Fisk as usual

Independent 1 October 2003

Oil, war and a growing sense of panic in the US

Robert Fisk

Oil is slippery stuff but not as slippery as the figures now being
peddled
by Iraq's American occupiers. Up around Kirkuk, the authorities are
keeping
the sabotage figures secret - because they can't stop their pipelines to

Turkey blowing up. And down in Baghdad, where the men who produce Iraq's
oil
production figures are beginning to look like the occupants of Plato's
cave
- drawing conclusions from shadows on their wall - the statistics are
being
cooked. Paul Bremer, the US proconsul who wears combat boots, is "sexing
up"
the figures to a point where even the oilmen are shaking their heads.

Take Kirkuk. Only when the television cameras capture a blown pipe,
flames
billowing, do the occupation powers report sabotage. This they did, for
example, on 18 August. But the same Turkish pipeline has been hit before
and
since. It was blown on 17 September and four times the following day. US

patrols and helicopters move along the pipeline but, in the huge ravines
and
tribal areas through which it passes, long sections are indefensible.

European oilmen in Baghdad realise now that Iraqi officials in the oil
ministry - one of only two government institutions that the Americans
defended from the looters - knew very well that the sabotage was going
to
occur. "They told me in June that there would be no oil exports from the

north," one of them said to me this week. "They knew it was going to be
sabotaged - and it had obviously been planned long before the invasion
in
March."

Early in their occupation, the Americans took the quiet - and unwise -
decision to re-hire many Baathist oil technocrats, which means that a
large
proportion of ministry officials are still ambivalent towards the
Americans.
The only oil revenues the US can get are from the south. In the middle
of
August, Mr Bremer gave the impression that production stood at about 1.5

million barrels a day. But the real figure at that time was 780,000
barrels
and rarely does production reach a million. In the words of an oil
analyst
visiting Iraq, this is "an inexcusable catastrophe".

When the US attacked Iraq in March, the country was producing 2.7
million
barrels a day. It transpires that in the very first hours after they
entered
Baghdad on 9 April, American troops allowed looters into the oil
ministry.
By the time senior officers arrived to order them out, they had
destroyed
billions of dollars of irreplaceable seismic and drilling data.

While the major oil companies in the US stand to cream off billions of
dollars if oil production resumes in earnest, many of their executives
were
demanding to know from the Bush administration - long before the war -
how
it intended to prevent sabotage. In fact, Saddam had no plans to destroy
the
oil fields themselves, plenty for blowing up the export pipes. The
Pentagon
got it the wrong way round, racing its troops to protect the fields but
ignoring the vulnerable pipelines.

Anarchy is now so widespread in post-war Iraq that it is almost
impossible
for international investors to work there. There is no insurance for
them -
which is why Mr Bremer's occupation administrators have secretly decided

that well over half the $20bn (�12bn) earmarked for Iraq will go towards

security for its production infrastructure.

During the war, a detailed analysis by Yahya Sadowski, a professor at
the
American University of Beirut, suggested that repairing wells and pipes
would cost $1bn, that raising oil production to 3.5 million barrels a
day
would take three years and cost another $8bn investment and another
$20bn
for repairs to the electrical grid which powers the pumps and
refineries.
Bringing production up to six million barrels a day would cost a further

$30bn, some say up $100bn.

In other words - assuming only $8bn of the $20bn can be used on industry
-
the Bush overall budget of $87bn which now horrifies Congress is likely
to
rise towards a figure of $200bn. Ouch.

Since the 1920s, only about 2,300 wells have been drilled in Iraq and
those
are in the valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates. Its deserts are almost
totally unexplored. Officially, Iraq contains 12 per cent of the world's
oil
reserves - two-thirds of the world's reserves are in just four other
countries, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Kuwait and the Emirates - but it could
contain 20 per cent, even 25 per cent.

It's possible to argue that it was Saddam's decision to switch from the
dollar to the euro in November 2000 that made "regime change" so
important
to the US. When Iran threatened to do the same, it was added to the
"axis of
evil". The defence of the dollar is almost as important as oil.

But the real irony lies in the nature of America's new power in Iraq. US
oil
deposits are increasingly depleted and by 2025, its oil imports will
account
for perhaps 70 per cent of total domestic demand. It needs to control
the
world's reserves - and don't tell me the US would have invaded Iraq if
its
chief export was beetroot - and it now has control of perhaps 25 per
cent of
world reserves.

But it can't make the oil flow. The cost of making it flow could produce
an
economic crisis in the US. And it is this - rather than the daily
killing of
young American soldiers - that lies behind the Bush administration's
growing
panic. Washington has got its hands on the biggest treasure chest in the

world - but it can't open the lid. No wonder they are cooking the books
in
Baghdad.

