AUT: Iraq 1/2 - re-sent

[Montyneill <Montyneill@xxxxxxx>]

I am told this did not go through, so I am re-sending it. Monty

In the US, Dreaming of Iraq
by
George Caffentzis
Midnight Notes
P.O. Box 204
Jamaica Plain, MA 02130
GCAFFENTZ@xxxxxxx


"I am not a criminal.
I am new to Cairo. I live in Baghdad." He told the story
of his dream and the buried treasure,
and he was so believable in the telling that
the night patrolman began to cry. Always,
the fragrance of truth has that effect.
-Rumi, In Baghdad, Dreaming of Cairo:
In Cairo, Dreaming of Baghdad (1260-1273)
(Rumi 1996: 210)


Introduction
        Barely seven years after a major military attack that left Iraqi
industry, hospitals, water and sewage treatment plants devastated, and
caused thousands of civilian casualties as well as widespread sickness
among American soldiers, the United States government prepared to go to war
again against Iraq in February 1998. The Clinton administration's reasons
for initiating this war--although noticeably shifting as the weeks went
by--were clothed in a dramatic language.  "... [I]t is very important for
us to make clear"--said Secretary of State Albright in a Columbus, Ohio
"town hall meeting" on February 19, 1998-- "that the United States and the
civilized world cannot deal with somebody who is willing to use...weapons
of mass destruction on his own people, not to speak of his neighbors." In
the same meeting, Albright reiterated, "What we are concerned about is
Saddam Hussein, who has a record of using weapons of mass destruction
against his neighbors as well as against his own people. And [he is] a
brutal dictator who is terrifying his people and threatening the
region.....our policy is to contain him; that is what we are trying to do"
(NYT 2/19/98: A9).
        The key words used to justify the US policy were "weapons of mass
destruction" and "tyrannical rule."(1) The US war aims, according to Pres.
Clinton, were to undermine the Iraqi government and to "substantially
reduce or delay" its ability to develop and deliver weapons of mass
destruction (NYT 2/13/98: A1). The commander of US forces in the Persian
Gulf, General Zinni, explained that he intended to meet these aims by
destroying "the things that obviously allow [Saddam Hussein] to stay in
power, threaten his neighbors, threaten the use of weapons of mass
destruction, the things that are involved in the control of those sorts of
assets" (NYT 2/12/98: A6).
        Such justifications, however, were generally unconvincing, as the
audience in the famous Columbus town hall meeting demonstrated. Their
questions and the answers they received showed that the Clinton
Administration was far from transparent about its true war aims. As one
audience member said: "The are many countries that have these biological
and chemical weapons--six countries in the Middle East alone. You've stated
why Saddam Hussein should be singled out, but it is puzzling to people to
wonder why it's O.K. for these other countries to have biological and
chemical weapons." Another audience member asked Secretary of Defense Cohen
"if he thinks that the ultimate goal of this particular action...should be
the ultimate removal of Saddam Hussein from Government." Cohen replied that
the removal of Hussein "would require...a rather massive force of land
forces, and we don't think that it's necessary in order to contain him. We
think that we can contain him, as we have for the past seven years, and
allow the Iraqi people at some point in time to determine for themselves
whether they want another seven years of deprivation" (NYT 2/19/98: A9). In
other words, Secretary Cohen committed himself to the "containment" of
Saddam Hussein while General Zinni, is out to destroy his power.
        The Columbus "town hall meeting" gave voice to a pervasive sense
growing throughout the country and the world that the Clinton
Administration was hiding something. Was the movie "Wag the Dog" right? Was
the threatened war nothing but a diversion from a sordid sex scandal, or
was there an another explanation? Clinton Administration officials stuck to
their cover story through thick and thin simply because, however shaky it
may have appeared, it put the opponents to the war on the defensive. After
all, who wanted to defend secret weapons of mass destruction or a
tyrannical regime? What I offer in this article is a different explanation
as to why the US insisted on waging war against Iraq along with some
reasons why people in the US should oppose this war.
        Alternative explanations are necessary as probes to challenge and
deflate the ever present threats of war. For even though the agreement
between Kofi Annan, the UN General Secretary, and the Iraqi government
seems to have averted the immediate threat of war, there is very good
reason to believe that the US government will be vitally interested in the
fomenting similar episodes in the future. This strategy of tension can
delay the lifting of the sanctions that restrict the sale of Iraqi oil for
years. So we should be ready with our best arguments, since they might have
to be deployed quite soon.
        Moreover, one of the main arguments of anti-war opponents--a war
would cause the loss of innocent Iraqi lives--is morally valid, but
politically weak. Its moral validity is obvious. As we know, the combined
effects of the aerial bombardments and the sanctions imposed on Iraq, that
restricted the import of food and medicine, have been responsible for the
death of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi people, most of them children.(2)
And we can easily imagine that a bombing campaign of the sort described by
General Zinni would produce a carnage and a devastation of incommensurable
proportions.
         Unfortunately, these types of considerations have never moved the
US population to seriously try to stop its government from engaging in the
use of mass bombing, except in the case of Vietnam. Moreover, once a war is
started, military decisions are not in the people's hands. But if we cannot
appeal to the hearts of the US people, then we should speak to their
self-interest, showing how the war on Iraq is connected to a set of larger
issues that do affect the US working class and call for our resistance to
the war.
        To explain the US government's decision to threaten an attack on
Iraq we must go beyond the official reasons offered to justify this course
of action, and look at the short- and long-term material interests the US
government has in the region, and at the role Iraq plays in the
international division of oil and gas production. If we do that, we also
see that the attack on Iraq fits with the politics of "Globalization," as
demonstrated by the position the US/UN has taken in many other world
regions and conjunctures as, for example,  the Asian crisis.


