Gen. Petraeus's comments subtext: Israel vs. OIL

The story about General David Petraeus saying Israel's treatment of Palestinians endangers our troops is not remarkable for its insight, people from Noam Chomsky to neocon Fareed Zakaria have said this since 9/11 and even before, but what is remarkable is that someone in Petraeus position SAID it and it was publicly acknowledged.

I don't doubt Petraeus' concern for our troops, but generals work for elected civilians, which means the civilians may have realized the limits of seizing oil and pipeline routes with naked force.

Recall that when Bush invaded Iraq, Cheney's energy task force had been pouring over maps of Iraqi oil fields and foreign suitors who wanted contracts to drill their (and US companies weren't on the list), Condaleeza Rice's memo about merging the seemingly unrelated objectives of fighting terrorism and seizing oil fields, and the US written Hydrocarbon Law that Bush tried to force the Iraqis to pass that would have given 88% of their oil income to foreign oil companies (ours).

The Iraqi parliament refused to pass that bill in spite of offers of millions in bribes to each member because they knew if they voted for it, they were signing their death warrants. The one popular thing Saddam did was nationalize their oil, to keep most of the profits in the country, and the politicians who undid that would be literally torn to shreds by their own people, not to mention they would never win a fair election again.

The result is that the contracts Iraqis have given out pay out far less than the oil companies wanted as the people of Iraq naturally prefer, and many those contracts have gone to non-American companies despite our troops being a literal gun to Iraq's head. Our oil companies probably could have gotten the same deals from Saddam when the sanctions were lifted if we HADN'T invaded.

Likewise in Afghanistan, though we installed a pliant puppet government with a former Unocal consultant as president to oversee the pipeline route and his heroin dealer brother to shepherd that income to Wall Street, our military presence there has not quelled the Taliban and created the peace along the pipeline route necessary to pump natural gas from Turkmenistan through Pakistan to India.

Worse, client state Pakistan has made a deal for a competing pipeline from Iran that reduces the value of "our" pipeline route. So far, our reaction has been to suddenly notice the terrorists in Pakistan who have been there all along and even funded by their government.

But that is at best a holding maneuver.

Somewhere in the corporate board rooms of the oil and gas cartels, they must be realizing that brute force is not working. The natives are not cooperating with the pillage and rape of their own country's oil, gas, and pipeline income.

So what to do? They can't simply walk away from the greatest source of the world's dwindling, easily accessible oil and gas.

Simple.

What they are doing is what they should have done in the first place: offer the natives better deals as occurred in Iraq, and minimize any political offense that would prevent their government from making deals with American companies.

Which circles back to Israel.

In countries where the leaders have to be somewhat responsive to public opinion, doing business with us means tacitly condoning our ally Israel's ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from the occupied territories. Their leaders can hardly afford to be seen on the front page of their newspapers signing a deal with Exxon or Chevron when the photo next to it is a dead Palestinian child or a bulldozed Palestinian home.

Likewise, even countries our oil companies already have deals with like Saudi, Kuwait, and the various Emirates must react to public opinion when it reaches a certain peak of outrage as happened during the oil embargo during the 70's.

At that point, it is no longer a matter of just padding oil companies profits, but of strategic access to the fuel that runs the world.

After the debacle of Iraq, longstanding plans to invade Saudi Arabia if the royal family is overthrown or another embargo occurred suddenly look less practical.

The only way to keep the oil flowing is to remove the political offense. Make the Israelis behave, pull back to the 1967 borders, give the Palestinians their state and stop the invasions of Lebanon. The Arab governments have said they will recognize Israel in exchange for this and polls of Arab citizens shown the same.

From the Brookings Institute

When those conditions are met, we will be in no danger of having the oil tap turned off.

Our foray into 19th century, British style colonialism in Asia has failed, and now the masters of the universe on Wall Street must swallow their pride and deal with the people of the Persian Gulf and Central Asia as equals and get some of their oil wealth or keep pretending they are inferior races to be herded and exterminated until we are chased out of their countries and get none of the oil money at all.

I think I know which side they'll take, and if it comes to a fight between the Israel Lobby and the Oil Industry, with trillions of dollars in oil income in jeopardy, there is no doubt who will drink whose milkshake.

