Staying the Course Until What?

Various poobahs on the right keep moving the finish line on the American presence in Iraq, but it seems fairly clear that the administration is intent upon some goal that is not 1) bringing peace and prosperity to the Iraqis, 2) saving the American military, or 3) staunching the spouting hemorrhage of American tax dollars. I am sure that the Bush adminstration would like to have been out of the Iraq War business by now (at least for PR purposes), but the essential piece of business remains unfinished. After it is finished, I am sure Bush will cut and run with the best of them. That piece of business, people, is the ratification of those PSAs we were talking about at the end of last class. To review: PSAs are "production service agreements", which give Iraq nominal "ownership" of Iraqi oil (which is high quality, close to the surface, and in some regions completely untapped and even unexplored), but turn the profits for the exploration and extraction of the oil over to large corporations like poor Exxon, which, as we all know, is already suffering a profit glut. In small or risky oil nations, PSAs give oil companies a reason to explore and drill (and small nations aren't in any position to bargain, anyway). The oil rich nations of the Middle East don't need to accede to PSAs, and they continue to keep control of their oil. As Joshua Holland pointed out in a piece on Alternet last week, that is about to change in Iraq-- "Industry analysts expect that the result will be a radical departure from the laws governing the country's oil-rich neighbors, giving foreign multinationals a much higher rate of return than with other major oil producers and locking in their control over what George Bush called Iraq's "patrimony" for decades, regardless of what kind of policies future elected governments might want to pursue." Holland makes the unorthodox nature of these contracts (and the purpose for the Iraq war) clear when he remarks, "But the execs from Big Oil didn't just want access to Iraq's oil; they wanted access on terms that would be inconceivable unless negotiated at the barrel of a gun." According to Holland, the Iraqis understand perfectly what they have to lose and what the oil companies have to gain: "Erik Leaver, a senior analyst at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, told me that the disposition of Iraq's oil wealth is 'definitely causing problems on the ground,' but the entire topic is taboo in polite D.C. circles. 'Nobody in Washington wants to talk about it,' he said. 'They don't want to sound like freaks talking about blood for oil.' At the same time, a recent poll asked Iraqis what they believed was the main reason for the invasion and 76 percent gave 'to control Iraqi oil' as their first choice."

That's interesting. "They don't want to sound like freaks (ghouls? monsters? devils? thieves? murderers?) talking about blood for oil, but they don't mind BEING freaks (et cetera) if they get the oil. There's capitalism in a nutshell, don't you think? Let's not talk about how we got the money, dear (nerve gas, slave trade, giving smallpox-infected blankets to the native Americans), but do let's spend it!

Is something coming into focus now? According to Holland, big oil has only until December to actually get the fix in. They want the appearance of legality--as if they were dealing with duly constituted authority. And they also want to get it over with. I am sure that the big oil companies thought they would be greeted as liberators, don't you? But the Iraqis have not proven themselves to be as easily duped as, say, American voters. 76 percent of them know that they have suffered war for oil. In the US, Bush still appeals to over thirty percent of the voters. That would mean that the Iraqis are, let's say, twenty to twenty-five percent smarter than Americans, though, of course, in a hell of a lot more pain. Let's put the pain ratio at 655,000 to 2809.

Why, I ask myself, do I bang on about this? What does it matter if hundreds of thousands of people have died so that the oil companies can have the contracts they like? Isn't that the capitalist way? Isn't Capitalism the best of all economic systems in the best of all possible worlds? Doesn't the Iraq War demonstrate everything we need to know about Capitalism? Aren't we lucky to have a CEO president? Aren't we lucky to have two of them, in fact? And don't they constantly tell us how American they are, how patriotic, how Christian? Aren't we lucky that this means that to be American and Christian is to be a brutal, arrogant, narcissistic, money-mad, power-mad, ill-mannered, lying, cheating, war-crime perpetrating, Jesus-spouting, short-sighted boor? What is wrong with me that I can't accept that my job as a citizen is to nod happily while my tax dollars are being funnelled to big business, to hugely rich people, to those not in need? Here's some more numbers for you. According to Holland, Big Oil stands to profit to the tune of 194 billion dollars. That would seem like a lot until you realize that some experts put the cost of the Iraq war for American taxpayers at $2,000,000,000,000 (that's trillion). I see. For every extra dollar that the oil companies earn, we the taxpayers will have invested ten. Sounds like a bargain.

Many people don't want to believe that the Bush administration went to war in Iraq for the oil. They would rather make a case for pure egomania (showing American power, making of Bush a "war president", consolidating Republican power in Washington for the foreseeable future). But while everything else has fallen apart, the oil agenda has proceeded. If it proceeds to force PSAs on the Iraqis, then, no doubt, some will deem it a success.

What we have to remember is that the Iraq War is not some stupid aberration or mistake. It is what the entire last fifty years has been leading toward. The perpetrators of this war trained themselves all their lives to get here, and their current inability to say anything remotely intelligent about how to solve this big problem is also an artifact of their training. They have been so busy for the last twenty-five years congratulating themselves on how rich they are, how smart they are, how right they are that they never actually learned how the world works.

How do we get out of Iraq? I had a plan in 2004 and here is what it was: 1. Get rid of the Bush administration, so that the Kerry administration could say, "This was Bush's War, not America's war, and we distance ourselves from it. We APOLOGIZE for this war." 2. Go to the Iraqis and say, "We are at your service. YOU tell US how to help you and pacify you. What would you like us to fix first?" 3. Ask only one thing of the Iraqis--that they sit down for as long as it would take to come up with a workable constitution for their nation. During this process, the Americans would offer no suggestions without being asked, would only provide security and food. Can you imagine? Can you imagine any Americans doing this? Of course not. And yet, can you imagine any Americans listening for a moment to, say, Canadians playing hardball with us, telling us to come up with a way to give them our oil or else? To Canadians laying down all sorts of conditions under which we would be allowed a measure of limited autonomy? Why would any human being ask of others what he would never abase himself to do? We will not know how to get out of Iraq until we come clean about why we are there and what it means about who we are.

And of course, the ultimate irony is that our overuse of oil is destroying us. Americans use more oil more wastefully than anyone on else on Earth. A car is simply a device for siphoning carbon out of the ground and into the atmosphere. Now that we know that, how stupid are we to keep doing it? To fight and kill in order to retain the right to do it? Bush maintains that "they envy our freedom", but I don't think so. I think it is more likely that they are appalled at our selfish license, our criminal indifference to others, and our apparently sadistic wish to have our way in all things. But so what? Stay the course!