The Shit Our Leaders Pull And Lie About

You always knew this was so:

In the late spring of 2001, Vice President Cheney held a series of top secret meetings with the representatives of Exxon-Mobil, Conoco, Shell and BP America for what was later called the Energy Task-force. Their job, ostensibly, was to map out America’s Energy future. Since late 2001 several public interest groups, including the very conservative Judicial Watch, sued to have the proceedings of those meetings opened to public scrutiny. In March 2002, the Commerce Department turned over a few documents from the Task-force meetings to Judicial Watch, among which was the map of Iraq’s Oil Fields, dated March 2001 (above) and a list of the existing “Foreign Suitors” for Iraq Oil. Since that time, Cheney’s office has fought fiercely (and so far, successfully), right up to the Supreme Court, to keep the proceeding secret and to keep any of the private industry officials from disclosing any information about the meetings. Since we all now know the Bush administration’s energy policy, there can be only one explanation for the extraordinary efforts Cheney has taken to keep this secret–he was discussing the potential for a takeover of Iraq’s oil with the companies that might manage the resource, even before 9/11 gave him the excuse to do it.

A little context would be helpful. In early 2001, the Saudi’s were growing impatient that the large American Military presence in their land was causing tension from Muslim clerics who joined Bin Laden’s 1996 call for the “infidel to leave the Holy places of Islam”. In late 2001, the Saudi’s prevented the U.S. from using our Saudi Air Base for attacks on Afghanistan. As the New York Times reported, our departure from Saudi Arabia was abrupt.

The Prince Sultan base, which at the height of the war this spring housed 10,000 American troops and 200 planes, has now been supplanted as the Middle East’s main American military air operations center by Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar.

This last phase of the American departure from the base occurred with almost no fanfare, attracting only minor mention in the Saudi press. ”It was as if they were never here,” a senior Saudi official said. ”They left very quietly.”

Most of the senior policy makers in the Bush administration had as early as January 26, 1998 (while they were still out of power) made explicit their Iraq regime change policy in an extraordinary open letter to President Clinton.

In the near term, this means a willingness to undertake military action as diplomacy is clearly failing. In the long term, it means removing Saddam Hussein and his regime from power. That now needs to become the aim of American foreign policy.

So for Cheney in the spring of 2001, the desired outcome of U.S. control of Iraq was not in doubt. What was of concern as you can see from the “Oil Suitor List” (here and here) was that both China and Russia had signed “production sharing contracts” with the Iraq Oil Ministry to develop most of the major fields. The reason this becomes important now is that with yesterday’s agreement in the Iraqi Parliament over Amnesty and Revenue Sharing, the American Embassy is now pushing hard for an Iraq Oil Law which would open up huge new concessions to the Oil Companies that were part of Cheney’s Task force. This rush for a new law confuses the Iraqis.

And as Tariq Shafiq, one of the three-member team charged with drafting the petroleum law for the Iraq Ministry of Oil suggested at the hearing, because Iraq itself doesn’t need to develop those untapped reserves for another decade, pressure to immediately implement any provision that would open them up for exploration and development “fuels the argument” that the Americans and British “are there for the oil.”

There has been a very informed discussion on these pages recently, about the role of U.S. Hard Power in a world increasingly dominated by economic and cultural Soft Power moves by our commercial rivals around the globe. If we are to have an honest discussion about imperialism, mercantilism and the role of our government in an everchanging landscape, wouldn’t shining a little sunlight on the discussions of the Cheney Energy Task-force be a place to start?

Link.