By James Cogan
http://www.countercurrents.org/cogan300609.htm
It is fitting that today’s deadline for the withdrawal of US troops from Iraq’s cities coincides with a meeting in Baghdad to auction off some of the country’s largest oil fields to companies such as ExxonMobil, Chevron and British Petroleum. It is a reminder of the real motives for the 2003 invasion and in whose interests over one million Iraqis and 4,634 American and other Western troops have been killed. The Iraq war was, and continues to be, an imperialist war waged by the American ruling elite for control of oil and geo-strategic advantage
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- Highr0ller
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The contracts will facilitate the first large-scale exploitation of Iraq’s energy resources by US and other transnationals since the country’s oil industry was nationalised in 1972. On offer are 20-year rights over six fields that hold more than five billion barrels of easily and cheaply extractable oil. In the autonomous Kurdish region of northern Iraq, where foreign companies are already operating, the Norwegian firm DNO is now producing so-called “sweet oil” from a relatively small field at Tawke, at a cost of less than $2 a barrel.
In an apt analogy, Larry Goldstein of the US-based Energy Policy Research Foundation told the New York Times last week: “Asking why oil companies are interested in Iraq is like asking why robbers rob banks—because that’s where the money is.” Iraq’s total oil reserves are estimated to be at least 115 billion barrels. Its reserves of natural gas are at least 3.36 billion cubic metres.
Millions of people around the world understood in 2003 that the claims of the Bush administration and its international allies about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and links to terrorism were threadbare lies promulgated to justify the plunder of the country’s oil wealth. The claim by the Obama White House that it is continuing the occupation to consolidate “Iraqi democracy” is also a lie.
The war driven by the decline of US global power and growing class tensions within the United States itself. The American capitalist elite believed that military domination in the Persian Gulf would give them access to lucrative resources, as well as a powerful lever against their main European and Asian rivals, who depend upon the region for critical supplies of energy. The militarist agitation surrounding the war was used to smother public disquiet and divert discontent away from the economic inequality that wracks American society.
It has taken more than six years of carnage—far longer than any pro-war analyst would have predicted—to establish the conditions where majo...
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- Highr0ller
- 4 months ago
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The country has been economically ruined. Unemployment and underemployment stand at between 30 and 50 percent. At least seven million people live on less than $2 a day, and malnutrition and disease are rampant.
SHAME ON AMERICA,
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- Highr0ller
- 4 months ago
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True that to all of the above--U.S. imperialism has a motive-this is nothing new except to my fellow sheeplike countrymen.
