SPOKESMAN BOOKS
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Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation
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Catalogue
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Surging for Oil
The Spokesman, 94
Editorial by Ken Coates
The year 2007 opened with a raging dispute on the
implementation of the decision of President George Bush to send more than
twenty thousand additional troops to join the slaughter in Iraq. Already
American fatalities had numbered more than three thousand, and the Iraqi
civilian casualties of the war filled hecatombs.
According to the Iraqi Interior Ministry, one thousand
nine hundred and thirty perished in December alone, although the figures are
the subject of some controversy. The Financial Times, for instance,
claims that the December figure may be a significant underestimate’.
Iraqi oil had been public property for decades before
the outbreak of the present war. When that war was engineered, the British
Prime Minister went to the House of Commons on the 18th
March
2003 to propose support for it. ‘Oil revenues, which people falsely claim that
we want to seize, should be put in a trust fund for the Iraqi people
administered through the UN’, he asserted. ‘The United Kingdom should seek
a new Security Council Resolution that would affirm the use of all oil
revenues for the benefit of the Iraqi people.’
Such promises from Mr. Blair must always be taken with
a modest amount of salt.
Meantime, behind the stairs a company called
BearingPoint, which had contributed more than any other Iraq contractor to
Bush election campaigns, was helping in the reshaping of the Iraqi oil
industry, already reduced to a shadow of itself by war and subsequent acts of
guerrilla harassment, or even banditry. One BearingPoint employee had been
given an office in the massive US Embassy in Baghdad, and charged with
advising the Iraqi Ministry of Oil on the drafting of a new hydrocarbon law. A
suitably large retinue of well-placed officials were in attendance. This law
has the objective of legitimising western oil companies when they seek a large
share of profits from the Iraqi oil fields.
The new law will seek to avoid the stigma of
‘privatisation’ by insisting that the legal ownership of reserves will not
be affected by the contingent steps that are proposed to govern and control
the exploitation of those reserves. The new law which is being promoted is
based upon the concept of Production Sharing Agreements (PSAs) which came into
being in the 1960s. Technically these keep the ownership of the reserves in
State hands, while practically affording control of their exploitation to the
oil companies with which the contracts are agreed. PSAs are carefully shrouded
in commercial confidentiality, and liable to imprison Governments for decades
in terms which will remain unalterable for their duration. Naturally it is
easier to conclude such one-sided agreements when the new Government is
subservient, enfeebled or divided. An important provision will stipulate that
any disputes are heard in International Investment Tribunals, not subject to
past or future Iraqi national laws.
The US State Department proposed that PSAs be inaugurated, even before the invasion of 2003 had been launched.
It is alleged by officials of the occupation that PSAs
could normally govern the oil industry, in order to finance its development.
But the International Energy Agency tells us that only some twelve per cent of
world oil reserves are governed by PSAs, in countries with small oil fields
(sometimes off-shore) where production costs are high, and there is a degree
of uncertainty about the prospects.
Middle Eastern countries have not generally used PSAs. Russia did during the turmoil of the Yeltsin years and has been regretting it ever since.
On January
16th
2007
the final draft of this oil law was agreed by the Oil Committee established in
the Iraqi Oil Ministry with a little help from its friends.
It sets out the rules for the sharing of revenue, increasing production
and regulating foreign investment throughout the oil sector of Iraq. It seeks
to establish a federal committee (led by the Prime Minister in Baghdad) to
superintend all future contracts, and to review existing deals which had been
concluded by the Saddam regime, and also separately by the Kurdish Regional
Government. This legislation would establish central control over the
consequent oil revenues, and regulate their distribution to the various
regions of Iraq.
But a draft law cannot settle the continuing arguments
between the different regions of Iraq. The Kurds told the world’s press that
they were not satisfied with the draft, and that a number of issues remained
unresolved. ‘The Ministry of Oil statement is unfortunately premature’.
The draft legislation includes a number of annexes which apparently remain
strongly disputed. The Sunni regions of Iraq are famously oil-poor, so that a
major object in the settlement of the argument over revenue distribution would
be to assuage Sunni complaints. It is not known how this imperative can be
tackled. Ferocious arguments between the Kurds and the Shia are also quite
evident, and quite unresolved.
