Iraq, oil and U.S. world hegemony (I)

While millions of people around the world this weekend have marched against a possible war against Iraq initiated by the U.S. lead "coalition of the willing", it seems that President George W. Bush is determined to get this war, no matter what it costs. Secretary of State Colin Powell has said that the U.S. can give Iraq maximum two weeks. The U.S. knows that the decisive attack must start as soon as possible before the warmth comes in April.

It is extremely important for the U.S. to win this war. Their goal is clearly to obtain the "quick victory" scenario lasting only one or two months. This scenario would resemble the Gulf War I, the Kosovo War and the Afghanistan War. It would involve some combinations of strategy and luck in which Saddam Hussein and his leadership was captured or killed, the Iraqi ground forces surrendered quickly, and the presence of U.S. forces prevented civil disorder from breaking out in the oil rich south or in the
Kurdish regions.

This scenario would enable the U.S. to fulfil their goals. Last August 6th an anonymous member of the U.S. Administration said to Washington Post that “the road to the entire Middle East goes through Baghdad”. We can only look at the map. Having troops in Iraq, in Turkey, in the former Soviet Republics in the North and Afghanistan in the East- the U.S. troops totally would be surrounding the "Axis of the Evil" state Iran.

They would also get access to the enormous oil fields in Iraq containing the second largest oil reserves in the world. Colin Powell has said that Iraq’s oil will be "held in trust for the Iraqi people", but he didn’t say anything about who would get paid to take the oil out of the ground and where it would go next.

It seems that it is a matter of National Security of not talking about oil in the Iraq conflict. This is partly because a regime change would benefit U.S. and U.K. oil companies, while if the regime survives, the oil wells will be drilled by the Russian, Chinese, French and Iraqi companies. But mainly, this has to do with another neighbour of Iraq, Saudi Arabia.

Saudi Arabia is the largest oil producing and exporting nation and has the largest oil reserves in the world. The oil production is very cheap. From being an ally of the U.S. with an autocratic kingdom being able to adjust the oil production up and down according to the shifting needs of the U.S. and the world economy, Saudi Arabia has become an unstable and unreliable partner. As a leading OPEC nation it has as the other OPEC nations, been dependent upon relatively high oil prices to keep their own rapidly growing
population into social peace. This does not fit with the U.S. prospects of rising oil import dependence, and by this lower prices.

A successful "quick victory" scenario will enable the planned U.S.A. controlled Iraqi regime to increase the oil production and by this decrease world oil prices. Then Saudi Arabia will have to produce more oil to meet oil revenue targets. This would lead the kingdom to invest more in the oil industry, which again would boil down to the big Western oil companies investing and taking control of the Saudi oil fields.

The result would be the Grand Goal of the Americans running the show in Iraq and the Saudi Arabia. Sufficient military, economic and diplomatic pressures could be made to implement a Latin American style coup for the division of the Saudi Arabia and drawing of a new map of the entire Middle East. These divisions plans have been outlined by the British Labour party Member of Parliament, George Galloway.

If the U.S. succeeds this scenario, they can’t only secure their own present and future need of oil, but also control competitors as France, Germany, Russia and China. France, Russia and China see if their own oil projects are thrown out of the Middle East, the U.S. won’t only maintain, but strengthen its hegemony. This very important step of the U.S. comes in addition to the strategies we have seen in the 1990s and until today. The
expressions of the "Old" and the "New" Europe comes from this divide and rule policy:

U.S. policy has been to balance France and Germany against each other so neither of them dominates Europe. Great Britain, Spain and Italy have as the Blair -Aznar -Berlusconi (BAB) axis co-operated on the flexibilization of the EU labour market and support today the U.S. in the Iraq conflict.

The U.S. has in the Balkan wars shown the EU- especially France and Germany, that they are the strongest military power. The U.S. has by having a policy of enlarging the EU and NATO, and by implementing influence in a corridor of East-European and Central- and East Asian countries reduced German, French, Russian and Chinese influence.

The terrorist attacks of September 11th 2001 made it possible for the U.S. to put many of these plans into practice. The next move to start a war against Iraq is to fulfil the goal of controlling the entire Middle East, but a lot of the outcomes are dependent on what will happen with the war against Iraq, and it makes it necessary to look upon another war scenario. The U.S. hasn’t only outlined a "quick victory" scenario, but also one called "prolonged conflict and nasty outcomes". (This will be treated in part II)

Oslo, 16th of February 2003
IWA-Secretariat