***

ZNet Commentary
The Fall And Rise Of Liberal England October 10, 2003
By John Pilger

In his latest New Statesman article, John Pilger describes how the
public
arbiters of liberal England embraced the Blair 'project', notably the
four
wars he has engaged Britain in, and how their message, like Blair
himself,
has now been shunned by the majority. In their place, there is an
awakening
as millions of Britons have broken their customary silence to rescue the

noble ideas of freedom and democracy from Blair's diminishing court.

An epic shame and silence covers much of liberal England. Shame and
silence
are present in a political theatre of frenetic activity, with actors
running
on and off the national stage, uttering their fables and denials and
minor
revelations, as in Ibsen's Enemy of the People. From the media gallery,
there is a cryptic gesturing at the truth, so that official culpability
is
minimised; this is known at the BBC as objectivity.

Shame and silence reached a sort of crescendo during the recent
conference
of the Labour Party. Hundreds of liberal people stood and clapped for
the
Prime Minister, it was reported, for seven and a half minutes.
Choreographed
in their pretence, like the surviving stoics of a sect, they applauded
his
unctuous abuse of the only truth that mattered: that he had committed a
huge
and bloody crime, in their and our name. It was a shocking spectacle.

For those who cling to Blair, the last resort is to make him seem
Shakespearean: to invest him with tragedy and the humanity of "blunders"
and
"cock ups" that might divert the trail of blood and conceal the
responsibility he shares for the slaughter and suffering of thousands of

men, women and children, whose fate he sealed secretly and mendaciously
with
the rampant American warlord.

We know the fine print of this truth now: and we are a majority. I use
"we"
here as the Chartist James Bronterre O'Brien used it in 1838, to
separate
the ordinary people of England from "the vagabonds" who oppress "what
are
called our colonies and [which really] belong to our enemies".

The criminality of Blair and his diminishing court is felt across this
country. It is sweeping aside those in the Labour Party who still plead,

"Listen to us, Tony" and "Please have more humility, Tony."

The silence of famous liberals is understandable. Remember the division
they
skilfully drew in 1997 between "new" and "old". New was unquestionably
good
for "us". New was a "modernised" system called neoliberalism, as old and

rapacious as its Thatcherite model.

Their propaganda suppressed every reliable indication (such as the
venerable
British Social Attitudes survey), which left no doubt that most of the
British people had "old" priorities and rejected Blair's ruthless
refusal to
redistribute the national wealth from the rich to the poor and to
protect
public services, the premise of so much of British life, just as they
rejected his embrace of the City of London and American dominance and
warmongering.

The Blair myth was that he was "untainted by dogma" (Roy Hattersley).

The opposite was true. For Blair, the issue was always class. When times

were more secure, the liberal wing of the middle class would allot a
rung or
two of their ladder to those below. The ladder was hauled up by Margaret

Thatcher as her revolution spread beyond miners and steelworkers and
into
the suburbs and gentrified terraces, where middle managers suddenly
found
themselves "shed" and "redundant".

It was to people like these that Labour under Neil Kinnock, then John
Smith,
then Blair, looked in order to win power. Middle-classness became the
political code, as the middle classes sought, above all else, to restore

their status and privileges. An ideological Scrabble was played in order
to
justify the Blair project's true aims. The "stakeholder" theory was
briefly
promoted, and there was chatter about "civic" society. Both were new
names
for old elites. The archaic word "governance" was used to obfuscate real

social democracy.

There was enthusiasm for the ideas of an American "communitarian" guru
who
wrote books of psychobabble that impressed Bill Clinton. A "think tank"
called Demos filled up the Guardian tabloid on slow days with vacuous
chic.
Out of this was promoted something called "Middle England", a
middle-class
idyll similar to that described by John Major when he yearned for
cycling
spinsters, cricket and warm beer. That one in four Britons lived in
poverty
was unmentionable.

When Blair was elected with fewer votes than Major received in 1992,
liberalism's principal organs were beside themselves. "Goodbye
xenophobia"
and "The Foreign Office says 'Hello world, remember us?'", rejoiced the
Observer. Blair, said the paper, would sign the EU Social Chapter within

weeks, push for "new worldwide rules on human rights and the
environment",
ban landmines, implement "tough new limits on all other arms sales" and
end
"the country-house tradition of policy-making". Apart from the landmines

ban, which was in effect already in place, all of it was false.

Then it was "Welfare: the New Deal". The Chancellor, said the Observer,
"is
preparing to announce the most radical welfare Budget since the Second
World
War". On the contrary, what Gordon Brown announced was a
"welfare-to-work"
scheme that was a pale imitation of failed and reactionary schemes
already
tried by the Tories and the Clinton administration. There was no new
deal.

