The writer is a lawyer based in Lahore and studied law at Lincoln’s Inn and the London School of Economics.
He tweets @AsadRahim
There’s something of the immortal about Saddam Hussein. There are bad guys and there are bad guys, but Saddam’s life reads like Kafka on crack — son of an abusive stepfather, father of a sadistic son, and invader of all he beheld; a man whose career in public service began by opening fire on the prime minister.
The Saddam saga does make for great TV; a reviewer called the HBO miniseries “like ‘The Sopranos’ with Scud missiles”. But stripped of its storyline — the coups and gassings and exploding in-laws — and there’s a recurrent theme: it is a life drenched in blood… and oil.
Oil drove Saddam. It was the method behind his madness, the reason Vice-President Hussein was flush enough to splurge millions during Iraq’s brief few breaths of petro-success. It was partly the reason he bounded into Iran, and the whole reason he was thrown out of Kuwait.
And it was the reason that over 7,000 Iraqis died this year. As that vulgar little warlord Tony Blair denies, denies, and denies himself dizzy, it’s no longer pasty conspiracy theorists saying the past 10 years were, well, all about The Oil.
It was The Independent that leaked minutes of meetings where oil lobbyists ran around panicking that BP was being ‘locked out’, telling the Foreign Office that Iraq was ‘more important than anything we’ve seen for a long time’. Not to be outdone, the FO’s Middle East boss went and said, “Shell and BP could not afford not to have a stake in (Iraq) for the sake of their long-term future … We were determined to get a fair slice of the action for UK companies in a post-Saddam Iraq.”
And that’s not touching on the cholesterol levels of Blair’s bigger, dumber masters; those neocon gents that briefed the younger Bush’s Security Council on Iraqi oil as early as 2001.
It’s not touching on Dick Cheney, whose pacemaker melts just saying ‘Halliburton’, that oil-drinking dragon he also happened to run. Want a job as Drilling Project Management Technical Adviser in Basra, Iraq of all places? Try the Halliburton website.
But before you smear it with Iraq, Halliburton has since diversified in “building temporary detention and processing facilities” (read concentration camps), and awarded $385 million dollars to do it by Homeland Security. If a company like Apple could only come from the mind of Steve Jobs, then Halliburton is definitely the kind of twisted Death Star worthy of Dick Cheney.
And forget the evil ones; even the US’s human defence secretaries do as little to dress it up. Chuck Hagel, best known in these parts for shaking hands with a bunch of Pakistanis, remarked of the war, “People say we’re not fighting for oil. Of course we are.” Well, so much for ridding the world of Saddam’s Bond Villain bomb.
But we’ve been here before. It was the same sad story in Iran in 1953, even if it was a simpler time — Mohammed Mosaddegh was a better human being than Saddam was, the Anglo-Persian Oil Company was a far more sinister-sounding (and obvious) outfit than the cut-glass corporate Halliburton, and Mosaddegh’s nationalisation of Iran’s oil sent him to the front of the US waitlist for coup candidates.
Mosaddegh was overthrown, the Shah brought in, and a new government soon in agreement to “restore the flow of Iranian oil to world markets in substantial quantities”. Corporatese for ‘we’ve resumed selling to the Great British’.
And the Anglo-Persian Oil Company? It goes by the name of BP (plc) today.
Of course, this is one rat race that everyone’s in on. Saudi Aramco needs no introduction. Vladimir Putin’s red-eyed rampage across the Caucasus has been stunning in speed, driving out the oligarchs and sticking the state back into its Gazproms and Rosnefts (if it ever left).
Putin is a man on a mission, bulldozing all comers for each barrel of crude. Even when he was busy bullying the oil-less Georgia in 2008, Western support for the Georgians largely hinged on it hosting the Baku-Tblisi pipeline, supplying oil to much of Western Europe.