Official Issues and the Fine Print
        At the end of the Gulf War, a series of agreements were concluded
between the Iraqi government and the United Nations. One of the most
controversial was the right of the United Nations to search for and destroy
any "weapons of mass destruction" that the Iraqi state would produce. The
"UN Special Commission" on Iraq ("UNSCOM") is the name of the UN inspection
team in charge of the search-and-destroy mission;  its present head is
Richard Butler, a former Australian ambassador to Indonesia. Once UNSCOM
completes its work, the sanctions will, presumably, be lifted
        The Clinton Administration justified its threatened bombing of Iraq
by claiming that the Iraqi government has violated this agreement. Was this
true? Immediately before the Secretary General Kofi Annan's arrival in
Baghdad in February 21, 1998, there appeared to be two interpretations of
what complying with the original agreements meant. (A) The Iraqis agreed to
give the UNSCOM inspectors access to eight presidential sites--areas
containing many buildings including residences belonging to Saddam
Hussein--for the duration of 60 days, and they have also agreed to have the
inspection team report directly to the UN Secretary General rather than to
Mr. Butler. (B) The US asserted that the UNSCOM inspectors "must be free to
do their work without hindrance, without conditions, and without time
limits" and they must continue to report to Mr. Butler (NYT 2/17/98: A6).
        The issue, then, as stated, was not whether the inspections should
go on, but how they should be conducted. The Iraqi authorities were
demanding that the accords be put in specific  terms (specific times,
places and persons), while the US demanded a general  reading of the
accords. In other words, the confrontation seemed to be between the
position of Iraq, that accepts eight sites and sixty days, and that of the
US, that demands inspection at any place-any time.
        The Iraqi government's insistence on specific terms in the
interpretation of the accords came from its desire to maintain at least a
shred of sovereignty. It wanted the terms of the accord to be open to
negotiation at each turn in the story and the story itself to have a
temporal limit that would lead to the end of sanctions.
        The US government, on the other hand, claims the right to carry on
an absolute surveillance over the entire Iraqi territory, for an indefinite
span of time, and wants the absolute right to control and destroy any
possible means  that might lead to the development of weapons of mass
destruction and their delivery. This demand is tantamount to requiring that
the Iraqi nation becoe a pre-industrial colony producing crude oil, at
best. For, as we have learned from the ecological movement, almost any
industrial development is either a potential weapon of mass destruction, or
allows for the development of such weapons. For example, any petro-chemical
industry makes chemical weapons possible; any aero-space industry makes
delivery vehicles possible; any bio-engineering or pharmaceutical industry
makes biological weapons possible. What the US is, in fact, demanding is
the elimination not only of Iraqi sovereignty but the total control over of
its future industrial development, if not the total destruction of its
industrial capacity.
        The seemingly formal issue concerning the interpretation of the
accords hid a much more substantial one: whether the ruling Baathist
government will accept Iraq's return to a colonial, dependent status. This
definitely was what international jurists used to call a "casus belli."
        The crisis was averted when Iraqi government decided to accept an
