U.S. Walks Away From Iraqi Oil
A very interesting news article was published last year, but hardly anyone in the American anti-war community noticed it. It seems that American oil companies had little interest in bidding on Iraqi oil contracts in 2009. The significance of this development is relatively minor in the field of issues associated with the very controversial Iraqi war. Nonetheless, all claims that American oil interests would benefit from the war have been soundly laid to rest.
Iraqi oil never amounted to much more than 5% of U.S. foreign oil imports anyway, so there was never a strategic reason to launch a war against Saddam Hussein’s regime as far as oil was concerned. If Iraq had cut us off, we could have replaced their oil from other sources (perhaps even from the spot market, which sends ships out to sea and allows people to bid on them). These would undoubtedly have been expensive alternatives but they were insufficient incentive to drive an American government to war.
Wars for resources are rare in the American experience. The U.S. has fought wars of expansion (against Native American tribes and Mexico) and it has fought for political control of various regions (as when American marines were sent to the Philippines in the early 1900s) and it has fought wars of survival (against the British and against the Germans). “Wars of survival” includes wars intended to defend rights and citizens. It’s not like Imperial Germany threatened the survival of the United States in 1916 but by indiscriminantly killing American citizens the German government was declaring war on the United States.
Americans like all other peoples will find a way to rationalize or justify their wars, until those wars become unpopular enough that we force our government to abandon them. We did that with Vietnam. We may have done that with Korea. General MacArthur challenged President Truman’s stance on opposing the Soviet Union by declaring that “in war there can be no victory”. General Eisenhower ran for President (in part) on the promise that he would end the Korean war if elected in 1952 — which he was.
In Korea it was our own leaders who led the opposition to the war. In Vietnam it was our college students and our returning soldiers who opposed the war. There is an account of a company of American soldiers who returned from Vietnam after serving a tour of duty there. They had disembarked from their transport plane and were assembled on the tarmac when President Johnson came up, delivered a speech praising the men for their courage and dedication, and then watched as they were ordered back on to the transport. President Johnson’s motorcade had taken him to the wrong transport plane, and instead of sending off a company of departing soldiers he all but drove the returning soldiers to mutiny. Those men marched back on to the transport plane but once they were out of the President’s site they went wild.
The mixup was resolved, of course, but not without considerable embarrassment to the military amongst its own. But the Vietnam era is filled with anecdotes of how unpopular the war was with soldiers, many of whom were draftees. They didn’t know what we were fighting for or why we just kept setting up firebases that were intended to take all punishment. There was no clear military objective in Vietnam, other than to “keep the north from conquering the south”.
Many people see the American intervention in the Vietnam war as a campaign in the Cold War, a U.S. proxy war intended to stifle the ambitions of the Communist governments in the Soviet Union and China. In the minds of the Vietnamese people, however, it was a very different situation. Northern and Southern Vietnamese clans and rulers had been fighting each other for over a thousand years. Vietnam has endured a long history of wars with other lands, particularly China. A few years after the U.S. pulled out of Vietnam and South Vietnam fell to the North, the Vietnamese army fought off a ground attack from China. At the time I was impressed and somewhat anxious about what might happen. It seemed like little Vietnam would be trampled by the Chinese behemoth.
Having fought the United States to a standstill — and watched the U.S. leave southeast Asia — Vietnam could have become a serious military threat to many other countries. Maybe the Khmer Rouge were more responsible for what happened afterward than the Vietnamese leaders themselves. After seizing power in Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge fell into dispute with the Vietnamese government. Pol Pot, leader of the Khmer Rouge, invaded Vietnam in 1978 (three years after the U.S. had withdrawn from the south). Vietnam retaliated, drove the Khmer Rouge out of Phnom Penh, and installed a pro-Vietnamese government. This is what led to China’s 1979 invasion. Vietnam didn’t back down.
Vietnam withdrew its forces from Cambodia in 1989, leaving behind a friendly government that was militarily strong enough to fight off the remnants of the Khmer Rouge. The Cambodian government eventually won over or defeated or captured the remaining Khmer Rouge but by 2004 the monarchy had been restored. The events that led to the peaceful succession of monarchical government from a Communist-backed regime were complex. They started centuries ago and did, in fact, originate with the economic priorities of European monarchist governments.
