> On 9/25/2010 7:09 PM, Marv Gandall wrote:
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>> MG: But the Shah and the Saudi monarchy remained staunch US allies, guaranteeing access to their oil, adjusting production quotas at critical junctures against cartel members promoting more aggressive pricing, recycling petrodollars into US financial assets, goods, and services, and favouring US oil exploration and oil servicing companies with their business. The US, like any imperialist power, installed and supported despotic monarchies and military dictatorships in the Middle East and elsewhere in order to ensure that wealth of the world's resources would be shared between a small number of pro-Western ruling families and US multinational corporations, rather than redistributed downwards to the populations of these states or diverted to commercial competitors from France, Russia, and, more recently, China. The US has always reacted strongly to movements and regimes in the Middle East and elsewhere, whether Islamist or secular nationalist, who have resisted US and Western imperialist control of their economies and have sought instead to redirect their resource wealth into endogenous economic and social development.
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> SA: You claim the US wanted access to Iraqi oil. Yet obviously Saddam Hussein was always happy to grant the US access to its oil, for a price, just like any other oil producer. You claim the US wants control over price. I pointed out that the Shah was a close US ally, yet was among the main *instigators* of OPEC's aggressive pricing in the 70s. You respond by simply deadpanning - wrongly - that the Shah acted against aggressive OPEC pricers, which he didn't.
MG: I note that you now disingenuously omit any reference to the Saudis, whom you previously mentioned together with the Iranian monarch, as being somehow antagonistic to US oil interests. I have not been able to to either confirm or refute your assertion about the Shah's purportedly aggressive pricing policy. If you can provide evidence, I'd stand corrected, but would continue to reject your preposterous inference that it proves the divergent interests of Iran under the Shah and the US. The Shah, it will be recalled, colluded with Kermit Roosevelt Jr. and the CIA in the overthrow of Mossadegh, and the tyrant remained a loyal ally of the US until his overthrow by Islamist and left-wing forces seeking an independent path of development outside the orbit of US imperialism.
But the more important omission from your reply are the Saudis who, as the swing producer in the Middle East, HAVE consistently acted to adjust production and drive down prices during oil price shocks at the behest of the US and other oil consumers - most notably, in the late 70s and towards the end of the current decade - over the protests of Iran, Venezuela, Libya and other producers less accomodating to US interests.
> SA: You argue that Iraq was different from Saudi Arabia and the Shah because the latter, being US allies, recycled petrodollars into Western banks and purchases from Western multinationals. Well, where do you think Iraq put its oil surpluses? Under Saddam Hussein's mattress? Who do you think built the Iraqi telephone, sewage, and electricity systems? Not European companies? Did Iraq build its own fleet of ministerial automobiles or did it buy them from Mercedes Benz? After the windfall of the 1979 oil shock, Saddam went on a weapons buying spree for his war with Iran. Who sold him the weapons?
MG: Saddam was an ally of the US from his participation in the CIA-backed overthrow of the Iraqi nationalist Kassem in 1963 through the Iraq-Iran war of 1980-88 until the rupture with the US precipitated by his invasion of Kuwait in 1990. So, of course, the US funded and armed him in the war against their joint enemy, the Islamic Republic of Iran, and he was able to participate in the international oil market as a member of OPEC on the same terms as Saudi Arabia and other members of the cartel until the first Gulf War.
After the war, the US succeeded in imposing a crippling oil and financial embargo on Iraq which lasted until the overthrow of Saddam 13 years later. So, no, from 1990 on, Iraq was not generating oil surpluses or building infrastructure or welcoming FDI or recycling petrodollars into Western banks or purchasing goods from Western multinationals except on the black market or through the very restrictive oil-for-food program which was later initiated by the UN to ease the terrible suffering and loss of life the embargo was inflicting on the Iraqi people.
> SA: Here is a mathematical truism: 100% of an oil producer's earnings from foreign oil sales go either to purchases from foreign companies or to petrodollar recycling. There is no "radical" or "socialist" exception to this truism. You talk about "endogenous" development, but what does it mean? Autarchic development? A poor oil producing country can't be autarchic, it has to sell its oil abroad. When it does so, it has to send the earnings either to foreign banks or foreign companies. There's no way around this.
MG: No kidding. My reference was to the unequal distribution of oil revenues by US-supported regimes as against that of Islamist and left nationalist regimes which have sought to redirect a greater portion of revenues formerly accruing to the multinationals and the wealthy upper classes at the economic and social needs of the mass of the population.
> SA: You write these stentorian passages about how "The US has always done thus and such" that sound a lot like Chomsky, but I'm not always sure you've really thought about what they mean.
MG: I've looked up stentorian and, in all fairness, I don't think I've been blaring, blasting, booming, clamorous, clangorous, deafening, earsplitting, piercing, plangent,resounding, ringing, roaring, slam-bang, sonorous, loud, thundering, or thunderous throughout our exchanges .