America liberates Iraqi oil
Herman Tiu Laurel, Journalist, Manila
The Iraqi opposition-in-exile, in anticipation of the occupation by U.S. forces of Iraq, announced that Iraq's state oil monopoly will be dismantled.
The American authorities also announced that the American oil companies shall take charge of the oil fields of Iraq. Hallelujah! George Bush and Dick Cheney liberate Iraqis from their 112 billion barrels of oil reserves! Liberation is so sweet for the American oil companies. Free oil for the American oil cartels! Twenty-five billion dollars of it annually, or even double that if the American oil companies wish, just by turning up the spigots.
Bush did not find any weapons of mass destruction, but he found what he really wanted -- Iraqi oil.
With the oil the collapsing American economy and dollar may be saved; that is, if the Arabs all over the Middle East allow Bush and Blair to have peace in Baghdad, which we doubt. As Bush's Americans, like the oil companies, have said, occupied Iraq will stay within the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) but it will not be tied by its quota agreements. Bush and the American oil mafia will drain and suck off all the oil wealth of the nation of Iraq, and stem the redistribution of wealth and power.
None of this escapes the 1.2-billion Muslims of the world that the Ba'ath Party has been appealing to all this time, alarming the Arabic peoples into vigilance. Doing as good a job as Saddam Hussein in rousing the rage of the Islamic and Arabic peoples is former CIA chief and Donald Rumsfeld's adviser in the Iraq War, James Woolsey, who said in a talk at the University of California in Los Angeles, that the Iraq War represents World War IV (the Cold War being the third) and this is only the beginning of what he hopes won't be a 40-year war.
They will "democratize" the other Arab nations, too. "Democracy" for Iraq will be so beautiful under the American flag, with "patriotic" Iraqis like Ahmed Chalabi, who will be installed as the civilian puppet government. This is the Chalabi who, in 1989, fled Jordan to escape arrest for a bank scam in the second-largest Jordanian bank at that time, Petra Bank.
The Jordanian government had to pump in US$ 64 million to prop up the bank after Chalabi was through with it.
Chalabi, in Robert Dreyfuss's article "Tinker, Banker, Neocon," in The American Prospect magazine, will hand over Iraq's oil to U.S. multinationals, and his allies in conservative think tanks are already drawing up the blueprints. "What they have in mind is denationalization, and then parceling Iraqi oil out to American oil companies,' says James E. Akins, former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia." This is outright plunder of a nation's wealth on the blood of thousands of dead Iraqis, and a sledgehammer threatening the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries.
Filipinos shouldn't miss the connection between the Philippines' experience with our national oil company Petron and the energy company Napocor, which resulted in the looting of our nation, and the "liberation" of Iraq's oil through denationalization (aka privatization).
Will global oil prices decline? Our experience with privatization shows that they will go up to the manipulated levels the OPEC members will be happy with, but the U.S. is now getting Iraq's share. Non-oil producing countries will pay through their noses, which the Philippines could have avoided if former president Corazon Aquino had not abandoned the alternative energy development plans of her predecessor, Ferdinand Marcos.
It is a beautiful world that Bush, Rumsfeld, Woolsey and co. have ushered in, with President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo dragging behind. Already, many Filipino migrant workers are suffering discrimination and getting laid off in Bahrain and Jordan. With Woolsey's threat against Saudi Arabia, will half a million foreign workers there also suffer?
Will the world be clouded with the smell of war for a generation, and development postponed as long? Bush has liberated the dogs of war, in pursuit of "power and glory" for what French writer Jean Gabriel Fredet of the weekly Novel Observateur describes as the American "military-industrial galaxy".
Some have, in jest, asked if I am ready to join the "Coalition of the Winning", but winning where? The peoples of America, Britain and the world are not winning here. Only the Anglo- American military-industrial-raw-materials cartel wins. The world is losing precious time to erase poverty and push the frontiers of human achievements, and we have only a generation of destruction ahead.
The writer runs Net25 radio in Manila.