interpretation of the accords brought by Kofi Annan to Baghdad on February
23, 1998.  This interpretation seemed to be an adequate diplomatic
"splitting of the difference" for the moment. It   lifted the sixty day
limit on inspections, but kept the reference to the eight sites. Similarly,
it included a gesture to the recognition of Iraqi sovereignty by adding a
group of senior diplomats to the UNSCOM "technical" team--whose members
were arrogant and disrespectful, according to Iraqi officials--that will
inspect the presidential sites. Finally, the document's references to the
"legitimate concerns of Iraq relating to national security, sovereignty and
dignity" and the "lifting of sanctions" seemed enough to assuage the Iraqi
government (NYT 2/24/98). But the fundamental issue between the US and the
Iraqi regimes concerning the political sovereignty and economic
independence of Iraq remains and will be the source of tension in the
future.
        Some "hawks" in the US have attacked the recent agreements because,
acording to them, the Iraqi state lost its rights to national independence
when it was defeated in the Gulf War and that any negotiations with Saddam
Hussein's government are unnecessary and illegitimate concessions to a
"mass murderer" and weak-willed world opinion. The Iraqi Army's invasion of
Kuwait was unjust, they claim, and its defeat gave the victors (the US-lead
UN coalition) the right to punish the guilty state at will. But we must
remember that defeat in an unjust war does not give the victor such
automatic rights. For example, the US military's unjust invasion (replete
with chemical weapons) of Vietnam was defeated. But this defeat did not
give the Vietnamese government even the theoretical right to control the
US's political and economic life. For the US defeat was conditional.
Similarly, the Iraqi state's defeat in the Gulf War by the US-lead UN
coalition was conditional. Iraq 1991 was not Japan 1945.  The Baath
government survived the Gulf War and today is defending the principle of
Iraqi sovereignty and the right of the Iraqi state to determine a national
industrial policy. That is, the status of Iraq is not that of a slave whose
life was forfeited and must then live under the absolute legal and moral
power of a master, as occurred in Japan after the Second World War. Iraqi
society and its state demand recognition as agents in an exchange.
        Nevertheless, the US government insists that any demand by the
Iraqi government for negotiations about the conditions of the accords and
the end of sanctions--conditions involving its territory and economy--are
illegitimate. The Clinton Administration is making claims fit for an
absolute master without having any right to possession, except for its
military superiority. It is by virtue of this military power that the US
government and its transnational corporate allies have in recent times
battered down all trade and political barriers wherever they stood in the
way of US national and corporate interests. The recent showdown with Iraq
was not different, even if the justifications given appealed to the
well-being of the people of the world and put the US in the place of the
ancient knight fighting the horrendous dragon, ensuring in the end that
justice is done.
        But is hard to cast President Clinton, the supporter of the IMF,
NAFTA, Multinational Aggreement on Investment (MAI) and all the other
corporate-sponsored institutions and deals around the planet, in the
clothes of Saint George, with his spear drawn in defense of the poor and
weak. Indeed, there were and are more mundane reasons revolving around the
price and availability of crude oil that make war with Iraq a continual
temptation .


