Tom Engelhardt on fossil fuel interests and the occupation of Iraq -

"An administration of former energy execs — with a National Security Advisor who once sat on the board of Chevron and had a double-hulled oil tanker, the Condoleezza Rice, named after her (until she took office), and a Vice President who was especially aware of the globe’s potentially limited energy supplies — certainly had oil reserves and energy flows on the brain. They knew, in Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz’s apt phrase, that Iraq was afloat on 'a sea of oil' and that it sat strategically in the midst of the oil heartlands of the planet.

It wasn’t a mistake that, in 2001, Vice President Dick Cheney’s semi-secret Energy Task Force set itself the 'task' of opening up the energy sectors of various Middle Eastern countries to 'foreign investment'; or that it scrutinized 'a detailed map of Iraq’s oil fields, together with the (non-American) oil companies scheduled to develop them'; or that, according to the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer, the National Security Council directed its staff 'to cooperate fully with the Energy Task Force as it considered the ‘melding’ of two seemingly unrelated areas of policy: ‘the review of operational policies towards rogue states,’ such as Iraq, and ‘actions regarding the capture of new and existing oil and gas fields'; or that the only American troops ordered to guard buildings in Iraq, after Baghdad fell, were sent to the Oil Ministry (and the Interior Ministry, which housed Saddam Hussein’s dreaded secret police); or that the first 'reconstruction' contract was issued to Cheney’s former firm, Halliburton, for 'emergency repairs' to those patrimonial oil fields. Once in charge in Baghdad, as sociologist Michael Schwartz has made clear, the administration immediately began guiding recalcitrant Iraqis toward denationalizing and opening up their oil industry, as well as bringing in the big boys.

Though rampant insecurity has kept the Western oil giants on the sidelines, the American-shaped 'Iraqi' oil law quickly became a 'benchmark' of 'progress' in Washington and remains a constant source of prodding and advice from American officials in Baghdad. Former Federal Reserve chief Alan Greenspan put the oil matter simply and straightforwardly in his memoir in 2007: 'I am saddened,' he wrote, 'that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.' In other words, in a variation on the old Bill Clinton campaign mantra: It’s the oil, stupid. Greenspan was, unsurprisingly, roundly assaulted for the obvious naiveté of his statement, from which, when it proved inconvenient, he quickly retreated."

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Toban Black
(http://tobanblack.net/blog/)