The Iraqi Oil bill is the key to understanding 9/11 and the war

Coincident with the sixth anniversary of 9/11, The New York Times and other mainstream media reported the apparent collapse of the would-be compromise Iraq Oil Law agreement among Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds. Sunnis removed their support for the deal in Parliament, in part because Kurdish leaders jumped the gun and signed independent contracts with two foreign corporations, one based in the United Arab Emirates, the other in Dallas, Texas. But that’s not the whole story.

The alleged “failure� of the Iraqi government and people to meet the critical benchmark of adoption of the proposed Iraq Oil Law simply confirms what we always knew about the underlying motivation of the terrorist attack on 9/11 and the Bush invasion and occupation of Iraq. (See “It Should Be Obvious: It’s the Oil, Stupid,� The Lakeville Journal, Jan. 16, 2003.)

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The Iraq Oil Law is a Trojan horse. While it does indeed seek more balanced oil revenue sharing within Iraq, it also opens as much as 50 percent or more of all Iraqi oil fields to “privatization� by transnational ( i.e., foreign) oil interests. This, plus gas pipeline rights, was precisely what Donald Rumsfeld attempted to negotiate as early as 1983 when he had a hugging relationship with Saddam Hussein and blew it. That failure triggered the invasion of Kuwait and two Gulf wars.

David Bacon, writing in the San Francisco Chronicle, reports on it this way: “Under Washington’s guidance, the Iraqi government wrote the oil law in secret deliberations. It needed secrecy to obscure the fact that it gives foreign corporations control over exploration and development in one of the world’s largest oil reserves, through agreements called ‘production-sharing’ contracts. Such deals are so disadvantageous that they have been rejected by most oil-producing countries, including Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and otherwise conservative regimes throughout the Middle East.�

This is why virtually all Iraqis, especially oil workers who do not want to be dependent on foreign owners, refuse to ratify this benchmark law.

Jim Hightower, in his September 2007 “Lowdown� puts it this way: “Truth is, the Iraq Oil Law is not about sharing profits, but about a cynical power grab by multinational oil giants. Big Oil got the Bushites to write a provision into the proposed law that would open two-thirds of Iraqi’s oil fields to ownership by foreign corporations — unlike Saudi Arabia, Venezuela and Iran, which all control their oil drilling and extraction. So when you see stories about Bush, Cheney and others imploring Iraq’s Parliament to pass the law, remember, they’re not promoting national reconciliation, they’re promoting a shameful oil scam.� Most Iraqis have begun to realize this; many Americans have not.

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The Iraqi Oil Law tells us, as clear as the nose on our faces, why Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and other neocons and oil interests went to war in Iraq, and mean to stay there, rather than get out and pursue al-Qaeda and other terrorist organizations in non-oil countries. Meanwhile, the U.S. president continues to assure us, and our valiant military troops, “We’re in Iraq because they attacked us on 9/11.� Nothing could be farther from the truth.

The truth goes one level deeper: The underlying motivation behind the 9/11 terrorist attack was a deep-seated, agonizing, and desperate reaction and resistance to U.S.-sponsored de-regulated corporations’ global ( i.e., foreign) exploitation of oil and other resources, combined with cultural suffocation and uneven-handed foreign policies in the Middle East. To this we now add occupation by foreign troops, fanning sectarian violence. The Bush administration and related oil interests are part of the problem; they cannot provide the solution. They dropped the egg.

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Clearly, there is no military solution to the mess in Iraq, much as the administration argues that the military can buy us time for a political solution to emerge. The Bush strategy does not address the underlying cause of global terrorism. Indeed, there is no solution whatsoever unless we take steps to regulate our own irresponsible corporate and governmental executive behavior, withdraw our troops, and commit to international, national and local arrangements throughout the Middle East, dictated not by ourselves, but by the people who actually live there.

It is much harder to clean up an egg, once smashed, but we have to give it our best shot — one that will be heard around the world.

Sharon resident Anthony Piel is a former director and legal counsel of the World Health Organization.