[Marxism] Palast - Was the Invasion of Iraq A Jewish Conspiracy?

[Brian Shannon <brian_shannon@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Was the Invasion of Iraq A Jewish Conspiracy?

BY GREG PALAST
Tikkun Magazine JULY/AUGUST 2006

June 26, 2006


Did the Jews do it?

The US Congress will open hearings this week on the War in Iraq -- a  
wee bit late one might think.  But one question at the forefront of  
the minds of many on both the Left and the Right is sure not to be  
asked:  Did the Jews do it?  I mean, after killing Jesus, did the  
Elders of Zion manipulate the government of the United States into  
invading Babylon as part of a scheme to abet the expansion of Greater  
Israel?

The question was first posed to me in 2004 when I was speaking at a  
meeting of Mobilization for Peace in San Jose. A member of the  
audience asked, “Put it together— Who’s behind this war? Paul  
Wolfowitz and ElliottAbrams and the Project for a “Jew” American  
Century and, and, why don’t you talk about that, huh?  And ....”

But the questioner never had the full opportunity to complete his  
query because, flushed and red, he began to charge the stage. The  
peace activists attempted to detain the gentleman—whose confederates  
then grabbed some chairs to swing. As the Peace Center was taking on  
a somewhat warlike character, I chose to call in the authorities and  
slip out the back.

Still, his question intrigued me. As an investigative reporter,  
“Who’s behind this war?” seemed like a reasonable challenge—and if it  
were a plot of Christ-killers and Illuminati, so be it. I just report  
the facts, ma’am.

And frankly, at first, it seemed like the gent had a point, twisted  
though his spin might be. There was Paul Wolfowitz, before Congress  
in March 2003, offering Americans the bargain of the century: a free  
Iraq—not “free” as in “freedom and democracy” but free in the sense  
of this won’t cost us a penny. Wolfowitz testified: “There’s a lot of  
money to pay for this that doesn’t have to be U.S. taxpayer money.”


A "Free" Iraq

And where would these billions come from? Wolfowitz told us: “It  
starts with the assets of the Iraqi people.... The oil revenues of  
that country could bring between $50 and $100 billion over the next  
two or three years.”

This was no small matter. The vulpine Deputy Defense Secretary knew  
that the number one question on the minds of Americans was not, “Does  
Saddam really have the bomb?” but “What’s this little war going to  
cost us?”

However, Wolfowitz left something out of his testimony: the truth. I  
hunted for weeks for the source of the Pentagon’s oil revenue  
projections—and found them. They were wildly different from the  
Wolfowitz testimony. But this was not perjury. Ever since the  
conviction of Elliott Abrams for perjury before Congress during the  
Iran-Contra hearings, neither Wolfowitz nor the other Bush factotums  
swear an oath before testifying. If you don’t raise your hand and  
promise to tell the truth, “so help me, God,” you’re off the hook  
with federal prosecutors.

How the Lord will judge that little ploy, we cannot say.

But Wolfowitz’s little numbers game can hardly count as a Great  
Zionist conspiracy.  That seemed to come, at first glance, in the  
form of a confidential 101-page document slipped to our team at BBC's  
Newsnight.  It detailed the economic "recovery" of Iraq's post- 
conquest economy.  This blueprint for occupation, we learned, was  
first devised in secret in late 2001.

Notably, this program for Iraq's recovery wasn’t written by Iraqis;  
rather, it was promoted by the neo-conservatives of the Defense  
Department, home of Abrams, Wolfowitz, Harold Rhode and other desktop  
Napoleons unafraid of moving toy tanks around the Pentagon war room.

