economic crises" over which they
would have "little control." Only the United States had the essential
right to threaten, or simply apply, overwhelming military power to the
"problem" of energy; only it had the right to subdue any country that
attempted to create -- or exploit -- an energy crisis, or that simply
had the potential and animus to do so.
None of this was lost
on the unipolar-minded officials who made the decision to invade Iraq
-- and were more ready than any previous administration to spell out,
shock-and-awe style, a new stronger version of the Carter Doctrine for
the planet. According to Treasury Secretary O'Neill, Rumsfeld offered a
vision of the grandiosity of these goals at the first Bush
administration National Security Council meeting:
"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."
An even more grandiose vision was offered to the New York Times by presidential speech writer David Frum a few days later:
"An
American-led overthrow of Saddam Hussein, and the replacement of the
radical Baathist dictatorship with a new government more closely
aligned with the United States, would put America more wholly in charge
of the region than any power since the Ottomans, or maybe even the
Romans."
As worldwide demand for hydrocarbons soared, the United
States was left with three policy choices: It could try to combine
alternative energy sources with rigorous conservation to reduce or
eliminate a significant portion of energy imports; it could accept the
leverage conferred on OPEC by the energy crunch and attempt to
negotiate for an adequate share of what might soon enough become an
inadequate supply; or it could use its military power in an effort to
coerce Middle East suppliers into satisfying American requirements at
the expense of everyone else. Beginning with Jimmy Carter, five U.S.
presidents chose the coercive strategy, with George W. Bush finally
deciding that violent, preemptive regime change was needed to make it
work. The other options remain unexplored.
[Note: This
commentary -- and most of the useful work on the role of oil in Middle
East and world politics -- rests on the remarkable evidential and
analytic foundation provided by Michael Klare's indispensable book,
Blood and Oil,The Dangers and Consequences of America's Growing
Dependency on Imported Petroleum. Readers who seek a full understanding
of these issues should start with that text.]
Michael
Schwartz, Professor of Sociology and Founding Director of the
Undergraduate College of Global Studies at Stony Brook University, has
written extensively on popular protest and insurgency, and on American
business and government dynamics. His books include Radical Protest and
Social Structure and Social Policy and The Conservative Agenda (edited,
with Clarence Lo). His work on Iraq has appeared on numerous Internet
sites, including Tomdispatch, Asia Times, Mother Jones, and ZNET; and
in print in Cities, Contexts, Against the Current, and Z Magazine. His
email address is Ms42@optonline.net.
Copyright 2007 Michael Schwartz
Lately, even Democratic candidates for president have been weighing in on why the U.S. must maintain a long-term, powerful military presence in Iraq. Hillary Clinton, for example, used phrases like protecting our "vital national security interests" and preventing Iraq from becoming a "petri dish for insurgents," in a major policy statement. Barack Obama, in his most important speech on the subject, talked of "maintaining our influence" and allowing "our troops to strike directly at al Qaeda." These arguments, like the constantly migrating justifications for invading Iraq, serially articulated by the Bush administration, manage to be vaguely plausible (with an emphasis on the "vaguely") and also strangely inconsistent (with an emphasis on the "inconsistent"). 