Letter to Obama: be honest about oil & gas motive for wars

Sent through the White House contact page:

President Obama,

As you are reassessing our military presence in Afghanistan, I would urge you talk frankly with the American people about the role pipelines play in our presence there, and whether that is in the interest of average Americans or just the energy companies scrambling to take business from Russia. Colin Powell's former chief of staff Lawrence Wilkerson gave an excellent speech on this last week, and I was saddened that no president or cabinet member has talked this honestly about our foreign policy.

You can see his speech here.

Ironically, T. Boone Pickens made a similar point recently when he said if we pull out of Iraq, the Chinese will get all the best contracts. I think the American people should hear from our leaders that our troops are being used as leverage in oil company negotiations, don't you?

Pickens failed to point out that China would be getting those contracts without losing the life of one of their troops or taking the life of a single Iraqi. Maybe if our military wasn't available to our oil companies to enforce contract terms to their liking, they would learn how to negotiate as well as the Chinese.

The grown up lie about Iraq and Afghanistan is that we need those oil and gas resources, so we must kill and occupy to get it. But China and other countries are showing that's not necessary for access--you just have to make a deal favorable to both sides. The only thing that could be hurt by that approach is oil company profits margins, but we would save untold billions in unnecessary wars and would stop earning the animosity of people whose families we kill on behalf of Unocal, Chevron, and Exxon.

To the extent that you and your administration are not putting these business motives for our wars front and center in the public debate, you are following the Bush administration example and depriving the public of the chance to make an informed decision and neutering our democracy.

Sincerely,

VIDEO: OIL, FOREIGN POLICY & DEMOCRACY Colin Powell's former chief of staff tell the truth

Colin Powell's former chief of staff confirms what those who have read history know: we are in the region to control their oil ( and I would add not particularly for the benefit of the American people).

Part 2 of this lecture lays out oil and pipeline motives of our current policies from the edge of the Mediterranean to Pakistan.

Part 3 describes the implications for our democracy that the real motives for coups, occupation, and wars for oil are not discussed with the public.

The first part is very good too, but the other two are essential to understanding what are government is doing.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

When our President Bush and now unfortunately President Obama talk about Iraq, Afghanistan, and our role in the Middle East, Central Asia, and Persian Gulf, they tell us fairy tales about fighting terrorism, spreading democracy, and stopping small nations from getting nukes, each is a demonstrable lie that makes us look like imbeciles for not tar and feathering and running out of office anyone who repeats that line of shit.

If we were after terrorists, we would choke off their supply of money, hunt down members of their groups with the CIA, special forces, and Predator drones. Then we would figure out how to make joining those groups less attractive by reducing grievances in the region that drive people into those groups.

One of those grievances is lack of democracy. We don't have to invade and occupy countries to spread democracy, we can simply turn off the supply of money and weapons to dictators in countries like Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and in the past, Pakistan (oddly, once that country reverted to democracy from a dictatorship, they moved from our buddy list to shit list, and we noticed the terrorists who were there all along).

Likewise, while we should discourage nuclear proliferation, any country getting nukes will not be a threat to us. We have thousands and every world leader knows that if they launch one at us or give them to terrorists to detonate here, before one mushroom cloud clears here, their country will be burned off the map.

By contrast, Wilkerson discusses the drive to control the world's declining oil supplies, and two ways to deal with that end:

• having a plan to switch to other kinds of energy in an orderly fashion

• scrambling to control the last barrels then scrambling to replace oil when it's finally gone

He made it clear we are currently pursuing the second course.

We must ask the White House and our representatives in the House and Senate to cut the shit and be honest about what we are doing there, who demanded the action, and what benefit if any it will give average Americans, so we can decide how much more of our tax dollars and how many more of our troops we want to die there.

