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CounterPunch
February
8, 2003
New Iraq Report
Yes, Tony, There
is a Conspiracy
by JACOB LEVICH
Here's the prewar zeitgeist in a nutshell: In
a widely reported January 16 speech, Tony Blair proclaimed that
the impending invasion of Iraq "has nothing to do with oil,
or any of the other conspiracy theories put forward."
One week later, Sen. Richard Lugar, chairman
of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, quietly passed word
to Russia and France that their countries will be frozen out
of staggeringly lucrative postwar oil contracts unless they roll
over and endorse the US attack.
Yes, Tony, there is a conspiracy, in
the dictionary sense of the term: an agreement among people to
perform a criminal or wrongful act. It consists, not of a tiny
cabal, but of the whole of the American power elite, from politicians
to business executives to journalists. It has everything to do
with oil. But it is not secret.
The conspirators know they can count
on the uncritical support of the mass media. Therefore knowledge
of their cynical motives and thuggish tactics can be made available
in journals and other specialized fora, all but invisible to
most Americans but accessible to the few with sufficient time
and inclination to dig beneath the headlines.
Building on that knowledge, a Mumbai-based
independent think tank has now anatomized the conspiracy behind
the coming war and issued a truly comprehensive explanation of
the current global crisis.
Behind the Invasion of Iraq, the startling new book-length report authored
by the Research Unit for Political Economy (RUPE), synthesizes
the seemingly disparate threads of the US war drive in what amounts
to a blistering indictment of American foreign policy. The report
(available on the Web at www.rupe-india.org)
is lavishly documented and jargon-free; the effect, especially
for readers with limited understanding of global commerce and
finance, is of puzzle pieces clicking decisively into place.
The RUPE report wholly confirms the widely-held
view of the coming war as a massive oil grab, "on a scale
not witnessed since the days of colonialism." Further, the
current debate about arms inspections and alleged links to al-Qaeda
is revealed as pure political theater, since the decision to
invade Iraq was made months ago.
But seizure of Iraq's multi-trillion-dollar
petroleum reserves is only the immediate goal, the report shows.
RUPE's rigorous analysis of publicly available sources -- including
official documents, think-tank papers, and press reports -- reveals
that the US intends to use the invasion of Iraq as a launching
pad for a drastic reshaping of the Middle East, to be followed
by an unprecedented expansion of US power worldwide. The strategic
trend of US foreign policy now points unmistakably towards global
empire.
To be sure, an imperial project on so
ambitious a scale entails big downside risks for the US, including
staggering costs, military hazards, and the disruption of global
"stability" (i.e., the dearly-bought loyalty of US
allies and client states.) But the American Establishment seems
prepared to go for broke, and its enthusiastic consensus behind
a naked war of conquest cannot be explained solely by the "cowboy
mentality" that some detect in the White House.
What's really at stake -- and this will
come as no surprise to leftists -- is US control of global markets.
The report reveals that the US economy is now facing a nightmare
scenario: A crisis of overproduction has crippled US GDP, resulting
in monstrous trade and budget deficits, even as a potentially
disastrous deflationary spiral appears to be under way worldwide.
Meanwhile, superpower rivals Europe,
Russia and China are mounting a vigorous challenge to US economic
preeminence, which is further threatened by the euro's emergence
as a credible alternative to the dollar as global reserve currency.
(All this is exhaustively detailed in the RUPE report, which
draws its most telling evidence from the mainstream financial
press.)
In this context, the US sees confiscation
of the world's richest oil-producing regions as a magic bullet.
While securing its own access to petroleum supplies for the foreseeable
future, it can simultaneously defend dollar hegemony and restructure
Middle East markets for the exclusive benefit of US-based corporations.
Which brings us to the crux: Direct American
control of oil would render any potential challengers for world
or regional supremacy perpetually dependent on US forbearance.
In RUPE's words, "once it has seized the oil wells of west
Asia the US will determine not only which firms would bag the
deals, not only the currency in which oil trade would be denominated,
not
only the price of oil on the international market, but even the
destination of the oil."
RUPE's argument here is powerful but
complex, and this summary is necessarily an extreme oversimplification.
But the overall thrust is quite clear: The US invasion of Iraq
needs to be understood not as an end in itself but as the means
to an end -- the foundation of a New American Empire.
Needless to say, you won't catch Tony
Blair owning up to the war's real purpose as he flogs it to a
skeptical public. But the truth, or something pretty close to
it, is now readily available to anyone who cares to look.
Jacob Levich
(, a writer and editor based in Queens, N.Y., assisted RUPE in
researching Behind The Invasion of Iraq -- which is a
fancy way of saying he forwarded several hundred articles to
an email address in Mumbai. He can be reached at: jlevich@earthlink.net
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