> TRB FROM WASHINGTON
> Crude
> by Peter Beinart
[....]
> If all the Bush administration wanted from Iraq were those six million
> daily barrels of crude--if all its talk about nuclear, chemical, and
> biological weapons was merely a smoke screen--why wouldn't the
> United States simply lift sanctions? Attacking Saddam, after all,
> entails huge financial costs, risks American lives, and could prompt
> civil war in precisely those parts of Iraq where oil companies want to
> drill. Lifting sanctions would far more easily produce the same
> result--ince it is sanctions that have partially prevented Iraq from
> importing the equipment that it needs to boost oil production. Saddam
> has made it clear that he'd love to pump more oil--if the world would
> let him use the revenue to buy palaces and Scuds. In 1995, for
> instance, Baghdad announced that if sanctions were lifted it would
> enter into agreements with foreign oil companies aimed at boosting
> production to between six and seven million barrels per day--roughly
> the same amount analysts envision under a post-Saddam regime.
>
> And while Russian, French, and Italian oil companies would have the
> inside track in cutting deals with Saddam if sanctions fell, that's
> largely because Washington's anti-Saddam hard-line has kept
> American oil companies from investing in Iraq. Saddam's
> government, for its part, has said it would be perfectly happy to
> partner with American oil companies. And even under sanctions, it
> has knowingly sold substantial quantities of oil--through
> middlemen--to U.S. energy behemoths like ChevronTexaco and
> Valero.
>
> In fact, it isn't war that the American oil industry has been lobbying
> for all these years; it's the end of sanctions. As late as October
2001,
> after Bush administration hawks had already begun talking about
> war with Iraq, the American Petroleum Institute was still focused on
> trying to lift sanctions. In an interview with Energy Day, an institute
> spokesman criticized "the roadblocks of U.S. law that unilaterally
> close important markets to U.S. companies while leaving the door
> wide open for competitors."
Does anyone know about this lobbying? More specifics?
> Indeed, for their first nine months in office, Cheney and the Bush
> team didn't propose invading Iraq; they proposed scaling back the
> U.N. sanctions regime. The Bush administration changed its mind
> not because of oil but because of terrorism. September 11 made the
> terrorist threat a reality, and the more American policymakers began
> worrying about that threat, the more they began worrying about the
> proliferation of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons--which
> seems to be how they arrived at war with Iraq.
Unless the aim is redrawing the political map of the Middle East. The piece by Nicholas Lemann in the New Yorker fwd'd to the list some time back outlined this intent on the part of the Rumsfeld-Cheney-Wolfowitz quarter prior to 9/11. This is what they've been considering for nearly a decade. That seems a more likely motive than anti-terrorism, as the coming war shifts sights away from Al Qaeda rather than honing in on it.
-- Shane
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