Wilkerson's bio & background on talk

MORE IRAQ OIL THEFT SOURCES

T. Boone Pickens confirms Iraq War for OIL

Straight from the horse's mouth:

Financier T. Boone Pickens speaks during the World Business Forum in New York October 6, 2009. (REUTERS/Lucas Jackson)

Published on Thursday, October 22, 2009 by Reuters

Pickens says US Firms 'Entitled' to Iraqi Oil

by Tom Doggett

WASHINGTON - Oil tycoon T. Boone Pickens told Congress on Wednesday that U.S. energy companies are "entitled" to some of Iraq's crude because of the large number of American troops that lost their lives fighting in the country and the U.S. taxpayer money spent in Iraq. Boone, speaking to the newly formed Congressional Natural Gas Caucus, complained that the Iraqi government has awarded contracts to foreign companies, particularly Chinese firms, to develop Iraq's vast reserves while American companies have mostly been shut out.

"They're opening them (oil fields) up to other companies all over the world ... We're entitled to it," Pickens said of Iraq's oil. "Heck, we even lost 5,000 of our people, 65,000 injured and a trillion, five hundred billion dollars."

President Barack Obama has pledged to withdraw U.S. troops in Iraq.

"We leave there with the Chinese getting the oil," Pickens said.

FULL TEXT

Essentially, Pickens is saying America can only get a piece of Iraq's oil if we have a gun in their face.

There are a couple of problems with that calculus though.

First, even if American oil companies get oil concessions in Iraq, there is no guarantee that means they will sell it to American citizens for less, or reward us for the sacrifices of tax dollars and our troops lives that it took to get those contracts.

And while we are rightly focused on the thousands of our troops who have died, the Iraqis might be thinking more about the over one million Iraqis killed, with every other family having lost at least one member.

The other thing to note is that China and other countries were somehow able to negotiate contracts with Iraq without invading or occupying the country. Could it be that one way to negotiate is to offer more favorable terms than you competitors instead putting a gun in the face of the people you're negotiating with?

That might be hard to grasp if you are used to calling up Washington and getting the CIA or Pentagon to remove leaders who don't agree to your terms. Military action is a form of welfare for oil companies.

That certainly seemed to be the case in Iraq since as soon as Dick Cheney came into office, he formed a secretive energy task force, and the only revealing document anyone could pry out of it was a map of Iraq's oil fields divided up and a list of foreign suitors for those fields.

And if you think taking care of the oil companies also meant getting cheap gas for the rest of us, think again. BBC journalist Greg Palast was told by a top CIA oil analyst that the war was to prevent the price of oil from going down. The industry's own journal said in 2002 that once sanctions came off Saddam, he could pump too much oil and drive the price DOWN. President Bush even seemed to confirm this when he sent Russia's Putin reassurances that an Iraq War would NOT result in lower oil prices.

The other thing the awarding of contracts to other countries proves is that the oil companies are lying, and getting politicians in DC to lie for them, about Iraqis demanding unreasonable terms that make it impossible for them to drill there and make a profit. Somehow those other countries think Iraq's terms are manageable.

In reality, it is our oil companies who are making unreasonable demands on the Iraqis. After the invasion, President Bush hired an American consulting firm to write an oil law for the Iraqis that gave 88% of their oil income to big oil companies, a deal none of Iraq's oil rich neighbors wouldn't take without a gun to their head, and a provision rarely discussed in the American press, who instead focus on the ethnic division of oil income. The Bush administration pushed so hard for this law that at one point Iraq's prime minister said Bush would fire him if it wasn't passed, and while the Iraqi cabinet approved the law, the full parliament wouldn't vote for it even when the big oil companies offered them bribes of millions of dollars each.

If the war was not about oil, then US politicians would not be browbeating the Iraqis to accept American oil company terms as Joe Biden recently did--they would be twisting the arms of the oil companies to make them give Iraqis the best possible deal so it wouldn't look like oil was why we invaded and to reduce animosity toward the US in the region.

The fact that the likes of T. Boone Pickens are complaining about the Iraqi government shows that we might have done the Iraqis one favor--given them a government that actually looks out for their interests instead of politicians simply lining their own pockets. Now if we could just do ourselves the same favor.

MORE IRAQ OIL THEFT SOURCES

what won't change even if Iran's government does

Americans and many others around the world are hoping for an outcome to Iranian election away from the religious hardliners like President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, but even if Mir-Hossein Mousavi takes power, several things are unlikely to change, and most of them are the points of tension between the US and Iran.