European empires managed to carve up the globe from around 1500 through 1945. During that time, many long-established kingdoms and nations outside of Europe were overthrown, colonized, divided, and in a few cases actually destroyed. The experiences of Native American peoples at the hands of European invaders were unique only in that it was the Europeans who brought diseases that devastated the native populations. Elsewhere it was often the Europeans who struggled to survive native diseases. I was once told that the average life expectancy for a European adventurer in India during the 1700s and 1800s was about 2 years. Why did they risk the assignment if their chances of survival were so poor? Because those who survived would return to England as immensely wealthy men.
European colonialism transformed central and south Asia — leading to the conflicts between in Aghanistan, Pakistan, and India today.
European colonialism transformed eastern and southeastern Asia — leading to the rise of Imperial Japan in the early 1900s and the subsequent rise to power of Communist governments in China, North Vietnam (later Vietnam), and Cambodia.
European colonialism also transformed the New World, leading to the rise of the United States as a world power. As the European powers weakened and failed during the early 20th century, the United States took up the power vacuum. We stepped into that role for a variety of reasons. First, over 100 years of expansionist policies against our neighbors had taught the United States how to conduct successful wars. By emerging as the most powerful nation in the world, we accumulated controlling interests (in typical colonial fashion) in many small lands around the globe, although mostly in the Pacific Ocean (the Philippines, many small islands, Japan and Okinawa, etc.). At the end of the Spanish-American War we “took over” control of the Philippines and Cuba, for example. Why? Because we won the war. And also because Spain just couldn’t maintain its shrinking empire.
American colonialism is a very real thing. When you see radical people across the world denouncing American colonialism, they aren’t making up a fake foreign policy for the sake of being rhetorically defensive. All they need do is open up a history book and see what we’ve done. We built the Panama Canal for our economic expedience, but also to facilitate the speedy transfer of troops and materials from the Atlantic to the Pacific Oceans.
In the 1930s President Franklin D. Roosevelt introduced a new chapter in American colonialism: he concluded that as the European powers locked up oil treaties with Middle Eastern countries, the United States would be left entirely dependent upon European middlemen if he didn’t do something. So he negotiated mutual defense treaties with countries like Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. These treaties called for the United States to defend those nations if they were invaded.
Does that sound familiar?
Our political decisions about oil were made decades ago in a time when no one cared about where the oil came from, and we didn’t go after Iraqi oil. As the Soviet Union became more powerful and threatened more nations our interests in the Middle East changed. We developed a strong relationship with the Shah of Iran to help him become a regional power. This was the classic Cold War proxy strategy. In theory, just as we shored up the South Vietnamese government to oppose Communism in southeast Asia, we were strengthening the Persian people to be a bulwark against Communism … and to prevent the Soviet Union from gaining significant influence over the oil.
All that was threatened when the United States backed the creation of the Nation of Israel. American soldiers had freed many of the Nazi death camps. Our leaders knew fully well that the Nazi’s “final solution” had made Europe a very unfriendly place for European Jews. The partition of Palestine into two states, one Arab and one Jewish, was already under discussion in post-war Europe. The British were moving to get out of the region. The French were still putting the pieces of their own empire back together. It didn’t make sense for the American government to stand by and let the Soviet Union become a player in the region.
Hence, we supported Israel for both humanitarian and strategic reasons, but it was a decision that was fraught with political peril. The conflicts between Israel and its neighbors stressed America’s relationship with its Arabic allies. The antipathy against Israel that was fostered throughout the Islamic world caused problems for us in Iran, and when Islamic fundamentalists seized control there we lost a valuable ally and considerable leverage in the complex Middle East political situation.
At the time, I suppose it must have seemed like a good idea to cultivate a relationship with Iraq. After all, unlike Syria Iraq was not situated right next to Israel, so any anti-Israeli rhetoric coming out of Iraq could probably be downplayed or ignored. The Israelis proved capable of dealing with Iraq on their own terms anyway when they bombed an Iraqi nuclear facility. But Iraq, being situated right next to Iran, offered American strategic thinkers a new pawn in the game: a foil to challenge Islamic Iran and dilute their influence in the region. By cultivating a relationship with Iraq, the U.S. also interfered with Soviet influence in the area, thus restoring our buffer zone of influence. Turkey, it should be noted, has also been a long-time U.S. ally in the region but Turkey has not suffered from the political instability in the region that other nations have.
With Turkey and Iran, the U.S. was able to set up a strategic and economic roadblock that frustrated the Soviet Union. That strategic position shifted to Turkey and Iraq in the 1980s. This roadblock helped contribute (along with many other factors) to the collapse of the Soviet Union. Among other things, the more contracts that American companies won in the rich, large nations of the Middle East, the fewer contracts would be awarded to the Soviets — who had to compete with western European nations for remaining economic benefits.
