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War continues in Iraq. They're calling it Operation Iraqi Freedom. They were going to call it Operation Iraqi Liberation until they realized that spells
"OIL."
-- Jay Leno
“Leading Hawks Pave Way for Bechtel”
“It has nothing to do with oil, literally nothing to do with oil.” Those were the words of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld explaining why the U.S. was preparing to launch a pre-emptive attack on Iraq.
That was Nov. 15, 2002.
Flashback 19 years to Dec. 20, 1983. The setting is Baghdad. President Reagan’s special envoy was in Baghdad. He met a certain Saddam Hussein and Tariq Aziz. And the discussion centered on one topic: oil. The envoy’s name was Donald Rumsfeld.
Let’s read Rumsfeld’s notes from the meeting with Aziz:
“I noted that Iraq’s oil exports were important… I raised the question of a pipeline through Jordan. He said he was familiar with the proposal. It apparently was a U.S. company’s proposal.”
The U.S. company was San Francisco-based Bechtel.
Bechtel wanted to build a pipeline from Iraq to Jordan. The deal would eventually fall apart, and with it, U.S.-Iraqi relations, leading Saddam Hussein to become a prime target of Washington.
“The break in U.S.-Iraq relations occurred not after Iraq used chemical weapons on the Iranians, nor after Iraq gassed its own Kurdish people, nor even after Iraq invaded Kuwait, but rather, followed Saddam's rejection of the Aqaba pipeline deal,” concludes a new report by the Sustainable Energy and Economy Network and Institute for Policy Studies.
Today Bechtel stands to profit millions from the rebuilding of Iraq as soon as the Rumsfeld-led military finishes waging its attack on the country. Bechtel was one of five U.S. companies – Vice President Dick Cheney’s former company Halliburton was another – to be quietly invited by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) to bid on a $900 million project to rebuild Iraq. As we went to press, the list of prospective contractors had been narrowed to two including Bechtel.
Let’s go back 20 years: The Iraq-Iran war in full swing. Reagan and Bush (the first) were in the White House. The Secretary of State was George Shultz, a former CEO of Bechtel. And Iraq had already begun gassing the Iranians.
On Dec. 2, 1983 the State Department invited Bechtel officials to discuss building an oil pipeline from Iraq to the Gulf of Aqaba, Jordan.
Within three weeks special envoy Rumsfeld was in Baghdad. Declassified notes indicate Rumsfeld told Hussein, “The US looks with favor on other means, such as the expansion of Iraqi pipeline capabilities through Saudi Arabia and possibly elsewhere [to] redress the Iran-Iraq oil export imbalance.”
Rumsfeld would return again on March 26, 1984. On the same day he met with Aziz to discuss the pipeline, the United Nations issued its first report condemning Iraq’s use of chemical weapons. Meanwhile in Washington, Secretary of State Shultz was quietly pressuring the U.S. Export-Import Bank and the Overseas Private Investment Corporation to provide aid to Iraq and to his former company, Bechtel.
Iraq, however, was still hesitant to OK the Bechtel project because of fears that Israel would target the oil pipeline. Over the next two years, countless hours of questionable negotiations occurred involving a cast of characters including Attorney General Edwin Meese III, former CIA Director and Defense Secretary James Schlesinger, National Security Advisor Robert “Bud” McFarlane, National Security Advisor Roger Robinson and Judge William B. Clark (who simultaneously represented Bechtel and the Reagan administration during negotiations with Iraq).
Despite the intense negotiations, the Iraqis eventually rejected the pipeline proposal. U.S.-Iraq relations have never recovered. Many of the same officials calling for the pipeline transformed into the same hawks calling for war.
In February 1998, Rumsfeld, Clark, Robinson and McFarlane joined a team of others including current members of the Bush/Cheney cabal such as Richard Perle, Elliot Abrams, Richard Armitage and Paul Wolfowitz writing an open letter to President Clinton urging him to rid the world of Saddam Hussein.
"The men who courted Saddam while he gassed Iranians are now waging war against him, ostensibly because he holds these same weapons of mass destruction" said Jim Vallette, lead author of the Sustainable Energy report. "To a man, they now deny that oil has anything to do with the conflict. Yet during the Reagan Administration, and in the years leading up to the present conflict, these men shaped and implemented a strategy that has everything to do with securing Iraqi oil exports."
Bechtel may have lost its chance to build an oil pipeline, but now it has its eyes on a bigger project: rebuilding the country that it had a role in destroying.
-- Mike Burke, the Indypendent
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