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April 9,
2003
CounterPunch
Special Report
Secret Bechtel Documents
Reveal:
Yes, It Is
About Oil
By DAVID LINDORFF
Is the war against Iraq all about oil? Not to
hear Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld tell it. Back on Nov.
15, he called the notion that oil was the real reason behind
the Bush administration's drive against Saddam Hussein "nonsense,"
saying, "It has nothing to do with oil, literally nothing
to do with oil."
But a new study released by the Institute
for Policy Studies, based upon secret diplomatic cables just
declassified by the National Archives, and internal communications
of the Bechtel Corporation, suggests just the opposite?that oil
is the underlying cause of this war.
The study, which discloses the intimate
links between the Bechtel Corporation and Bechtel executives
and U.S. policy towards Iraq, also shows that some key players
in the push for America's war against Iraq, including Rumsfeld,
Vice President Dick Cheney, and other former Reagan  administration officials
Roger Robinson, Judge William B. Clark and Robert McFarlane,
have been intimately involved in issues relating to Iraqi oil
as far back as the1980s.
Titled "Crude Vision: How Oil Interests
Obscured US Government Focus on Chemical Weapons Use by Saddam
Hussein," this report traces an intense effort by Reagan
officials in the mid-OE80s to win Hussein's approval for a $2-billion
oil pipeline to be built by Bechtel, running from the Euphrates
oilfields in southern Iraq westward to Jordan and the Gulf of
Aqaba.
A key player in that effort was Rumsfeld,
then the CEO of Searle drugs, the giant phramaceutical company.
One particularly revealing 1983 memo,
declassified for the first time in February by the National Archives,
concerns a trip by Rumsfeld to Iraq. Acting as a special White
House "peace envoy" allegedly to discuss with Hussein
and then foreign minister Tarik Aziz the bloody war between Iran
and Iraq, Rumsfeld turns out according to this memo to have been
talking not about that war, but about Bechtel's proposed Aqaba
pipeline.
In his memo to Secretary of State George
Schultz reporting on the meeting with Hussein, Rumsfeld talks
at length about the pipeline discussion, but makes no mention
of having discussed either the war or charges that Hussein's
army was using chemical weapons against the Iranians.
The intense focus of Rumsfeld, Schultz
(a former president of Bechtel), Cheney and other Reagan officials,
in concert with Bechtel, on the pipeline, reads like an abbreviated,
or mini "Pentagon Papers," laying the groundwork for
a collapse in relations between the U.S. and Iraq, and eventually
to
war. The documents also cast Bechtel's
current position as one of two top candidates for the lucrative
contract to "rebuild Iraq" in a troubling light.
As American troops press into Baghdad,
and Iraqi casualties run into the thousands, Counterpunch speaks
with Jim Valette, director of research at the Sustainable Energy
and Economy Network, and one of the three authors of "Crude
Vision."
Q: What prompted this study?
A: We were examing the interconnections
between private corporations and the U.S. government in the pursuit
of oil worldwide since 1995--principally the U.S. financing --through
the World Bank and US agencies like the Export-Import Bank and
the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC), etc.?of that
pursuit. But what has clearly occurred in recent months has been
clearly an even more serious expression of this pursuit of fossil
fuels for the benefit of Big Oil, which is an extention of this
relation into the military role. And so we're looking at the
deployment of troops and paramilitaries financed by the U.S.
government worldwide, and of course the most serious conflict
of interest is in Iraq. In the course of that research we saw
the beginning and end of the story of American efforts to gain
control of Iraq's oilfields, the beginning being Rumsfeld's meeting
with Saddam Hussein in Deecemer 1983 to the end, which was the
Independent Counsel's investigation of the Attorney General,
at the time, Edwin Meese, and his relationship with one of the
brokers of the pipeline, E Robert Wallachs. Before this nobody
had connected the dots between Rumsfeld and the Meese investigation
and nobody had examined exactly how dominant this pipeline project
was in the diplomacy and the burgeoning relationship between
the Reagan administration and Saddam Hussein. It was in that
context that we came across corporate records and government
memoranda related to the Aqaba pipeline project. It was a real
eye-opener to us to see how interwomen Bechtel's interests were
with the Reagan Administration.
Q. We1re talking about stuff that happened
almost 20 years ago. How is this relevant to what's happening
in Iraq now?