Nose-Twist’s Hidden Hand

The neo-cons’ 101-page confidential document, which came to me in a  
brown envelope in February 2001, just before the tanks rolled, goes  
boldly where no U.S. invasion plan had gone before: the complete  
rewrite of the conquered state’s “policies, law and regulations.” A  
cap on the income taxes of Iraq’s wealthiest was included as a matter  
of course. And this was undoubtedly history’s first military assault  
plan appended to a program for toughening the target nation’s  
copyright laws. Once the 82nd Airborne liberated Iraq, never again  
would the Ba’athist dictatorship threaten America with bootleg dubs  
of Britney Spears’s “...Baby One More Time.”

It was more like a corporate takeover, except with Abrams tanks  
instead of junk bonds.  It didn’t strike me as the work of a Kosher  
Cabal for an Imperial Israel. In fact, it smelled of pork—Pig Heaven  
for corporate America looking for a slice of Iraq, and I suspected  
its porcine source. I gave it a big sniff and, sure enough, I smelled  
Grover Norquist.

Norquist is the capo di capi of right-wing, big-money influence  
peddlers in Washington.  Those jealous of his inside track to the  
White House call him "Gopher Nose-Twist."

A devout Christian, Norquist channeled a million dollars to the  
Christian Coalition to fight the devil’s tool, legalized gambling. He  
didn’t tell the Coalition that the loot came from an Indian tribe  
represented by Norquist’s associate, Jack Abramoff.   (The tribe  
didn’t want competition for its own casino operations.)

I took a chance and dropped in on Norquist’s L Street office, and  
under a poster of his idol [“NIXON— NOW MORE THAN EVER”], Norquist  
took a look at the "recovery" plan for Iraq and practically jumped  
over my desk to sign it, filled with pride at seeing his baby. Yes,  
he promoted the privatizations, the tax limit for the rich, and the  
change in copyright law, all concerns close to the hearts and wallets  
of his clients.


“The Oil” on Page 73

The very un-Jewish Norquist may have framed much of the U.S.  
occupation grabfest, but there was, without doubt, one notable item  
in the 101-page plan for Iraq which clearly had the mark of Zion on  
it. On page seventy-three the plan called for the “privatization.... 
[of] the oil and supporting industries,” the sell-off of every ounce  
of Iraq’s oil fields and reserves.  Its mastermind, I learned, was  
Ariel Cohen of the Heritage Foundation.

For the neo-cons, this was The Big One. Behind it, no less a goal  
than to bring down the lynchpin of Arab power, Saudi Arabia.

It would work like this: the Saudi’s power rests on control of OPEC,  
the oil cartel which, as any good monopoly, withholds oil from the  
market, kicking up prices. Sell-off Iraq’s oil fields and private  
companies will pump oil in their little Iraqi patches to the max.  
Iraq, the neo-cons hoped, would crank out six million barrels of oil  
a day, bust its OPEC quota, flood the world market, demolish OPEC  
and, as the price of oil fell off a cliff, Saudi Arabia would
fall to its knees.

“It’s a no-brainer,” Cohen told me, at his office at Heritage. It was  
a dim little cubby, in which, in our hour or two together, the phone  
rang only once. For a guy who was supposed to be The Godfather of a  
globe-spanning Zionist scheme to destroy the Arab oil monopoly, he  
seemed kind of, well...pathetic.

And he failed.  While the Norquist-promoted sell-offs, flat taxes and  
copyright laws were dictated into Iraqi law by occupation chief Paul  
Bremer, the Cohen neo-con oil privatization died an unhappy death.    
What happened, Ari?

"Arab economists," he hissed, "hired by the State Department … the  
witches brew of the Saudi Royal family and Soviet Ostblock."

Well, the Soviet Ostblock does not exist, but the Arab economists  
do.  I spoke with them in Riyadh, in London, in California, in wry  
accents mixing desert and Oxford drawls.  They speak with confidence,  
knowing Saudi Arabia's political authority is protected by the royal  
families -- of Houston petroleum.


