Allow me to introduce you to Camp Doha, in operation outside Kuwait City since 1991. Here, they even have pictures. The US military didn’t leave Kuwait after the Gulf War. No idea how many servicemen and -women are on duty at the current time, but 500 acres can hold quite a few, I’m sure.
I did a bit of research on foreign concessions to Kuwaiti oil. Links from the Kuwaiti Petroleum Corporation page provided some interesting tidbits.
Shell Kuwait buys crude oil from the KPC (which it can then refine and sell for a higher price). But it also involves itself in selling training and technology to technical staff in Kuwait, and, according to the Group Managing Director for Exploration and Production, is very eager to hear Kuwait’s plans for involving international oil companies in its oil industry.
So at least three US oil companies, if they already don’t have a piece of the Kuwaiti oil market, are champing at the bit. God only knows what kind of rush will happen should Bush’s war on Iraq prove successful.
How will Bush and Cheney profit from this? If they’re not hired back by oil companies once they’re out of office, they’ll certainly get fatter 2004 campaign contributions from the companies they helped get into Iraq.
Oh, and to bring up an older, but related issue: it seems Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Turkmenistan have signed an agreement to build that pipeline across their countries. The feasibility study ends in July - no doubt there’ll be a successful conclusion, since the project had Unocal’s backing through the '90s - and they start searching for investors after that. I think it quite likely there’ll be some US companies looking to get in on that.
I guess we could split hairs indefinitely, but to me, 500 acres out of the original invasion force pretty much fulfills my criterion for having “left.”
Italics are mine. What is so ominous here?
Oh…my…God. An oil company that buys low and sells high. Does it matter that the Shell Group is a joint Dutch/UK company, or is this further proof of US perfidy?
OK…so here are three US oil companies-ok, two, “champing at the bit” to …uh…do what they do all over the place. I’d be willing to bet that I can find similar quotes from other non-US oil companies.
Basically all you have provided are a few sentences with the words “US oil company,” Kuwait," and “oil exploration” in the same sentence. All the rest are vague suppositions and tepid correlations which reinforces my original proposition that while we had every opportunity and reason to do to Kuwait what people are claiming is our goal in Iraq, we did not. Dare I suggest that the US is capable of acting morally on occasion?
It ain’t the size of the territory, it’s what’s on it that counts. Camp Doha is an active US military base. It, like other military bases in the region, is there to help maintain an active US presence in the Gulf. The US has not “left” Kuwait by any stretch of the imagination.
That’s my point. Oil companies want as big a piece of the market as they can get. The US invades Iraq, ousts Saddam Hussein, and suddenly has a lot more control over Iraqi oil than they’ve ever had before. Now there is a definite advantage for US oil companies to move in and grab the lion’s share of the concessions.
None of this means, however, that the US is using or extracting so much oil that the wells are being “drained dry”. I honestly fail to see the logic behind that conclusion.
minor nitpick: I think you meant to say that oil companies want as big a piece of the resources as they can get, not the market. Invading Iraq won’t substantially increase market share. That aside, “wanting as big a piece of the market as they can get” is quite a different kettle of fish from waging a war to get it, which is subtle distinction that many “blood for oil” advocates fail to grasp.
As far as the scenario you paint of the US ousting Saddam and gaining “control” (an oft-used but ill-defined phrase which could mean anything from wresting them at gunpoint to negotiating favorable exploration/development agreements), my point was that the same scenario has already played itself out and as far as I can see, the US (and the Dutch and UK) have acted pretty above-board. If there were some shady goings-on I would have thought that we would have heard about it loud and clear by now.
Absent an internal memorandum, e-mail or transcript showing clear-cut collusion between the oil industry and the Pentagon, the only support for the “blood for oil” camp are tenuous, tepid suppositions and conspiracy-theories. The old “c’mon…you know they want it” argument just doesn’t cut any ice.
Don’t presume you know what I meant to say. I said market and I meant market. Currently, France and Russia have oil deals with Iraq that stand to be potentially very lucrative. If the US goes in and seizes control of the oil fields, they become the ones who can decide what is done with those concessions. France and Russia lose out. US oil companies get a bigger market share for themselves.
Being one of those who see this war as the spilling of blood for control of oil, I’m well aware of the difference between negotiating a deal with an oil-producing country to increase a company’s market share and waging a war to control another country’s resources. Powell didn’t look like he was talking trade deals at the UN the other day. The whole WMD and terrorism talk is a cover excuse for the US to flex its military muscle in its economic interests.
The scenario with Kuwait is certainly not the same as the scenario with Iraq. There wasn’t a regime change in Kuwait after the Iraqi invasion, was there? Kuwait, and the royal family that rules it, owes its existence to the British carve-up of the Gulf in the 1920s (since at the time it was the largest oil-producing region in the world and Britain didn’t want anyone else controlling the resources) and has always been willing to do business with both Britain and the US - thus obviating any consideration of war on the US’ part to enforce its interests. Iraq, partially because of resentment over denial of historical claims to Kuwait, hasn’t been as consistently friendly towards Britain or the US. That resistance, wrapped in the cloak of the “war on terror”, provides the US with the weak justification for this invasion.