A: This story, I think, is timely even
though it's 20 years old because Bechtel is back now, as the
likely winner of the contract to rebuild Iraq's infrastructure,
and many of those Reagan administration officials are back, and
they are poised to get their hands on Iraq's oil again.
Q: So what is new here?
A: The release in February by the National
Archives of cables back and forth between Washington and U.S.
diplomats in the Middle East around the time of 1983 and 1984
disclose for the first time what really transpired in Rumsfeld's
meetings with Saddam and other Iraqi officials. What had previously
been reported was that Rumsfeld had a cozy meeting with Saddam
in Baghdad in December 1983. In the past, the focus was on whether
or not he had raised the issue of Saddam's use of chemical arms
against Iran. But what the actual memoranda show is that a big
part of Rumsfeld's discussion with Saddam Hussein was this new
proposal from Bechtel to build a pipeline form Iraq to Jordan.
I mean Rumsfeld was executing the marching
orders of George Schultz, who was the
Secretary of State, but who came directly from the presidency
of Bechtel to the Reagan administration. The documents released
by the National Security Archive suggest that what was going
on then had quite a bit to do with oil--certainly more than had
been known before.
Q: Before the release of those documents
we didn't know that Rumsfeld was talking about a pipeline?
A: Right. Right. I mean it was reported
that when he was there he didn't raise an issue with Saddam about
the use of chemical weapons, even though there were reports coming
out of Iran that Saddam was dropping chemical bombs on Iranian
troops.
Q: So we knew before what he didn't talk
about, but not what he was talking about?and that was the pipeline?
A: .Right, he was there sort of as a
bagman for Bechtel. And then there were documents I found in
the government's National Archives that showed the extensive
involvement of Reagan officials and the very close relationship
they had with Bechtel officials, in pursuing this pipeline over
the next two years. We sort of connected the dots between what
was in these National Security Archives and what was known in
the general coverage over the last 15 years.
Q: How important was this pipeline in
terms of <U.S.-Iraqi> relations?
A: It was the focus of U.S. relations
with Iraq for several years, right through the period that Iraq
was locked in a bitter war with Iran. In one 1984 internal company
memo, Bechtel executive H. B. Scott exhorts his colleagues at
Bechtel, after it appeared that all this diplomacy by Rumsfeld
seemed to be paying off, "I cannot emphasise enough the
need for maximum
Bechtel management effort at all levels
of the U.S. government and industry to support this project.
It has significant political overtones. The time may be ripe
for this project to move promptly with very significant rewards
to Bechtel for having made it possible." And in these documents
we see how tightly interwoven this management effort is with
their former colleagues such as George Schultz in the State Department
in implementing this initiative. It shows how corporations take
advantage of U.S. geopolitics in the region and how they try
to profit from those geopolitical developments. Another important
memo was in July of 1985, after Bechtel had run into some difficulties
in assuaging Saddam's fears about potential Israeli threats to
the pipeline. Bechtel and the State Department were having trouble
getting the right degree of assurance from the Isreaeli Labor
Party [then the ruling party in Israwl] that the pipeline would
be off limits to attack. Bechtel and the Reagan administration
officials were trying to get absolute assurance from the Labor
Party that the pipeline would absolutely not be
attacked. There were some frustrations
to that approach in 1985, and so Bechtel hired a couple of very
close friends of the Reagan administration to sort out the deal.
In July of 1985, pipeline promoters hired Judge Jim Clark, who
was considered Reagan's right hand man. He had just left government
to go into private business. There's a memo from Judge Clark
saying that he's "on board" and laying out the terms
of his involvement, which were $500 an hour, and saying he'd
be flying to Baghdad, not as a private consultant, but representing
himself as a White House representative. That memorandum, which
is avialable on our website (<www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB82>),
shows how blurry that revolving door had become. He's working
for the government while he's simultaneously getting paid as
an agent for Bechtel.
Q: Okay, so we have the evidence that
there was this big concern about getting this big pipeline for
Bechtel, and the interest in getting oil out without it having
to go through the Persian Gulf. But wasn't that a legitimate
national security concern for the U.S., given Iran's political
situation and its hostility towards America?