Who shall sign contracts with the oil companies? Must
it be the central Government in Baghdad, or can the function be devolved to
local powers? This reopens arguments which had already been aired in initial
debate about the Iraqi constitution itself. Now, all have been reborn in more
naked, carnivorous shapes. For
these reasons, outside commentators have been extremely agnostic about whether
the new draft law can be anything more than the most tentative of opening
gambits. Will it survive the Al-Maliki Government? Will that Government itself
survive George Bush’s military surge against the Mahdi army and others he
finds inconvenient?
Before the oil majors can pump Iraq’s wealth away
with relative impunity, they need the legal fiction of the new hydrocarbon
law. Without this, the expropriation of occupied Iraq’s resources will be
strictly illegal. But before any pretence of legality can be feigned, the
Iraqi Parliament has to overcome its internecine feuds for long enough to vote
the measure through, and that with some speed, before the ferocious
surge of American protection splits everyone in Mesopotamia asunder.
In early January 2007, although the hydrocarbon law was
nearing the point at which it was supposed to be ratified, numerous Iraqi
Members of Parliament claimed that they had not yet seen it. The leaders of
five Iraqi trade union federations met in Amman to consider what was known
about this measure. Evidently it is designed to enable foreign companies
to invest in the oil sector, and to offer them very favourable terms. The
draft law apparently specifies that as much as two-thirds of Iraq’s known
oil capacity will be developed by major multinationals, who will be offered
contracts lasting for fifteen or twenty years.
Such a decision would mark a rupture with the oil
industry policy in Iraq, which has kept the industry in the public sector for
more than thirty years in conformity with the practice in most other countries
in the Middle East.
The five major trade unions (which represent hundreds
of thousands of workers) have rejected ‘the
handing of control over oil to foreign companies, whose aim is to make big
profits at the expense of the Iraqi people, and to rob the national wealth,
according to long-term, unfair contracts, that undermine the sovereignty of
the State and the dignity of the Iraqi people.’
The new law has been considered important enough to
figure in the Baker- Hamilton Iraq Study Group Report, and to receive specific
endorsement from the American Ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, who
described it as a ‘milestone’ in Iraqi progress.
The Iraqi unions were not impressed by these official
proclamations. They complained that the new law would ‘benefit foreign
investors more than it would benefit Iraqi workers’.
This legislation was framed in active consultation with
the International Monetary Fund (in September), and with the United States
Government and major oil companies (in July). It has profited from a wealth of
exploitative experience so that it provides that any disputes with foreign
companies must ultimately be settled by international arbitration.
The protection of oil fields and pipelines will be financed by Iraqi
Government funds, but will undoubtedly draw on the expert services of American
military contractors.
Whilst these dark matters were emerging into the light
of day, the preparations for George Bush’s ‘surge’ were remorselessly
advancing. On the 29th January, Al Jazeera reported that hundreds of
people had been killed near the city of Najaf.
The Iraqi army had engaged what was allegedly an armed
Muslim cult. When the Iraqi forces were outgunned and outfought, they called
in the Americans, who ‘took control of the operation on Sunday (28th
January)
and continued bombing the area until well after dawn on Monday. A helicopter
was shot down, and two Americans were killed’. Reuters reported Colonel Ali
Nomas as saying that ‘three hundred to three hundred and fifty armed men had
been killed in the operation, and dozens more arrested’. Subsequent news
reports provided a striking testimony to the power of the military
imagination. Those killed were variously alleged to be ‘religious
fanatics’, bent on the slaughter of Shiite clerics. They were also described
as Saddamists, and Afghanis, infiltrated as pilgrims. The Iraqi Government
claimed a smaller number of casualties, ‘between two hundred and three
hundred’. They claim that women and children might have been caught up in
the fighting and might thus figure among the casualties. ‘All those people
not killed were in detention, many of them wounded’. Other reports have
claimed that the victims of this slaughter had come from Iran, whilst still
others insisted that they were hostile to the Iranians.