"Enhance OPEC"

After two mad years of hunting, I discovered the real plan for Iraq's  
oil, the one that keeps our troops in Fallujah.  Some 323 pages long  
and deeply confidential, it was drafted at the James A. Baker III  
Institute in Houston, Texas, under the strict guidance of Big Oil's  
minions.  It was the culmination of a series of planning groups that  
began in December 2000 with key players from the Baker Institute and  
Council on Foreign Relations (including one Ken Lay of Enron).  This  
was followed by a State Department invasion-planning session in  
Walnut Creek, California, in February 2001, only weeks after Bush and  
Cheney took office. Its concepts received official blessing after a  
March 2001 gathering of oil chiefs (and Lay) with Dick Cheney where  
the group reviewed with the Vice-President the map of Iraq's oil fields.

Once I discovered the Big Oil plan, several of the players agreed to  
speak with me (not, to the chagrin of some, realizing that I rarely  
hold such conversions without secretly recording them).  Most  
forthright was Philip Carroll, former CEO of Shell Oil USA, who was  
flown into Baghdad on a C-17 to make sure there would be no neo-con  
monkey business in America's newest oil fields.

It had been a very good war for Big Oil, with tripled oil prices  
meaning tripled profits. In Houston, I asked Carroll, a commanding,  
steel-straight chief executive, about Ari Cohen’s oil privatization  
plan, the anti-Saudi “no-brainer.”

“I would agree with that statement” Caroll told me, “privatization is  
a no-brainer. It would only be thought about by someone with no brain.”

Bush world is divided in two: neo-cons on one side, and the  
Establishment (which includes the oil companies and the Saudis) on  
the other. The plan the Establishment created, crafted by Houston oil  
men, called for locking up Iraq’s oil with agreements between a new  
state oil company under “profit-sharing agreements” with  
“IOCs” (International Oil Companies).  The combine could “enhance the  
[Iraq’s] government’s relationship with OPEC,” it read, by holding  
the line on quotas and thereby upholding high prices.


Wolfowitz Dammerung: Twilight Of The Neo-Con Gods

So there you have it. Wolfowitz and his neo-con clique— bookish,  
foolish, vainglorious—had their asses kicked utterly, finally, and  
convincingly by the powers of petroleum, the Houston-Riyadh Big Oil  
axis.

Between the neo-cons and Big Oil, it wasn’t much of a contest. The  
end-game was crushing, final. The Israelites had lost again in the  
land of Babylon. And to make certain the arriviste neo-cons got the  
point, public punishment was exacted, from exile to demotion to  
banishment. In January 2005, neo-con pointman Douglas Feith resigned  
from the Defense Department; his assistant
Larry Franklin later was busted for passing documents to pro-Israel  
lobbyists.
The State Department’s knuckle-dragging enforcer of neo-con  
orthodoxies, John Bolton, was booted from Washington to New York to  
the powerless post of U.N. Ambassador.

Finally, on March 16, 2005, second anniversary of the invasion, neo- 
con leader of the pack Wolfowitz was cast out of the Pentagon war  
room and tossed into the World Bank, moving from the testosterone- 
powered, war-making decision center to the lending office for  
Bangladeshi chicken farmers.
“The realists,” crowed the triumphant editor of the journal of the  
Council on Foreign Relations, “have defeated the fantasists!”

So much for the Big Zionist Conspiracy that supposedly directed this  
war. A half- dozen confused Jews, wandering in the policy desert a  
long distance from mainstream Jewish views, armed only with Leo  
Strauss’ silly aphorisms, were no match for Texas oil majors and OPEC  
potentates with a combined throw weight of half a trillion barrels of  
oil.

**********

Investigative Reporter Greg Palast is the author of the New York  
Times bestseller, Armed Madhouse: Who’s Afraid of Osama Wolf?, China  
Floats, Bush Sinks, the Scheme to Steal ’08, No Child’s Behind Left  
and other
Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Class War to be released next  
week in United Kingdom and Ireland by Penguin UK, from which this  
essay is adapted.


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