A: Well, it has been long-standing US
national security policy on paper
that threats to the free flow of oil
are threats to national security, and this is what we're getting
at here. Is this pursuit of oil or the pursuit of empire? Some
folks define what's going on in Iraq as U.S. pursuit of empire,
but right now it's really two sides of the same coin. And this
policy of
pursuing oil and empire is coming up
against all sorts of realities now that weren't well understood
back in the 1980s. On the National security side, this pursuit
of oil wealth at all costs has huge costs to democracy and human
rights. It's creating a backlash in the Middle East and elsewhere
that has had some horrible expressions recently.
Q: The pipeline never got built though.
What happened?
A: In the end, Saddam decided that Bechtel
was trying to charge too much for the project, and so he killed
the project and instead went with a pipeline connecting into
pipelines in Turkey and into Saudi Arabia, but avoiding the Straits
of Hormuz.
Q: Do you expect to see the Aqaba pipeline
revived?
A: Maybe, maybe not. I've seen reports
now of Israel looking to build a pipeline from Iraq to the Golan
Heights. It's not the same project as Bechtel's Aqaba pipeline
idea. Bechtel asked the Commerce Department to keep the Aqaba
pipeline registered as an active project for years, but it's
probably less necessary now for the U.S. and Bechtel. The pipelines
to Saudi Arabia and Turkey give an alternative route for oil
to the Persian Gulf, and Bechtel gets into Iraq as a contractor
to rebuild Iraq after the war. Right now, according to an article
in the Wall Street Journal, Bechtel is one of the two finalists
for the Iraq reconstruction job, along with Parson's group, which
has Halliburton as a secondary contractor. Halliburton is Vice
President Cheney's former company [Note: Cheney is still receiving
payments from Halliburton]. That was reported in the Wall Street
Journal
today (April 2). They're both on the
short list. Halliburton sort of stepped back for obvious reasons
but they1re still in there with Parsons.
A: Aside from the unseemly picture of
two well connected companies getting an inside track for all
that post-war business in Iraq, why do you find the Bechtel involvement
in this situation so troubling?
Q: Schultz worked at Bechtel. So did
(Reagan Defense Secretary) Caspar Weinberger. There were a lot
of Bechtel people in the government in the '80s at the same time
that the Iraqi's were gassing the Iranis. The same people are
now formulating the plans for a coming U.S. occupation of Iraq,
and in turn, the same people will be given the spoils of war--whether
it's Parsons and Halliburton or Bechtel. It's all kind of circular
back to the 1980s, you know -- completing unfinished business--getting
American companies back in there after their being shut out since
1991 and the first Gulf War. Bechtel was also listed by Iraq
in its report to the U.N. weapons inspectors as one of the companies
that helped supply Saddam with equipment and knowledge for making
chemical weapons. Bechtel in the 1980s was prime contractor on
PC 1 and 2, two petrochemical plants constructed in Iraq which
had dual-use capacity. So I guess the bottom line is that the
Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld squad are now holding Saddam Hussein accountable
for chemical weapons of mass destruction--the same weapons which
these same officials ignored in pursuit of the Aqaba pipeline
project. And now we are going to reward the pipeline promoter
with massive contracts for reconstruction resulting from this
policy. There is just such hypocricy in all this.
Q: This all seems like a kind of mini-Pentagon
Papers, laying out the early roots of this war.
A: It's not as much of a blue-print as
was the Pentagon Papers, but these memos and documents do show
how business gets done in Washington, how it was conducted in
the 1980s and how it's probably being conducted now behind closed
doors under secret bidding processes. And it shows how the origins
of American conflict with Iraq involve control of and access
to oil.
Q: Can you see any signs that the current
war is linked directly to oil? I mean the administration has
given so many reasons for going to war I'm surprised they haven't
gotten to oil. I remember in 1991, the first Bush said it was
about jobs, which equates pretty quickly to oil. But they didn't
say that this time around.
A: Yeah, they've redacted any reference
to oil from their language. Maybe that's the best evidence that
that's what it's really about, because it's logical. I mean Bush
the first in his national security papers defined the free flow
of oil as a national security priority, as did President Clinton
in his final months in office. He released a national security
paper that said that the free flow of oil is a national security
priority that must be enforced with military might if necessary.
