How the U.S. Empire Robs Iraq — and Taxpayers — Blind Since 2003

Eric Zuesse (blogs at https://theduran.com/author/eric-zuesse/)

When America and England invaded Iraq on 20 March 2003, both Governments baldfacedly and with zero actual evidence lied, alleging that Iraq was six months from having a nuclear weapon, and they denied that they were wanting to invade in order to grab for their oil companies Iraq’s oil. However, eight years later was long enough for them to allow the truth to start being reported to their voters in these ‘democracies’ (since the public doesn’t care about history — only about here-and-now ‘news’); and, so, on 19 April 2011, Britain’s Independent headlined “Secret memos expose link between oil firms and invasion of Iraq”, and it opened:

Plans to exploit Iraq’s oil reserves were discussed by government ministers and the world’s largest oil companies the year before Britain took a leading role in invading Iraq, government documents show.

The papers, revealed here for the first time, raise new questions over Britain’s involvement in the war, which had divided Tony Blair’s cabinet and was voted through only after his claims that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

The minutes of a series of meetings between ministers and senior oil executives are at odds with the public denials of self-interest from oil companies and Western governments at the time.

The documents were not offered as evidence in the ongoing Chilcot Inquiry into the UK’s involvement in the Iraq war. In March 2003, just before Britain went to war, Shell denounced reports that it had held talks with Downing Street about Iraqi oil as “highly inaccurate”. BP denied that it had any “strategic interest” in Iraq, while Tony Blair described “the oil conspiracy theory” as “the most absurd”.

But documents from October and November the previous year [2002] paint a very different picture.

Five months before the March 2003 invasion, Baroness Symons, then the Trade Minister, told BP that the Government believed British energy firms should be given a share of Iraq’s enormous oil and gas reserves as a reward for Tony Blair’s military commitment to US plans for regime change. [The historical account here is ambiguous over whether Bush’s commitment to invading Iraq and the seminal lie that he and Blair presented to the public on 7 September 2002 to ‘justify’ the coming invasion of Iraq had actually preceeded or instead followed the oil companies’ lobbying for the invasion.]

The papers show that Lady Symons agreed to lobby the Bush administration on BP’s behalf because the oil giant feared it was being “locked out” of deals that Washington was quietly striking with US, French and Russian governments and their energy firms.

Minutes of a meeting with BP, Shell and BG (formerly British Gas) on 31 October 2002 read: “Baroness Symons agreed that it would be difficult to justify British companies losing out in Iraq in that way if the UK had itself been a conspicuous supporter of the US government throughout the crisis.”

The minister then promised to “report back to the companies before Christmas” on her lobbying efforts.

The Foreign Office invited BP in on 6 November 2002 to talk about opportunities in Iraq “post regime change”. Its minutes state: “Iraq is the big oil prospect. BP is desperate to get in there and anxious that political deals should not deny them the opportunity.”

After another meeting, this one in October 2002, the Foreign Office’s Middle East director at the time, Edward Chaplin, noted: “Shell and BP could not afford not to have a stake in [Iraq] for the sake of their long-term future… We were determined to get a fair slice of the action for UK companies in a post-Saddam Iraq.”

Whereas BP was insisting in public that it had “no strategic interest” in Iraq, in private it told the Foreign Office that Iraq was “more important than anything we’ve seen for a long time”.

BP was concerned that if Washington allowed TotalFinaElf’s existing contact with Saddam Hussein to stand after the invasion it would make the French conglomerate the world’s leading oil company. BP told the Government it was willing to take “big risks” to get a share of the Iraqi reserves, the second largest in the world.

Over 1,000 documents were obtained under Freedom of Information over five years by the oil campaigner Greg Muttitt. …

Prime Minister Tony Blair had denied all of this. On 11 February 2003, Medialens had headlined “The Newsnight Debate [BBC2 on February 6: Blair On Iraq – A Newsnight Special] – Dismantling The Case For War”, and reported that

A member of the audience suggested that the war was motivated by oil. Blair dismissed this out of hand:

“No, let me just deal with the oil thing because this is one of the – we may be right or we may be wrong – I mean people have their different views about why we’re doing this thing. But the oil conspiracy theory is honestly one of the most absurd when you analyse it. The fact is that, if the oil that Iraq has were our concern I mean we could probably cut a deal with Saddam tomorrow in relation to the oil.”

On 15 April 2013, CNN headlined “Why the war in Iraq was fought for Big Oil” and reporter Antonia Juhasz opened:

Yes, the Iraq War was a war for oil, and it was a war with winners: Big Oil.

It has been 10 years since Operation Iraqi Freedom’s bombs first landed in Baghdad. And while most of the U.S.-led coalition forces have long since gone, Western oil companies are only getting started.