For example, while a new government might be less likely to call for Israel to be "wiped off the map" (or "disappear" from the map as many translators said was more accurate), they will still probably be sympathetic to the plight of Palestinians, fellow Muslims who are undeniably being killed in far larger numbers than Israelis, and systematically forced off their land by Israeli settlers, a process we would call ethnic cleansing anywhere else.

Likewise, it's hard to see them forsaking Hezbollah in Lebanon, given the multiple invasions by Israel and the many Muslims (and Christians) killed there, first in "overkill" to drive the PLO out of the country, then in attempts to crush Hezbollah whose ranks were swelled with Lebanese angered by the first war that caused so much death and destruction beyond its supposed targets.

What is especially unlikely to change is a sense of national ownership of their oil reserves and the income derived from it. Iran has the second or third largest oil reserves in the world. One of our goals in the Iraq War was to force them to give up 88% of their oil income to oil companies as stated in a Bush sponsored Hydrocarbon Law. For comparison, the Saudis, only give up about half. Despite Bush and members of both parties in Washington strong-arming Iraqis to pass it, they could only get the Iraqi cabinet to pass it, never the whole parliament--even when the oil companies offered millions in bribes to each member. And in spite of a war and occupation that cost the lives of over a million Iraqis.

If Iraq won't surrender their oil after all that, the tools of the oil industry in Congress would be foolish to expect the Iranians to give up theirs after an election. The truth is, real democracy makes it harder for corporations to cheat countries out of their natural resources. The oil companies would have had an easier time simply trying to bribe the handful of mullahs who are the real power behind the throne in Iran, just as they did the Shah, the dictator we installed after we overthrew the last secular, democratically elected leader of Iran, Mohammed Mossadegh. His sin was trying to nationalize his country's oil, which would have cut the big oil companies out of most of the profits. In the 1979 revolution in Iran, students were carrying signs with his photo on it. They had not forgotten who fought for their oil, and they wouldn't forgive someone who gave it away now.

Neither will Iran's antagonism with some of her neighbors diminish.

The Saudi conflict with Iran is likely based oil and who gets to decide how much is pumped and therefore the price as much as the Sunni-Shia rivalry.

Israel doesn't want any strong Muslim country in the region who might check their expansion or even criticize it, so they are unlikely to change much, even if the new government makes peace proposals that offer recognition in exchange for reasonable conditions on how Israel treats Palestinians.

And on the broader global stage, how the US treats a more secular, democratic Iran will depend almost entirely on how compliant they are to oil interests. After all, we overthrew Iran's secular prime minister in 1953, and have embraced the Sunni religious extremist Saudis for decades, even though they are far from democratic and Saudi Arabia supported the 9/11 hijackers who killed 3,000 Americans. Blood is thicker than water, but in Washington, oil is thicker than both (or at least the bribes oil companies give are).

MORE IRAQ OIL THEFT LINKS

Still waiting for Obama honesty on foreign policy

After Obama's press conferences with the press and later questions from the web, Bill Moyers asked his viewers what questions they would ask. Here's what I posted to his site:

President Obama,

The Bush administration's aggressive policy in the Middle East and Central Asia had a lot more to do with controlling Persian Gulf oil reserves and Caspian Sea pipeline routes than fighting terrorism.

He tried to force a Hydrocarbon Law on the Iraqis that would have given 88% of their oil income to big oil companies, a price no other Persian Gulf country would pay without a gun to their heads. The Iraqis refused even WITH the gun.

Big oil offered Iraqi legislators millions each in bribes, and they still wouldn't pass the law.

Likewise, in trying to deprive Russia of income from pipelines by building alternate routes, the Bush administration risked reigniting a Cold War with a nuclear armed adversary. John McCain slipped during the campaign and told the truth, that that was our main interest in the Georgia-Russia fight.

Will you be honest with the American public about the role these resources worth tens of trillions of dollars have played in our foreign policy decisions, whether Washington went along with it because they thought it was in our strategic or simply to pad oil companies bottom lines, or will you continue the embarrassing Bush lies about chasing terrorists over there where our actions only inflame hatred of the US?

To the extent that we don't have an honest debate about this, we don't have a democracy.

Posted by: Professor Smartass | March 29, 2009 8:59 PM

****

President Obama,

Poll after poll of Iraqis have shown that they want ALL US troops out of Iraq.