The Oil Secret

 "Most likely the sanctions will be lifted, not when Iraq agrees to any new
elimination of a weapons system or a new inspection of its arms sites, but
when it agrees to sell the oil on the US/UN terms"
(Midnight Notes 1992: 49).

        Oil has long been recognized as a major factor in the Gulf War.
This insight was expressed most graphically in the 1990/91 anti-Gulf War
movement's slogan "NO BLOOD FOR OIL!" What exact role oil played then,
however, was often disputed. According to some commentators at the time,
the US's interest in "cheap oil" brought about a confrontation with Iraq.
But the US government was never committed to any particular price for crude
oil. In 1974, for example, the US government gave the go-ahead to the
Saudis to hike the price of oil dramatically while in 1986 it bombed Libya
and sent cakes to Iran in order to lower the price of oil (Midnight Notes
1992: 6-7, 283-301). The US was responding not to the Iraqi state's demand
for high oil prices, but to its desperate attempt to bypass the US military
and economic control of Persian Gulf oil in 1990/91. In this respect little
has changed since the Gulf War.
        A key to understanding the present situation is to realize that the
Iraqi government has managed to face seven years of total military
surveillance and economic sanctions without capitulating completely to the
military subordination and economic dependence that US has demanded of the
states in the region. The Iraqi state is still insisting on some control
over the nation's resources and its independent entrance as a seller into
the global oil market. For example, the Iraqi state has made major deals
with a number of non-US oil companies to bring them into the joint
development of oil fields in Iraq once the sanctions are lifted. These
deals involve French companies like Elf Aquitaine and Total SA (involving
fields of 12.5 billion barrels) and Russian companies like Lukoil,
Zabrubezneft and Mashinoimport (involving fields of 7.5 billion barrels).
The only companies left out of the oil exploration bonanza when sanctions
are lifted will be US-based, unless the Saddam Hussein regime is somehow
persuaded otherwise (Wall Street Journal 2/23/98: A17).
        The economic situation now is the inverse of what it was during the
1991 Gulf War. In 1990, Iraqi authorities were the primary oil price hawks
in OPEC. They were calling for $25 per barrel and one of their official
reasons de guerre  was that Kuwait was violating its OPEC quota and
depressing the price of oil. In 1998 Iraq is objectively not a force for
higher oil prices. In fact, the full return of Iraqi oil into the
international oil market would substantially lower oil prices. In 1994, the
Clinton Administration estimated that, with the full lifting of sanctions,
a return of Iraqi oil on the world market would depress prices by almost
50% and there is no reason to believe that this estimate does not hold any
longer today. Such a price collapse would be especially problematic for the
world petroleum corporations in a period when they believe that there are
new, profitable large-scale investments to be made in oil exploration and
development (especially in the former non-Russian Soviet republics), but at
the same time they face a decline in short-term demand because of the
"Asian Crisis" (Beck 1998). Such a price collapse would also undermine the
present control structure of OPEC (where Saudi Arabia, a US client state,
is king-pin), and would devastate the capitalists of the local "oil patch"
in Texas and Louisiana. These are no small losers in the short-run, and
they have tremendous power with the US government.
        It is important to review oil price politics since the Gulf War to
understand this issue. That war itself was a $4 war because one of the
crucial issues at stake was the price of oil in the 1990s. A desperate
Iraqi government, trying to rebuild after the Iraq-Iran war and full of
political debts to its populace, was demanding a $25 per barrel price
target at the last OPEC meeting before the war while the Saudi Arabian
regime, with US support, was demanding $21--a $4 difference. The Baath
regime in 1990 was desperate because it was caught in a pincer. On the one
side, the Iraqi proletariat, after nearly a decade of war with Iran, was
demanding a "pay off" in the form of higher living standards,  on the other
side, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the US, and the UN were