Before the 2003 invasion, Iraq’s domestic oil industry was fully nationalized and closed to Western oil companies. A decade of war later, it is largely privatized and utterly dominated by foreign firms.

From ExxonMobil and Chevron to BP and Shell, the West’s largest oil companies have set up shop in Iraq. So have a slew of American oil service companies, including Halliburton, the Texas-based firm Dick Cheney ran before becoming George W. Bush’s running mate in 2000.

The war is the one and only reason for this long sought and newly acquired access.

Full coverage: The Iraq War, 10 years on

Oil was not the only goal of the Iraq War, but it was certainly the central one, as top U.S. military and political figures have attested to in the years following the invasion.

“Of course it’s about oil; we can’t really deny that,” said Gen. John Abizaid, former head of U.S. Central Command and Military Operations in Iraq, in 2007. Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan agreed, writing in his memoir, “I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.” Then-Sen. and now Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said the same in 2007: “People say we’re not fighting for oil. Of course we are.”

For the first time in about 30 years, Western oil companies are exploring for and producing oil in Iraq from some of the world’s largest oil fields and reaping enormous profit. And while the U.S. has also maintained a fairly consistent level of Iraq oil imports since the invasion, the benefits are not finding their way through Iraq’s economy or society.

These outcomes were by design, the result of a decade of U.S. government and oil company pressure. In 1998, Kenneth Derr, then CEO of Chevron, said, “Iraq possesses huge reserves of oil and gas-reserves I’d love Chevron to have access to.” Today it does.

Exclusive: Hans Blix on ‘terrible mistake’ in Iraq

In 2000, Big Oil, including Exxon, Chevron, BP and Shell, spent more money to get fellow oilmen Bush and Cheney into office than they had spent on any previous election. [That suggests the Bush Administration might have done the invasion of Iraq specifically as a pay-off to their political donoors.] Just over a week into Bush’s first term, their efforts paid off when the National Energy Policy Development Group, chaired by Cheney, was formed, bringing the administration and the oil companies together to plot our collective energy future. In March [2001], the task force reviewed lists and maps outlining Iraq’s entire oil productive capacity.

Planning for a military invasion was soon under way. Bush’s first Treasury secretary, Paul O’Neill, said in 2004, “Already by February (2001), the talk was mostly about logistics. Not the why (to invade Iraq), but the how and how quickly.” [And that suggests even more strongly the Iraq invasion’s having been done specifically as a political pay-off.] …

Juhasz’s report was remarkably thorough. For example, it mentioned that

representatives from ExxonMobil, Chevron, ConocoPhillips and Halliburton, among others, met with Cheney’s staff in January 2003 to discuss plans for Iraq’s postwar industry. For the next decade, former and current executives of western oil companies acted first as administrators of Iraq’s oil ministry, and then as “advisers” to the Iraqi government.

Before the invasion, there were just two things standing in the way of Western oil companies operating in Iraq: Saddam Hussein and the nation’s legal system. …

On 10 January 2018, the anti-imperialism website Amity Underground posted a very well-documented article, including photos of incriminating tweets from BP (British Petroleum) bragging about how profitable it all was. Their report headlined “15 years after the invasion of Iraq, and now largely out of the glare of the media, US and UK oil corporations start to flaunt the spoils of imperial conquest.”

The U.S. Embassy in Baghdad is the largest Embassy in the world, at 104 acres (42 ha). Ibrahim Zaidan headlined in Al Iraq News on 7 June 2014, “Iraq’s American Embassy is ‘Suspicious’ and ‘Dangerous’!” It said:

America’s largest diplomatic mission is surrounded by high concrete walls, is painted in black, brown and grey and is completely isolated from its environment – and has been built in an area that once included presidential palaces and a public park opened to all Iraqis. So far, embassy construction has cost $592 million, but recent estimates are that the number will rise significantly. Managing the embassy after construction is expected to cost another $1 billion a year. That includes 20 buildings, six of which that are apartment complexes containing 619 apartments and two that are for “administrative purposes” and which will contain about 1,000 staff – plus private residences for senior diplomats.

Embassy staff will find everything they need, so they won’t have to venture off embassy grounds. There is a shopping mall, a movie theater, a beauty parlor, a sports stadium, a swimming pool, tennis courts, a school and a club for social events. It is equipped with its own power plant, water purification system, sewers and sewage treatment system, as well as its own storage and maintenance facilities. The U.S. State Department even went as far as to reject a request by the architectural firm [Berger Devine Yaeger] that designed the complex to post a photo of the embassy on its Web site. The outer wall is nine feet tall and surrounds the complex like a bracelet around a wrist. As if that weren’t enough, the wall will be patrolled by a special Marine unit armed and deployed behind concrete bunkers.