Why are you trying to keep a ''residual force there?''

Won't ignoring the will of the Iraqi people incite more hatred of the US, defeating the supposed anti-terrorist reason for being there?

Posted by: Professor Smartass | March 28, 2009 4:01 PM

****

President Obama,

You said we are sending more troops into Afghanistan to deal with ''al Qaeda,'' but wouldn't it make sense to open the Saudi pages of the Joint Congressional Inquiry into 9/11 that Bush classified?

Wouldn't it make more sense to deal with the root of the problem than strike at the branches and kill innocent Afghans?

Also, if we were concerned about weakening or destroying al Qaeda & the Taliban, shouldn't we attack those elements of the Pakistani military & ISI that sponsored them for years and demanded they be spirited out of Tora Bora rather than killed or captured, according to Seymour Hersh, Pulitzer Prize winning reporter?

If you don't address these issues, how do we know you aren't using the "War on Terror" as an excuse to pursue other agendas without public consent?

Posted by: Professor Smartass | March 28, 2009 3:47 PM

Maybe someone else can come up with better questions, but not anyone in the mainstream White House press corps. Even Ted Koppel couldn't bring himself to discuss the central role oil played in the Iraq War until he retired. I'd like to think our network news people are embarrassed when they compare their work to the BBC or just about any other nation's TV news people, but they've sold their integrity for seven figure paychecks and probably don't lose any sleep over it.

War Profiteers angry over Wall Street Bailout

No bid contract recipients, mercenaries, and those who profited from the Bush/Cheney War on Terror and invasion of Iraq were silent last fall when the Wall Street bailout of hundreds of billions of dollars was rushed through Congress, but now they are speaking out.

"We didn't want to say anything before the election when there was still a chance that McCain might win, or before the inauguration when there was still a chance a 'national emergency' might prevent the inauguration of this new president," said Griffin Thorpe, spokesman for the Defense & Rebuilding Industries lobby, "but now we simply cannot hide the sense of betrayal we felt and continue to feel."

Thorpe said his various member corporations appreciated the no-bid contracts, lack of oversight, and various cost-inflation tricks allowed in "cost-plus" contracts like setting trucks on fire that got flat tires so they could call the whole truck a loss. But he says the money they got actually required some token amount of work unlike the Wall Street bailout.

"Arms manufacturers may overcharge for their products, but they do work hard to make depleted uranium shells that melt tank armor like butter, white phosphorus shells that burn people from the inside out and outside in at the same time, and cluster bombs that keep on working for years after they are dropped, as kids mistake unexploded submunitions for toys," said Thorpe.

One rebuilding contractor sent Thorpe a tearful letter saying that if he knew Washington was going to give Wall Street money for absolutely nothing, he would have done an even shoddier job of building a hospital in Iraq, so he could have kept more of the money for himself. His letter said, "Sure, the floor of our operating room was cracked so ants could get in, and when the toilets flushed, sewage rained down on the maternity ward, but we could have made so much more money if we just put in a dirt floor and no plumbing at all."

Thorpe arranged for me to meet some of his clients at L'Auberge Provencale outside of Washington.

A burly mercenary contractor CEO's eyes welled up with tears as he stared at his sauteed escargot. "Bush & Cheney made me rich, but it cost me something. Sometimes the mothers of one of our dead mercs will show up at our office or some damn reporter will catch me at the mall and ask why my guys throw grenades in every daycare center they see. You can't imagine the torment I feel until one of my guys cuts their brake lines or smothers them with their own pillow in their sleep. It puts me and my company at a legal risk that we never have to face overseas."

The mercenary executive said he is having his men trade in their body armor and AK-47s for Armani suits and briefcases, and converting his company to a hedge fund.

"I didn't get this rich to put up with actually working when I don't have to," he said.

Most upset was an unexpected guest: an oil company executive. He said Cheney made his industry go through elaborate secret meetings to plan the invasion of Iraq and install a puppet government that would in turn give American companies most of the tens of trillions of dollars in profits from pumping their oil. "All that work has pretty much fallen apart and we're not going to end up with a much better deal than we would have with Saddam. Sure WE didn't pay for the war, but we had to wait and wait for the Iraqis to pass the oil law that would show us the money, and now they probably never will. "

Even without the deals on their terms, oil companies are still reaping the greatest profits of any corporations in history, but the executive was despondent nonetheless.