This chess-game of political and economic strategy blew up in America’s face when we backed Saddam Hussein in his war with Iran. Although the war dragged on for 8 years and gave the appearance of weakening the Islamic regime in Iran, it allowed the Iranian military to grow strong and powerful, and to develop economic resources that have only come to light in the last few years. Iran, knowing fully well who was backing Iraq, became entrenched in its anti-American views. Whereas we have gradually entered into a healing and producing relationship with Vietnam (and China and post-Soviet Russia), we have failed miserably to restore any sense of cooperation with Iran.
The Iran-Iraq war energized Saddam Hussein’s already awakened political ambitions. He built up Iraq’s military to be the fourth largest in the world. Now, history shows us that that military was not capable of fighting a modern war against the United States and dozens of other nations, but it was nonetheless a serious threat to the rest of the Middle East — including Iraq’s western and southern neighbors: Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait. All three nations were by 1990 closely aligned or more closely aligned with the United States, along with the United Arab Emirates. These nations helped us spread our eggs across multiple baskets. We were doing whatever we could to discourage or prevent Iranian influence from taking hold in the region. We were even helping the Mujahedeen in Afghanistan fight off a Soviet invasion.
If only Saddam Hussein had been a more reasonable dictator, our house of cards would not have come crumbling down. Unfortunately, four significant events occurred in the early 1990s:
- The Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan
- The Soviet Union and eastern Europe abandoned Communism
- Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait
- The Somali dictator Mohamed Siad Barre was overthrown
The Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan led American strategists to naively conclude that we no longer had any vital interest in the region. The subsequent economic implosion and political self-destruction of the Soviet Union and its east European allies further reinforced that erroneous belief. We abandoned Afghanistan to the tenderless mercies of its neighbors’ political expediencies.
Thinking for some odd reason that he should govern the entire Arab world (and thus control a whole lot more oil than he already did), Saddam Hussein sent the world’s fourth largest army into Kuwait and almost into Saudi Arabia. By dropping the 101st Airborne Division into Saudi Arabia near the Kuwaiti border, we probably prevented an invasion of Saudi Arabia. One can speculate that if the United States had stood by and done nothing, both Jordan and the United Arab Emirates would have fallen to Iraq next. Egypt would then have been facing a really powerful neighbor with a lot of oil to sell. It’s doubtful that any worldwide boycott could have survived for long, and we would have had to mount an invasion of the conquered territories from Egypt (or Israel — and who knows what would have happened if Iraqi tanks had rolled up to the Jordan Valley?).
No one outside of east Africa really cared what happened in Somalia except Ethiopa and Eritrea. Ethiopa engineered the civil war that led to MSB’s fall. Unfortunately, the civil war led to one of the worst famines in modern history. American actress Audrey Hepburn, working with the United Nations, help propel the Somali humanitarian crisis to the front page of newspapers around the world.
We had to abide by our treaties with Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. That meant we had to go to war with Iraq. That also meant we had to put troops on the ground in Saudi Arabia. It was this defense of an Islamic country that set off Osama bin Laden. He apparently had no problem with our helping defend Afghanistan against the Soviet Union but once we started defending an Arab nation against an Arab neighbor, bin Laden’s Islamic idealism concluded that the matter should be settled between Arabs (or maybe he felt it would be good for Islam if the Saudi monarchy were overthrown — who knows what he was thinking).
The American-led liberation of Kuwait (another Islamic nation) and the subsequent American-led liberation of oppressed Islamic peoples in the Balkan war (which erupted as a consequence of the collapse of European Communism) AND the American-led humanitarian effort to bring food, water, and medicine to the Islamic people of Somalia all served as pretexts for Osama bin Laden and his ideological followers to claim that the United States was making a move on the Islamic world.
It sounds crazy to an American but to many poorly educated Islamic extremists who have heard at best rumors and incomplete accounts of American wars and political machinations in the Middle East, this did look like a significant power move. The people who rallied to bin Laden’s call for jihad had no clue as to what we were actually doing. In fact, it has often been said that American leaders have no clue as to they are doing, mucking around in other nation’s affairs and all.
But in these several instances (the Balkan war, the Somali relief effort, and the defense of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia against Iraqi aggression) we really did have only the purist motives: to help people in distress who needed our help. If anything, people criticized the American government for not doing enough in the Balkan war and Somalia, but we also realized in the end that we didn’t do enough against Saddam Hussein, either.