The current Bush came out with the national security strategy
that redacted this long-standing text dating back to the Carter
administration, but at the same time you had this Cheney energy
policy that continues this idea of the necessity of a "diverse
and free supply of oil" without the military language. And
actually you had Cheney kind of kick off the whole war fever
last August in a speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars. He cited
the specter of Saddam Hussein with his weapons of mass destruction
threatening the flow of oil from the region. Then immediately
afterwards, any kind of reference like that vanished from the
Bush administration's rhetoric, to the point that Secretary of
Defense Rumsfeld called any kind of association of the current
conflict with oil to be an "absurdity." So there is
no document or strategy paper now that says "we must invade
Iraq because our US oil companies have
been shut out of this second largest reservoir of oil for the
last 20 years," but who knows what we'll find in the National
Archives 20 years from now? It's a circumstantial case, but that's
as good as we can do now. And logic certainly has its place as
well. I mean, the question is why are the weapons of mass destruction
today a cause for war when these very same weapons were ignored
by the same officials 20 years ago when they were being used.
What has changed is that other national oil companies--French,
Russian and Chinese--have gotten into Iraq, while U.S. companies
were being frozen out. I'm sure there are other factors. Certainly
the Kuwait invasion didn't help U.S relations with Saddam, and
since Kuwait, Saddam signed very lucrative oil contracts with
the French, Russians, Chinese and others.
Q: You made the point in your paper that
US relations started to tank with Iraq after the rejection of
the oil pipeline.
A: That's true. There was a shift away
from Iraq to Iran right at that time, but I should say that Reagan
and Bush the First both played both sides of the fence for a
while, even after the pipeline project collapsed. You had the
Iran Contra deal, but at the same time the U.S. was providing
Iraq with intelligence about Iranian troop movements. And the
U.S. did extend commodity credits through the Agriculture Department
that Saddam then parlayed into arms. And there were the chemical
plants that Bechtel helped build. So it's been quirkier than
that. But certainly the end of the pipeline destroyed oil relations.
Q: What do you think led to the current
war. What's the oil link?
A: Look at what's in Iraq and what's
undeveloped. Iraq represents a major insurance package against
any kind of political overhaul in Saudi Arabia or problems elsewhere
in the Middle East. Look at the policy that people like Rumsfeld
and others were recommending in the 1990s leading up to this
war and they certainly cited the threat of Saddam Hussein to
regional oil supplies as a cause for war. Certainly if the Bechtel
pipeline had been built, the course of Iraqi-U.S. relations would
have been much different. The failure of that pipeline set into
motion a much different course for those relations.
A: So having control of Iraqi oil is
still a key issue?
Q: It's the sole reason why the Persian
Gulf region and Iraq have been a United States national security
concern for so long. It's not geography.
Q: So what would you say is the lesson
of all this?
A: The lesson is that when it comes to
oil, a dictator is friendly to the U.S. when he's willing to
do business and he's a mortal enemy when he's not. That has been
the driving force behind national security policy, especially
since the fall of the Soviet Union. Oil and national security
policy were all submerged in the context of the Cold War. But
once that Cold War collapsed, now it's a no-holds-barred battle
for oil globally, and the U.S. has seen itself cut out of the
world's second largest reserve of oil--and oil that is very inexpensive
to extract. So with the U.S. shut out of Iraq, certainly it makes
the trigger fingers of U.S. policy-makers itchy. And whether
it's a blood feud or a war for oil, it's just a tragedy that
the people of Iraq and our own sons and daughters and brothers
and sisters are paying the price.
Dave Lindorff
is the author of Killing
Time: an Investigation into the Death Row Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal.
A collection of Lindorff's stories can be found here: http://www.nwuphilly.org/dave.html
Today's
Features
David
Lindorff
Killing the Messengers: It Doesn't
Matter If It's Deliberate or Accidental
Richard
Lichtman
Dr. Phil in the Trenches
John
Brown
Why Uncle Ben Hasn't Sold Uncle Sam:
a Former Foreign Service Staffer on Bush's Policy Failures
Ben
Terrall
Report from the Oakland Docks: "The
Cops Had No Reason to Open Up on Them"
Jason Leopold
FERC and Wall Street: Conversations
May Have Violated Federal Law
Anthony
Gancarski
Conyers Heeds the Call on Perle
Linda Heard
Journalists Die, the Networks Lie, Iraqis Ask "Why?"
Ahmad
Faruqui
Wallowing in Hypocrisy
Wallace
Gagne
Baghdad Babble
Harry
Browne
Report from the Protests at the Bush/Blair
Summit
Larry Kearney
I Understand There's a Boy in
a Baghdad Hospital
Steve
Perry
War Web Log 4/8
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