demanding the privatization of state industries and an end to subsidies,
i.e., the imposition of a policy of austerity and structural adjustment.
The invasion of Kuwait was a calculated risk meant to gain some breathing
space from both the Iraqi working class and the IMF/US/UN (by gaining
concessions from the Kuwaitis and other elements of Middle Eastern capital
in exchange for a pull back). The invasion was also premised on the US not
having an viable political alternative to the Baath party. In a way, the
invasion did save the Baath regime and did impose austerity on the Iraqi
people.
        The Saudi Arabians won the oil price debate with Iraq both at the
last OPEC meeting before the Gulf War and in reality. The price of oil on
the international market between 1992 and early 1997 averaged in the region
of $19-$20 (with the low at $14 in late 1993 and a high of $25 in early
1997). Indeed, in 1996 the price was rising rapidly, to the point where
many were wondering whether the pre-Gulf War oil experts' predictions of
$40 oil at the beginning of the next century might still be fulfilled.
        But then came, after many twists of fate, the "oil-for-food"
agreement between the Iraqi government and the UN Security Council
(Resolution 986) and with it the very regulated and restricted return of
Iraqi oil onto the world market in January 7, 1997 which lead to a dramatic
collapse of the price of oil. In two months (January-March) it fell from
$24 to $18 and a year later it is in the $15-$16 range (it was $16.18 on
Feb. 20, 1998, for example).
        The US fought against the "oil-for-food" deal diplomatically and
militarily. Indeed, the last US attack on Iraq--the launching of 27 cruise
missals on September 9, 1996--delayed the implementation of the Resolution
for almost four months. Though it could not stop the "oil-for-food" deal
completely,  US diplomats have crafted the resolution in a very restrictive
way, making it vulnerable to a thousand and one possible interruptions and
challenges.  First, it only allowed for the sale of about 700,000 barrels
per day or only 20% of the 3,500,000 barrels per day the Iraqi state was
exporting before the Gulf War. Second, an essential part of the agreement
is the placing of 151 monitors from the UN Department of Humanitarian
Affairs (UNDHA) throughout Iraq who observe whether the food bought from
the oil revenues is properly distributed through an agreed upon ration card
system at more than 60,000 retailers throughout the country. Third, along
with food, essential technology to repair water and sewerage systems as
well as equipment for the oil industry may be purchased with the oil money.
These imports will to be checked by a monitoring team as well.
Consequently, the Iraqi economy is not only watched by satellite, spy plane
over flights, and the UNSCOM inspectors; hundreds of accountants and market
inspectors are also auditing it daily.
        These monitoring teams are clearly more important for the fate of
the Iraqi people and state than the UNSCOM inspection teams, but they are
not often talked about in Clinton administration press conferences. If they
are removed from Iraq or cannot do their work there, the "oil-for-food"
deal will become null-and-void and the Iraqi right to sell oil openly will
be rescinded.(3) In effect, any time the US bangs the "drums of war," Iraqi
oil is driven out of the market. This is certainly one of the secret
motivations for US war threats, since they permit control over Iraqi oil
sales in the short-run. For example, the UN Security Council increased
Iraq's quota for exporting oil from $2 billion to $5.2 billion on February
20, 1998 as an inducement to Saddam Hussein's government to sign the new
interpretation of the accords in Baghdad. This increase permitted the Iraqi
national oil company to sell up to about 50% of its pre-Gulf War exports.
But this limit is purely theoretical, because (a) the UNDHA inspection
teams must be operating on the ground in Iraq and (b) parts must be
imported in order to repair oil extraction and pipeline equipment in order
for the Iraqi National Oil Company to be able to increase production to
meet this limit. If the US threatens war again or objects that some
imported piece of equipment can be used to construct a weapon of mass
destruction, the Iraqi's will find themselves either thrown out of the
market or unable to enter into it.


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