The biggest problem with American policy in the 1990s, however, is that our government (under both President Bush and President Clinton) did not want to repeat the successes of our reconstruction policies in post-WWII Europe and Japan. The United States, our leaders sagely proclaimed, would not engage in “nation building”. Why? Because it was too expensive and didn’t accomplish anything for American interests.
History may eventually conclude that destroying nations and leaving the rubble in your wake is not in a nation’s interests, either. It may be argued that if a modern nation makes the decision to go to war in any form (either directly or through a proxy) then that nation assumes a moral obligation to fully reconstruct and restore to a viable, self-sustaining status whatever nation is ruined by the war.
By the time the U.S. decided to invade Iraq in 2003 we weren’t thinking about oil. We were thinking about weapons of mass destruction (which, ironically, we did find). Iraq’s WMD program became an issue of world-wide concern in the 1990s. By the 2000s U.S. President George W. Bush was tired of waiting for Saddam Hussein to come clean and prove he wasn’t pursuing new weapons of mass destruction (which history shows he had already used). The commitment to starving Iraqi children (by some estimates, as many as 50,000 Iraqi children died because of UN-imposed sanctions over those possible WMDs) may have weighed on the President’s mind, or maybe he just didn’t like Saddam Hussein. Whatever the reason, the U.S. government (either with or without the President’s knowledge and complicity) found reasons to argue for an invasion of Iraq.
The invasion was justified almost solely on the basis of Saddam Hussein’s refusal to prove he wasn’t building weapons of mass destruction. Hussein’s pompous posturing and bravado were masks for his ego. He was afraid to be seen as weak in the Arab world. He was afraid his people might revolt and throw him out of power if he was perceived as weak. In fact, Hussein had put down more than one revolt anyway but like all dictators he feared what would eventually happen. Saddam Hussein allowed other Iraqis to die so that he could cling to power (and life). Once pictures of the Kurds that Saddam’s regime had massacred with mustard gas and other chemical weapons were published around the world, it was only a matter of time before he would be brought to justice. He may have realized that if he ever lost or relinquished power he would be held accountable for many, many deaths (including those of thousands of Iraqis who vanished under his rule).
Was the U.S. invasion of Iraq justified by the obsolete, expired cache of WMDs we found there? Of course not. But the argument for the war should have been built upon his intransigence, not upon the promise that we would find any actual WMDs. Maybe the “Coalition of the Willing” would have been much smaller if we had only argued reasonably, but we would have been better understood by our allies and our own people. Instead, the false promise that we would probably find viable WMDs led to a great disillusionment with American political leadership.
In the long-term that disillusionment could serve us well if our leaders learn from the mistakes they have made. We had to return to Afghanistan because the Taliban rose to power there in the 1990s and gave shelter and material aid to Osama bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda. When the Taliban refused to turn bin Laden over to the rest of the world to answer for the attacks on the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and probably the White House (that seems to be where Pan Am Flight 92 was headed), the United States didn’t need long arguments to persuade a lot of nations to invade Afghanistan. Of the 3000 people who died on September 11, 2001, many came from over 100 nations around the world. Hundreds of those victims were Muslims.
But as has now become so clearly apparent, we entered into both Afghanistan and Iraq with the same incomplete set of goals that led us into Somalia. We didn’t want to build nations, we just wanted to use our military power to make people answer to us. If history judges President George W. Bush harshly, it may be for the arrogance of his foreign policies (which differ little from the foreign policies of all his predecessors going back to John F. Kennedy) rather than for anything else. The moral disconnection between invading and destroying a country’s governing infrastructure and the necessity of restoring or rebuilding that infrastructure makes no sense.
It is the American idea that nation building is bad that has proven to be our undoing time and time again. Instead of nurturing other nations and helping them rise above the challenges they face, challenges which in many cases we have overcome or still face ourselves, we allow our governments to treat other countries as if they were pieces on a chess board.
And that is why we have walked away from Iraq’s oil. Our wars in Iraq were never about oil. Our oil companies have never demanded access to more Iraqi oil. We have moved about the map to promote political ideologies without understanding and accepting the realities that such strategic moves introduce. When you create a power vacuum and leave a leaderless people behind, someone will step into that vacuum and begin implementing their own agenda.
If we’re going to fight wars in the future, perhaps the United States should limit itself to actually fighting wars for resources. At least that way we’ll ensure we stay around to rebuild the infrastructure we destroy. In doing so we might lessen the misery we inflict upon others. The political decisions our leaders make may not be easy, they may not have pleasant alternatives, but they seem to repeat the same mistakes over and over again. We speak of holding each other accountable for our actions here in the U.S., but why do we not hold ourselves accountable for our nation’s actions across the globe?