I’d like to see you back up your “tenuous, tepid assumptions” comments. I’ve provided statements from people in the Bush administration itself to back up my analyses - so either there’s something discreditable about the sources or my analysis is flawed. Which is it? And if it’s a flawed analysis, how is it flawed?
And here’s where the blood-for-oil argument falls to pieces. If we wanted the same cushy deals with Iraq that we have with Kuwait, all we would have to do is remove sanctions. How much do we spend annually on forces enforcing the no-fly zones? Add this to the estimated $200B that we’re going to spend invading Iraq. And we’re going to spend all this, and risk thousands of lives, in order to negotiate the kind of $60B oil contracts that France has? Sorry, it just doesn’t follow logic.
Throttle back, bub; it was a matter of semantics, not presumption.
No, all you have provided are quotes that say that the aim of American foreign policy is to ensure and protect American interests, that the middle east and Iraq are athwart large sources of petroleum, and since the US needs petroleum, it is in our interest to play an active role in middle east affairs, and interpolated/interpreted them to fit you views. I have yet to see a quote or document which concludes “therefore, we must invade Iraq and seize their oil production facilities to further the interests of American oil companies.”
Besides El Jeffe’s recently raised point, if the whole point is to get our lunch hooks into the Iraqi oilfields via whatever puppet regime we install, then why aren’t the French, Russians and Germans clamoring to jump on the gravy train? Don’t they have oil companies too?
I don’t want to get into this too heavily again as I think you and I have pretty much heard each other’s side for about a year now and have yet to come to an agreement.
But I’d like to point out that Kuwait had been an independent state prior to the post-war Middle East division, and had been a protectorate of the British since 1899, before oil was discovered in the region. The Kuwaitis wanted protection from the Ottomans and Britain wanted to keep Kuwait out of German hands so as to keep as clear a line as possible between other British holdings in the area and India. They didn’t want to be split. Big reason they fought so hard to keep Russia at bay, too. Kuwait also had the only decent deep water port in the area, too, which played a factor in Britain’s initial interest.
And in any case, northern Iraq was considered the oil prize during and immediately following WWI, not Kuwait. And Kuwait couldn’t have been the largest oil producing region at the time, because oil wasn’t discovered there until 1938, well after the carve up. No one really knew what was lying underneath the sands of the Arabian peninsula until the 1930s - otherwise, the British probably never would have allowed their man to be overthrown by the House of Saud.
Ok, it hink I’ve done enough reading on the threads of this post. IN my two cents. How come people think that if we go to Iraq and conquer it, then we will set up oil companys in the region. No, uh,uh, nadda. Look through history in all of the conflicts the we have fought in, have we ever fought one for just the sole purpose of their minerals, resources, etc. Nope. We give them a choice, well first. The only main thing that we do usually try and force onto them is to turn into a democracy. Even then, if they choose to do so, we do not take over their resources and use the profit from that to rebuild them. We use our own money, out of our own pockets. Because remeber the resources are theirs, not ours, it is their land, their country(s). We are only helping to rebuild it into something better. unfortunately this does not happen over night, it take years, and years. And we all know U.S. would never raise sanctions on a crazed dictator. What, trade with tem, anf give them more revenue to put into research for thei wmd programs, and whatever else lurks in their sick minds? No thanks.
And if someone who uses his own people as experiments has wmd’s, he will most definately try and find some way to use them upon other nations. Because hey, if he is goin to kill his own people, why would he care about someone else’s life that is half way around the globe?
Whether it is or isn’t about oil, it will easily be made to look that way, as Madeleine Albright pointed out on The News Hour with Jim Lehrer on 14 Feb.
If the war takes place we will need a force to safeguard Iraq’s oil establishment from further sabotage. (I’m assuming that the Iraqis will do some damage before being forced out.) This will no doubt be held up to the Moslem world by our real threat, terrorist groups, as us having gone in to “take over the oil.”"
And then convince Saddam Hussein that, in spite of the devestation wrought by the First Gulf War and the continued bombings since then, in addition to the ruination brought about by the sanctions, that the US is a much better business partner than either France or Russia and that US oil companies deserve those oil concessions more than French or Russian ones.
You’re probably not going to, either. It’s harder to justify the war that way. Which explains the Bush administration’s fixation with trying to make claims of secret maufacture of WMD stick. The current rifts in the UN - as well as the turnouts for the anti-war protests worldwide yesterday - show how well that approach is working.
The documents I cited don’t merely state that the goal of US foriegn policy is to protect its interests (as if any country’s foreign policy wouldn’t assert that!) but also how that goal is to be met - by building an army that is so technologically, organizationally, and numerically superior that it can meet and defeat any challenge (real or imagined) to US dominance across the globe. The current administration wants to achieve a level of global domination it couldn’t have done during the Cold War when it wasn’t the only superpower.
Yes, they do - and their contracts are with the current administration of Iraq. There’s absolutely no guarantee that those contracts will be honored should the US successfully install yet another puppet government in Iraq. Why would they jump on the bandwagon that throws their economic ventures the most into question?