When the smoke of battle subsides, perhaps we shall
discover what it was really about. One thing is already clear: this was a
powerful and remorseless offensive, generating a considerable slaughter. The
‘surge’ which is being prepared is advertised as threatening militia
forces which have been sheltered under the wings of the Iraqi Government, but
which are alleged to be beyond its influence. Such militias are clearly
greatly more powerful than the ‘Soldiers of Heaven’, of which no-one had
heard before the trial run in the killing fields of Najaf.
The American administration is already speculating
about the possibility that the followers of Muqtada al-Sadr may have fled, en
masse, to Iran, where it will be more difficult for the surge to kill them.
Evidently it is anticipated that rather a lot of killing is to be expected.
Were the followers of Muqtada al-Sadr to vote against the oil law? If so,
might its passage not be eased by their departure from the scene? Evidently
the American President is unwilling to cut his losses in Iraq before the
future of the oil companies is assured. And almost equally evidently he has
nurtured a high level of agnosticism about the permanence of the democracy
upon which he relies to give him his hydrocarbon law. There are days when we
can be forgiven for thinking that perhaps the much-vaunted Iraqi
ground-breaking engagement with democracy will have fulfilled its purposes
once the oil law is securely enacted.
The military surge ‘will
be accomplished largely by deploying troops sooner than was previously
planned, and by lengthening the deployment of forces already in the Iraq
theatre. The increase in force levels has already begun and is expected to
reach its peak of about twenty thousand additional combat personnel in May.’
But the Congressional Budget Office has pointed out
that these figures apply only to combat units, which also require substantial
back-up forces. These include headquarters staff, military police, and service
professionals in communications, contracting, engineering, intelligence and
medical activities. This entails an additional support force of something like
twenty-eight thousand, in addition to the actual combat personnel. There do
exist alternative estimates which put the support levels required at as many
as thirty-five thousand.
None of this has offered calculations about the
deployment which might be involved in any spill over of the conflict into
Iran. We cannot estimate the consequences of this, which represent an ascent
into the higher reaches of uncertainty. But whilst these costs will
remain difficult to compute, the possibility that we might need to reckon them
cannot, alas, be totally dismissed. There have been a very large number of
warnings that the war is imminently likely to spread to Iran. Some of these
may have seemed more alarmist than real: but some have needed to be taken
seriously. Now there has been a very grave alarm, sounded on 1 February 2007
by no less an authority than Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was President Carter’s
National Security Adviser. He warned of the risk of a ‘head-on conflict with
Iran’ when he testified to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee: ‘If
the United States continues to be bogged down in a protracted bloody
involvement in Iraq, the final destination on this downhill track is likely to
be a head-on conflict with Iran and with much of the world of Islam at large.
A plausible scenario for a military collision with Iran involves Iraqi failure
to meet the benchmarks; followed by accusations of Iranian responsibility for
the failure; then by some provocation in Iraq or a terrorist act in the United
States blamed on Iran; culminating in a “defensive” US military action
against Iran that plunges a lonely America into a spreading and deepening
quagmire eventually ranging across Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.’
(For more of Brzezinski’s testimony see page 73.)
*
* *
Events in Iraq plumb new depths of cynicism, but events
in Britain are if anything even less savoury. The British Prime Minister, who
has qualified for a Nobel Prize in lying in order to launch his wars, is
apparently waiting for the detectives to feel his collar on a variety of
criminal charges. His most dependable advisers are giving evidence to the
police under caution, if not actually under arrest. Old dishonesty was modest.
It wore a dissembling face. But New Labour has broken the mould. Nothing seems
too shameful for Mr. Blair to face down or tough out. Meanwhile, the polls
show his fortunes in freefall. The membership of his Party plummets ever
lower. And yet, he seems impervious, unsackable, a paradigm case of the
durability of the unacceptable, the indefensible, the basest behaviours.
It is, however, possible that this magic circle might
be broken in May. On the 3rd of that month there will take place local
elections, together with the contests for the Scottish Parliament and the
Welsh Assembly. In Scotland, there has been a phenomenal upsurge in support
for the Scottish National Party which declares its determination to secure
Scottish independence from the United Kingdom, its undying hostility to Mr.
Blair’s wars, and to the preparation of a renewed programme of nuclear
armament. Can it be that all this is entirely unconnected with the profound
desire to be rid of Mr. Blair?