There has been a tremendous reaction to the suspicious nature of the U.S. Embassy.

Sayyid Muqtada al-Sadr, leader of the Sadrist Movement, believes that if staff at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad remains as big as it is now after 2011, they will be considered occupiers and must be resisted.

Maha Al Duri, a Sadrist Movement member of the Council of Representatives [parliament] asserts that, “the maintenance of the U.S. Embassy in Iraq after 2011 is another face of the occupation, since it will include large numbers of staff and security staff thought to be in the many thousands. The U.S. Embassy will inject itself into every detail – small and large – of Iraqi domestic affairs, whether they relate to politics, economics or anything else.”

Representative Talal al-Zawbaii didn’t conceal his agitation when he said, “We have serious concerns about the continuing presence of 15,000 embassy staff after the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq, because a good number of them will be employed for intelligence purposes.”

On 1 January 2019, Will Sillitoe headlined in Helsinki Times, “What does the US embassy in Baghdad export to Finland and dozens of other countries?” and reported:

More than a million kilograms of cargo were shipped from Baghdad to different parts of the world, reveals US embassies procurement documents.

Mysterious cargo shipments from the US Embassy in Baghdad to other American embassies and consulates around the world have been revealed on a Wikileaks’ database. Procurement orders of US embassies are public documents, but Wikileaks put them in a searchable database making it easier to analyse.

The database displaying worldwide US embassy orders of goods and services reveals Baghdad as a postal and shipping centre for tonnes of freight.

Though military freight might be expected between the US and Iraq, records show that embassies across Europe, Asia, the Middle East, the Americas and Africa are all receiving deliveries from Baghdad too.

According to Wikileaks’ database, orders to ship more than 540 tonnes of cargo to the US were made in May 2018. The same document shows other main delivery destinations included 120 tonnes of freight to Europe, and 24 tonnes to South Africa, South America and Central Africa respectively. In comparison, only two and a half tonnes of freight were moved within Iraq between Baghdad, Basra and Erbil International Airports. So, the export of items from Iraq appears to be the primary activity.

The content of the deliveries is as yet unclear, though the order contract suggests household items, rugs, electrical goods, linen, kitchenware, furniture, pianos, refrigerators, books, chinaware, clothing as well as mail could be among the items dispatched. According to the website movers.com, an average one bedroom apartment of furniture weighs approximately one tonne but the practicality of moving many types of household objects across continents is doubtful. It also remains unclear whether the quantity of tonnage relates to many small deliveries or a small number of very large ones.

The lack of disclosed orders moving cargo and services into Iraq highlights that the movement of diplomats and their families into such a dangerous region on a large scale is unlikely.  Transfers of military personnel back and forth would normally go through the US airbases in Iraq and not via the Embassy administration. So discounting the movement of more than a thousand staff members out of Iraq to countries around the world means that the content and purpose of the shipments remains a mystery.

The Wikileaks’ database findings coincide with the discovery of a previously undisclosed US Embassy warehouse near Malmi Airport, a storage facility suitable for receiving large truckloads of incoming freight. Documents also show that the US Embassy in Finland ordered a new security perimeter fence for the warehouse compound in April 2018. The purpose for the warehouse remains unknown. …

On 29 December 2018 Sillitoe headlined “Guarded warehouse near airport and mysterious cargos from Baghdad; what is the US embassy in Helsinki up to?”, and he reported:

Situated across the street from the main entrance of Malmi Airport, the warehouse with its 3 meter high security fence appears an unlikely location for official embassy business. Neighbouring companies include a car yard and a tyre warehouse.

Helsinki Times visited the perimeters this weekend. Security personnel, young Finns in uniforms with American flags on their arms, appeared nervous and suspicious when asked to comment on the warehouse and refused to even confirm the order of the new fence structure which now surrounds the compound. At one point a security guard appeared in a second floor window to carefully monitor this reporter’s movements along Takoraudantie.

US embassy warehouse near Malmi airport. This image from Google street view is from 2011. The newly built permitter fence can not be seen in this image.

Mysterious parcels from Baghdad

The Wikileaks’ database has also revealed mysterious packages being sent to the US Embassy in Finland from their embassy in Baghdad.

The database displaying US embassy procurements around the world shows that tons of cargo are being distributed to Helsinki and other US embassies via regular airfreight cargo deliveries from Baghdad.

Twelve consignments, each logged at 5000 kilograms are recorded as sent to Helsinki and 23 other West European US embassies – an average of 2500 kilograms per US embassy.