Yes, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Hitler once got a cream cake for his birthday with an iced map of the Caspian; he cut out the slice that said B-A-K-U in chocolate, ate it, and screamed to the heavens as only Nazi loonies could, “Unless we get Baku oil, the war is lost!”
Fast-forward from 1941 to today, with the world’s newest country caught up in the same game, and looks like humanity’s made precious little progress. South Sudan is going, going, gone; fighting the other Sudan for oil-rich territory and killing hundreds in the process.
In a nation where, according to Al-Jazeera, literacy totals 15 per cent — with nearly three guns per 10 people — the South Sudanese may want to reprioritise. But tell that to a state that gets 98 per cent of its budget from oil. Suddenly, skirmishing with Other Sudan doesn’t seem too awful an idea.
But whatever Iraq and Iran and the Sudans may do, this is one finite resource. And regardless of stock, only rising prices shock us into investing in alternatives. The physicist Amory Lovins likes saying, “The Stone Age didn’t end because the stone ran out, and the oil age will be just the same.” Oil will get just too expensive.
High time then for the world to start investing elsewhere seriously — in wind and solar and hyrdro and bio; renewable energies all of them. If nothing else, it can conserve far better. But that’s for the very long haul.
In the short run, man’s bloodlust for black gold needs shaming. The artist behind Blair’s tormented Lincoln’s Inn portrait said Iraq was on his mind… and it shows. And last October, a war museum in Manchester put up an exhibition of Blair taking a psychotic-looking ‘selfie’ as Iraqi oilfields blaze behind him. It’s horrifying, and wholly necessary. As one columnist put it, “Art could not stop the war in Iraq. It can influence how that war is remembered.”
Published in The Express Tribune, December 31st, 2013.
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COMMENTS (23)
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Well researched and very well put. Good job!
im impressed!u sure write well
I liked the article. The US did not go into Iraq merely for oil. Yes, that was part of it. But returns from oil were miscalculated and the cost of US war was greater but some corporations did make money at the cost of US taxpayer who had funded the war. The other part was to weaken Iraq as the West figured that it could have been a threat to Israel. And, also the post Bipolar World, gave an overconfident sense of self-belief to the neoconservatives and they forgot the limitations of power. In the end, there was much blood-letting and greater suffering for the Iraqis, which continues.
Wow!! One of the best hard hitting pieces lately on Tribune. And something that needed to be said.
The remark about how stone age ended was really enlightening.
@TringTroll: @Open NATO supply:
Asad tairay janissar, beyshumar beyshumar!
The show off club thrives....
It was the Anglo Iranian Oil Company (AIOC) and not the Anglo Persian Oil company.
@TringTroll: What about the environment contamination caused by shale and fracking?
For once I agree with you.
Even the Global Jihad is funded by oil- Petrodollars.
@John the Baptist
Your four-liner comment smacks more of 'wordsmithing' than the authors whole article!
Just to update the author and the readers, the US is self-sufficient when it comes to Oil and will become the world's largest oil producer due to the Shale boom by 2015.@Ali Tanoli wrote "Plans went wrong bro thats why this is happening because god is great"
Mr. Tanoli, What is this that is happening? Please elaborate .
@Realist Plans went wrong bro thats why this is happening because god is great.
@john the baptist 'Horrendous overuse of strange, grammatically challenged juxtaposition,
John, no one told you this, but you can't write. Start with commenting on hottie of the week, then work your way up here
@Asad Great piece again sir. You have a knack for conveying smart subjects well
Countries like India and Pakistan who do not have oil should use as much as they can of what they have approx 300 days of bright SUNLIGHT
As despicable and unjust as all the above mentioned actions were, it is foolish for us to think/hope the people of the west would ever pressure their governments to stop doing whatever they are doing internationally. The only thing these people in the west care about is their economy and their quality of life...everything else (foreign policy, domestic policy, relations etc) are just tools used to improve those two sacred tenants.
Only if majority of western people (so called educated!) could see the evil actions of their own governments. . Very well written sir!
too deep and truthfull...
Solid international piece.