"To think of all those years looking for oil in the burning sand, bribing dictators, snuffing democratically elected leaders, dealing with the goddamn environmentalists, and telling the Congress which tax breaks and subsidies to give us," he said. "We could have made more if we just opened an investment bank on Wall Street, fucked up everything we touched, then asked Washington for a handout."

Our Afghan War for Pipeline & Poppy Fields

"There is only one thing in this world, and that is to keep acquiring money and more money, power and more power. All the rest is meaningless."

Napoleon Bonaparte

Former Senator Fritz Hollings wrote a piece for the Huffington Post asking why we are still in Afghanistan since our wars are producing more terrorists than they kill. He started off well, but sidestepped the geopolitic grown up talk that America never had about why we killed a million Iraqis and why we are still in Afghanistan.

It certainly has nothing to do with threats to our security. If that was the case, we would have invaded North Korea after they fired missiles over Japan.

And it has nothing to do with 9/11 since al Qaeda was financed and given logistical support by Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, the latter going as far as evacuating top al Qaeda leaders from Tora Bora when we had them cornered there.

If we didn't go after those two nations, it's hard to believe that having our troops in Afghanistan has anything to do with 9/11.

Instead, it is more likely we are in Afghanistan because someone thinks they can make a lot of money there, from the Trans Afghanistan Pipeline and so Wall Street can continue to collect the income from the Heroin poppies, just as the British did when they tried to force Afghan opium on the Chinese way back in the Opium War, and just as Bush was trying to force oil laws favorable to oil companies on Iraq, so they could collect up to 88% of the income from Iraq's tens of trillion of dollars worth of oil.

Energy companies courted the Taliban for a pipeline from Turkmenistan through Afghanistan and Pakistan to take natural gas to India but gave up in frustration shortly before 9/11. In 2006, India was concerned about continuing the project until America gave assurances that we would protect the pipeline.

UPDATE: Those assurances were repeated in 2008.
(Thanks to chill_wind at DU, who provided another good background link on pipeline)

The drug story is even less well-known, though the New York Times did cover the story of the Afghan president's brother being one of the largest drug smugglers in the country.

When Britain controlled Afghanistan, they owned the poppy trade. When the French owned Indochina, they owned the poppy trade there. Once we allied with the fundamentalists in Afghanistan in the 80's, drugs started flowing out of there, through Pakistan, and to the US. Do you suppose our leaders and business people are so pure they aren't getting a cut of that?

Wall Street has a bad habit of covering up their incompetence as businessmen with drug money.
The BCCI money laundering scandal involved some of the wealthiest and most powerful people in the country, profiting from drug trafficking and handling money for terrorists. The New York Times and even PBS has even covered this drug money laundering business, and if you googled the name of your favorite big bank, you would more likely than not find they have been involved.

UPDATE: UN says drug money keeping banks afloat in financial crisis.
(Thanks to RubyGal at DailyKos for link)

John Kerry has documented CIA drug dealing, confirming the work of San Jose Mercury News Reporter, Gary Webb's uncovering of the Contras selling cocaine that flooded America's inner cities. The CIA itself has an odd history of picking a fair number of directors who came not from the intelligence community but from Wall Street or corporations. Like corporate lawyer John Foster Dulles or oil man George HW Bush. So it would make sense that the agency is looking after business more than our security.

It is about money. I appreciate Hollings asking the question, but he should have provided part of the real answer too.

And I guess it would be too much to ask that our new president set aside the propaganda bullshit about our various military operations, tell us who profits from them, and what if anything the average American gets out of them, so we could make an informed decision about whether to support killing people in dirt huts with our troops and our tax dollars, and nineteen and twenty year old American kids coming home in aluminum coffins.

UPDATES:

confirmation in Toronto Star

Iran out-manuevers US on pipeline through Pakistan

November 2009 updates:

Recently, Ron Reagan had a former CIA agent on his show who said the CIA controls 90% of the heroin trade.

A couple of respectable investigative reporters have followed up on this, Chris Hedges and David Lindorff.