The reason for such a vast volume of embassy deliveries from Baghdad is as yet unknown but this latest disclosure follows Wikileaks news that the US Consulate in Frankfurt was a purchase and postal centre for distributing spy equipment to other US embassies worldwide. Concerns are now raised that the US Embassy in Baghdad is also being used as a main distribution centre for secret operations.

In addition to Finland and Western Europe, the Wikileaks database shows that the US embassy in Baghdad disseminates hundreds of tons worldwide, with more than 300,000 kilograms recorded as being delivered Stateside alone. …

Instead of Bush’s using that massive Embassy construction project as a sweetener for Iraqi architects and construction companies, to contribute to Iraq’s economy, it was still more pay-offs to U.S. contractors.

Furthermore, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, General Atomics, and other U.S. armament-makers, made record profits from the invasion of Iraq. So, well-connected insiders, and especially the billionaires who primarily invested in the firms that made fortunes from the invasion of Iraq, were huge beneficiaries from that invasion and from the still-ongoing U.S. military and diplomatic occupation of Iraq.

Furthermore, as I pointed out on 10 March 2021:

NATO now is even trying to extend to operations in Iraq and other nations that the U.S. regime already militarily occupies. On 24 February 2021, NATO headlined “NATO Mission in Iraq” and reported based only upon Iraq’s having requested and received in October 2018 additional training so as to defeat ISIS. That NATO report ignored the demand by Iraq’s parliament in January 2020 for all U.S. troops to leave Iraq immediately and the millions of Iraqis who subsequently demonstrated against the U.S. and demanded the U.S. to leave immediately. (Trump responded by threatening to destroy Iraq if Iraq’s Government would continue its demand.) On 24 November 2020, NATO headlined “Denmark assumes command of NATO Mission Iraq”. But Iraqis don’t want any alien military force occupying their country.

Here are some articles in the U.S.-and-allied mainstream media that are encouraging U.S. President Joe Biden’s moves to press even farther in the direction of assisting — rather than abandoning — the U.S. regime’s conquests:

“Iraq’s Disappearance From Biden’s Agenda Is a Big Mistake”, Foreign Policy, 21 January 2021

“Attack in Iraq highlights Biden’s Saudi problem”, Politico, 16 February 2021

“Why Biden can’t ignore Iraq and Afghanistan, even if he might want to”    Vox, 16 February 2021

“Joe Biden Gets Tested in Iraq”, Wall Street Journal, editorial, 16 February 2021

“U.S. contractor dies as rocket attacks in Iraq pose fresh challenge to Biden”, Washington Post, 3 March 2021

By contrast, the non-mainstream Voltairenet headlined on 14 February 2020, “NATO to deploy troops in Greater Middle East” and opened by reporting that:

“Ultimately, it looks as though NATO will take over in the Arab world after the withdrawal of CentCom (US Central Command in the Middle East). Germany could play a leadership role in the Alliance.

Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg hopes to:

1. deploy the Alliance in Tunisia and make the war in Libya last forever;

2. deploy the Alliance in Iraq and Jordan and make the war in Syria go on forever.”

Adherents to the U.S. empire don’t get to see that type of reporting. The same billionaires — U.S. billionaires — who control America’s ‘news’-media and ‘defense’ contractors and politicians, control also America’s vassal nations indirectly; and if such international dictatorship exists, then can a given vassal nation actually be a democracy? Is this what the international corporations are bringing — a global dictatorship?

On 4 March 2021, the non-mainstream progressive media-criticism site, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, headlined “Purging Inconvenient Facts in Coverage of Biden’s ‘First’ Air Attacks” and proved that all of America’s mainstream media were reading from the same script of lies.

All of this appears to be an imperialistic operation that serves the interests of no one except U.S.-and-allied billionaires.

What, to me, is the most interesting fact about all of this is that at the very same time as the U.S. regime robs Iraq and taxpayers blind and slaughters and maims and destroys the lives of tens if not hundreds of millions of people around the world, and extracts trillions of dollars from everyone but its own insiders by means of its invasions and coups and sanctions and subversions, it constantly preaches that all of the countries that it destroys or is trying to destroy are ruled by ‘autocrats’ and ‘dictators’ who present such a danger to their own people and to the entire world so that the U.S. and its colonies (‘allies’) must save the world from them by means of these U.S.-led atrocities that get sugared-over by their media as being for ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom’ and ‘human rights’. And billions of people around the world believe that toxic garbage. This is what comes from the public’s reading and hearing the ‘news’, and not knowing (far less understanding) history. Because what history teaches is that America and its NATO have, in fact, taken up Hitler’s torch of demanding to control — to dictate to — the entire world.

—————

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s latest book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.