From: "Battaglia comunista" <batcom-AT-ibrp.org>
Date: Sat, 5 Apr 2003 18:25:51 +0200
Subject: AUT: Humanitarian? Hoots of derision!


Read the small print: the US wants to 
privatise Iraq's oil 

No one here believes this is a humanitarian war 

Jonathan Steele in Damascus 
Monday March 31, 2003
The Guardian 

In this highly politicised city where anger over the invasion of Iraq alternates with 
pride in the resistance, there is one sure way to lighten the mood. Suggest that 
George Bush and Tony Blair launched their war because of Saddam Hussein's 
suspected weapons of mass destruction. Hoots of derision all round. Whether they 
are Syrians or members of the huge Iraqi exile community, everyone here believes 
this is a war for oil. In nearby Jordan and across the Arab world the view is the 
same. 
Some suggest a second motive - Washington's desire to strengthen Israel. Under 
one theory US hawks want to break Iraq into several statelets and then do the same 
with Saudi Arabia, to confirm the Zionist state as the region's superpower. Others 
cite Donald Rumsfeld's recent comments about Iran and Syria as proof that war on 
Iraq is designed to frighten its neighbours, who happen to be the leading radicals in 
the anti-Zionist camp. 
Oil is the war aim on which all Arabs agree. While the Palestinian intifada is 
resistance to old-fashioned colonialism with its seizure and settlement of other 
people's land, they see the Iraqi intifada as popular defence against a more modern 
phenomenon. Washington does not need to settle Iraqi land, but it does want 
military bases and control of oil. 
Many Arabs already define this neo-colonial war as a historic turning point which 
might have as profound an effect on the Arab psyche as September 11 did on 
Americans. Arabs have long been accustomed to seeing Israeli tanks running 
rampant. Now the puppet-master, arrogant and unashamed, has sent his helicopter 
gunships and armoured vehicles to Arab soil. 
The US has mounted numerous coups in the Middle East to topple regimes in 
Egypt, Iran and Iraq itself. It has used crises, like the last Gulf war, to gain 
temporary bases and make them permanent. In Lebanon it once shelled an Arab 
capital and landed several hundred marines. But never before has it sent a vast 
army to change an Arab government. Even in Latin America, in two centuries of US 
hegemony, Washington has never dared to mount a full-scale invasion to overthrow 
a ruler in a major country. Its interventions in the Caribbean and Central America 
from 1898 to 1990 were against weak opponents in small states. Three years into 
the new millennium, the enormity of the shift and the impact of the spectacle on 
Arab television viewers cannot be over-estimated. Is it an image of the past or 
future, they ask, a one-off throw-back to Vietnam or a taste of things to come? 
Blair sensed Arab suspicions about the fate of Iraq's oil when he persuaded Bush at 
their Azores summit to produce a "vision for Iraq" which pledged to protect its 
natural resources (they shrank from using the O word) as a "national asset of and 
for the Iraqi people". No neo-colonialism here. 
Unfortunately, the small print is different, as could be expected from an 
administration run by oilmen. Leaks from the state department's "future of Iraq" 
office show Washington plans to privatise the Iraqi economy and particularly the 
state-owned national oil company. Experts on its energy panel want to start with 
"downstream" assets like retail petrol stations. This would be a quick way to gouge 
money from Iraqi consumers. Later they would privatise exploration and 
development. 
Even if majority ownership were restricted to Iraqis, Russia's grim experience of 
energy privatisation shows how a new class of oil magnates quickly send their 
profits to offshore banks. If the interests of all Iraqis are to be protected, it would be 
better to keep state control and modify the UN oil-for-food programme, which has 
been a relatively efficient and internationally supervised way of channelling 
revenues to the country's poor. 
Drop the controls on Iraq's imports of industrial goods. End the rule that all food 
under the programme has to be imported, thereby penalis ing Iraqi farmers and 
benefiting rich exporters in Canada, Australia and the US. But maintain the 
programme for several years to keep helping the 60% of Iraqis who depend on 
subsidised food (it will be more after this war) rather than channel revenues to a 
new Iraqi government or a World Bank-administered trust fund which will be under 
pressure to pay it to US construction companies to repair the infrastructure which 
Bush's war machine has destroyed. US and UK taxpayers should finance the peace 
as they have financed the war. Iraqi oil earnings must stay out of US and British 
hands. 
If Downing Street has a better grasp than Washington of the need not to appear to 
be occupying Iraq, it was equally misinformed about Iraqis' views of invasion. Both 
governments confused hatred of Saddam with support for war. War has its own 
dynamic, trapping millions in the desperate business of daily survival. Naturally they 
blame US and British troops for the chaos. Yet, even before the first bomb fell, most 
Iraqis were against "liberation" by force. 
People living under Saddam Hussein's rule do not give opinions easily but British 
and US officials should have done a better job of talking to Iraqis in Jordan and 
Syria who are in close touch with their families in Iraq. 
On the eve of the war, I interviewed 20 Iraqis in Amman individually or in groups of 
two or three friends for an hour each on average. They included Sunni and Shia, 
property owners, artists, factory workers and several unemployed. Most were fierce 
critics of the Iraqi president. But on the over-riding issue of whether Bush should 
launch a war, a majority was opposed. Nine were against, four were torn and only 
seven were in favour. Now that war is no longer a theoretical option but a reality 
affecting every Iraqi at home and abroad, patriotic feelings are stronger. 
Western governments apparently confined their research to people with a narrow 
vested interest. They financed exiled politicians who want a share in US-supplied 
power and then talked to them as though they were independent. They listened to 
businessmen eager to cash in when the US privatises the economy. They were 
fascinated by nostalgic Hashemite monarchists. 
The voices of the poor and the professional classes were not deemed of interest, 
although these are the people who benefited from the surge in social investment 
from 1975-85 and later fell back under sanctions. London and Washington 
convinced themselves that Saddam Hussein had ruined the economy without 
asking whether Iraqis shared this view. If they now divert Iraq's oil revenues, they 
will be following a long tradition of blunder and exploitation. 

********************************************************************************************
Battaglia comunista
Organo del Partito Comunista Internazionalista
www.internazionalisti.org
www.ibrp.org
batcom-AT-ibrp.org




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