"A Budget for the people", said the Independent's front page over a
drawing
of Brown dressed as Oliver Cromwell. This was difficult to fathom. Apart

from a few crumbs for the health service and education, and windfall
taxes
on utilities, which their huge profits easily absorbed, Brown's first
budget
was from the extreme right, making his Tory predecessor look Keynesian.
That
was unmentionable, and still is.

Most Labour voters had endured 18 years of cuts in education, social
security, disability and other benefits - yet Brown reversed not a
single
one of them, including a tax base that allows the likes of Rupert
Murdoch to
avoid paying tens of millions of pounds to the Treasury. Today, nothing
essentially has changed. One in four Britons is still born into poverty
- a
poverty that has hardened under Blair and Brown and remains the chief
cause
of higher rates of ill health, accidents and deaths in infancy, school
exclusion and low educational performance.

"The New Special Relationship" was the next good news, with Blair and
Clinton looking into each other's eyes in the garden at No 10 Downing
Street. Here was the torch being passed, said the front page of the
Independent, "from a becalmed and aimless American presidency to the
coltish
omnipotence of Blairdom". This was the reverential tone that launched
Blair
into his imperial violence.

The new prime minister, wrote Hugo Young, "wants to create a world none
of
us has known, where the laws of political gravity are overturned". In
the
age of Blair, "ideology has surrendered entirely to values... there are
no
sacred cows [and] no fossilised limits to the ground over which the mind

might range in search of a better Britain".

By the time Robin Cook launched his infamous mission statement, putting
human rights at the "heart" of foreign policy and promising to review
arms
sales on "ethical" grounds, not a sceptical voice was to be heard coming

from liberalism's powerhouses. On the contrary, the Guardian counselled
Blair not to be too "soft centred". Jeremy Paxman assured his BBC
audience
that even if the new "ethical" policy stopped the sale of Hawk
fighter-bombers to Indonesia, their presence in East Timor (where
one-third
of the population had perished as result of Indonesia's illegal
occupation)
was "not proved". This was the standard Foreign Office lie, which was
eventually admitted by Cook.

Why did Blair go all the way with Bush? Apart from his own Messianic
view of
the world, the Blairite elite are part of the "Atlanticist" tradition of
the
party. That means imperialism. All those years of Kennedy scholarships,
trade union fellowships at Harvard and fraternal seminars paid for by
the US
government have had their insidious effect.

Five members of Blair's first cabinet, along with his chief of staff,
Jonathan Powell, were members of the British American Project for a
Successor Generation, a masonry of chosen politicians and journalists,
conceived by the far-right oil baron J Howard Pew and launched by Ronald

Reagan and Rupert Murdoch. Blair's invitation to Thatcher to visit him
in
Downing Street might have offered a pointer to what was coming. But no;
dissenters were killjoys.

According to Susie Orbach, the psychologist, not taking pleasure in the
rise
of Blairdom reflected no less than a troubled personality. "It's as
though
there is something safe in negativity..." she wrote, "you often find
[this
state of mind] in someone who... can only fight, who can never rest from

battle, may be trying to defeat inner demons, hopeless feelings, that
are
far too frightening to touch directly."

The dissenters have been proved right, and right again. In six years
Blair
has ordered four bloody wars against and in countries that offered the
British no threat, including the longest Anglo-American bombing campaign

since the Second World War, against Iraq; and this was before he ordered
a
land invasion of a country he knew was defenceless.

Andrew Gilligan will probably be pilloried by an establishment tribunal
for
telling a version of this truth. Lord Hutton (he who sat on the
notorious
"Diplock" court in Belfast) could and should have recalled Blair for
cross-examination, but chose not to. This is a travesty, because the
real
issue is the criminality of Blair and his coterie. The truth of this is
currency now, thanks to the millions who have broken an established
silence,
with thousands of them going into the streets for the first time and
filling
the letters pages and shaming the majority of Labour MPs, who chose Bush
and
Blair over their constituents.

They are the best of this society. They are rescuing noble concepts,
such as
democracy and freedom, from Blairite windbags who emptied them of their
true
meaning while claiming to be left of centre. Theirs is an "insurrection
of
subjugated knowledge", as Vandana Shiva has written.

They are the democratic opposition now, owing nothing to Westminster;
and
their achievements echo the American playwright Lillian Hellman who, in
a
letter in 1952 to the McCarthyite House Un-American Activities
Committee,
wrote: "I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's
fashions." It is this capacity for conscience that makes us human, and
without millions around the world demonstrating it, Blair and Bush might

well have attacked another country by now. That is still a distinct
possibility, as the current fitting-up of Iran should alert us.

Remember, the warmongers go to such lengths to deceive us only because
they
fear, as Shelley wrote, the public's awakening:

...like lions after slumber, In unvanquishable number... Ye are many -
they
are few.
-- -Kraig Grady
North American Embassy of Anaphoria Island
http://www.anaphoria.com
The Wandering Medicine Show
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