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Iraq: the Road to War
From John Foster Dulles to the War in Iraq: Understanding Modern Warfare and Global Economics
The United States is prepared to use armed forces to assist any nation or group of such nations requesting assistance against armed aggressors from any country controlled by international communism. -John Foster Dulles, 1958
"The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers
to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth becomes the greatest enemy of the State." --Dr. Joseph M. Goebbels.
The most tragic element of the Iraq war disaster is not the eventuality of war itself, but the manner in which highly educated men and women as students of history accepted the disinformation and distortion of military intelligence put forward by the Bush administration, which included patently false information and forged documents supporting allegations that Iraq possessed Weapons of Mass Destruction [and thus posed a military threat to the United States] when in fact it did not; we must assume that Congress was complicit in the Iraq war fraud, or that Congress was misled by senior Bush administration officials in an alleged criminal conspiracy of a magnitude hitherto unknown in American history. The intent to deceive Congress through intentional deception, manipulation and submission of false data [as supplied by the Bush administration] with intent to authorize war versus another sovereign nation on false pretenses, is a crime versus the United States and an unlawful act on the part of the perpetrators.
This paper briefly documents many diverse elements comprising the Bush road to war in Iraq, including:
- Three phases of US economic supremacy since World War 2 and its policies, and the attempt to secure the future of the petro-dollar as a global oil currency while forestalling the dollar's decline
- The Oil Triumvirate, Richard Cheney's Task Force on Energy, the Haifa pipeline and War for Oil
- Bad intelligence and the Pentagon policy arm versus the CIA
- US policy blunders in Lebanon, Iran, Iraq and Israel/Palestine since 1947 and the "Clean Break"
- How CIA operations in Iran destabilized and subverted democracy in that country from 1953 thus planting the seeds of modern terror
- America's decline as a world hegemonic power with conversion of US political and military might to factious regional conflict with intent to monopolize and control global energy resources for the forseeable future. [1]
- Emergence of the secular Ba'athists and the ideal of the pan-Arab state
- Emergence of the Islamic Republic and American support for Iraq's war versus Iran
Timeline to War
Overview [commentary]: Military Power in an Age of Unreason
As Chomsky points out, the nation-state maintains a monopoly of violence, and that monopoly provides the foundation for the state's power. Since the Falklands conflict several 'flash wars' have been initiated by the first world in response to real or imagined instability in the third world, but only when highly desirable political and geo-economic advantages can be leveraged on terms favorable to the global petro-village.
Iraq's history [and indeed the history of the Arab Muslim world] is replete with examples of war and occupation. Since the time of the Crusades various forces have attacked this region from East or West; these attempts at occupation resulted in a shifting political and economic landscape which no single world power ever managed to dominate - invariably occupiers were displaced or forced to retreat in the face of guerilla war or worse, leaving behind a phoenix-like people with tribal identities incomprehensible to most Westerners.
Bush's 2003 plan to invade Iraq originated as "a blueprint for America" in a 1996 think-tank whitepaper with the portentous title: "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm". The "Clean Break" document was written for Israel's then-current Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and was prepared by Israel's Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies "The Study Group on a New Israeli Strategy Toward 2000". The main substantive ideas in this paper emerged from a discussion in which prominent Israeli and US Neo-conservatives participated, namely: Richard Perle, James Colbert, Charles Fairbanks Jr, Douglas Feith, Robert Loewenberg, David Wurmser, and Meyrav Wurmser.
The "Clean Break" document itself was authored by Richard Perle, Douglas Feith [2], David and Meyrav Wurmser[3], James Colbert, and Robert Lowenberg - primary Neo-conservative figures in the Bush administration, as follows: Perle was Chairman of the Defense Policy Review Board from 2001-2003; Feith is currently Under Secretary of Defense for Policy and Wurmser now serves as a senior member on Vice President Richard Cheney's staff.
Topics from the "Clean Break" document arose during Bush's first meeting with his National Security Council on January 30, 2001, a mere ten days after his inauguration. Bush announced his intention to reverse the Clinton policy of interceding between Israel and the Palestinians, eg. Bush would allow Israel free reign in the Palestinian arena, again reminiscent of Ronald Reagan's delegation to Haig-Begin in the early 1980's. [4]
Israel's Netanyahu rejected the proposal as drafted but George W. Bush approved a modified version of the paper which resurfaced just before he siezed power in 2001. Presumably Bush's attention concentrated on the following: "This effort can focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq -- an important strategic advantage in its own right."
But Bush was similarly interested in those parts of the document which related to Syria and other Arab countries being "rolled back" while America simultaneously disengaged itself from interference in the 'Palestinian problem'. The idea was for the US to withdraw completely from the Israeli-Palestinian peace process and to allow free reign to the Israelis, much as Reagan/Haig had done at the time of the Israeli-condoned Sabra and Shatila massacres in Lebanon in 1982. In addition the "Clean Break" document advocated military pre-emption and aggression versus perceived regional 'enemies' of the United States, principally Iraq, Syria Iran. [5] Subsequent to the release of the "Clean Break" document in 1997, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfeld authored a letter to President Clinton calling for military force to be used in the ouster of Saddam Hussein, urging his removal as a primary "aim of American foreign policy".
It is clear that this flawed foundation for war in Iraq - the concept of pre-emption and unprovoked aggression in the willful pursuit of war - constitutes a major catastrophe and foreign policy failure for the United States of America. The United States has failed to appreciate the one key element of global militaristic and economic domination, eg. that all wars must be fought with an eye to securing near-term and long-term goals of political, economic and social stability once the military ends have been achieved.
The foregoing totally ignores any moral justifications for war. Regardless as to whether the global petro-village is morally right or wrong in its motivations, the ends must be seen to justify the means in order to maintain political will and ensure the intended future political alliances as well as economic success in the GPV sphere of influence. And to this point Iraq has proven to be an ultimate political failure for the Bush regime: by misunderstanding the true ramifications of the Iraq invasion, and with no real plan or exit strategy in such a volatile theater of operations, Iraq has become a truly major blunder for the Bush administration. But the purpose of this paper is to comprehensively describe the political, economic, historical and cultural background on the road to war in Iraq.
The Intelligence War: Rumsfeld's Crazies Versus the CIA
The intelligence war was a critical part of a broader offensive by prominent Pentagon Neo-conservative civilians within the Bush administration, versus the entire US establishment's historical quest for peace in the Middle East; the 'establishment' included the State Department, Pentagon military experts and CIA area specialists. Central to the quest for peace was an apparatus consisting of Foreign-policy/Defense and intelligence agencies, along with senior officials who were adamantly opposed to the bad intelligence fuelling the Bush administration's siren call for war in Iraq.
A core base of approximately two-dozen prominent Neo-conservative hawks were behind the strategy for war devised by Vice President Richard Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and the Bush administration's core support for Neo-conservative hawks effectively quashed all opposition to the Iraq war. But the Neoconservative case for war was driven at its heart by four radical civilian extremists in senior Pentagon positions: Richard Perle, Chairman of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board; Paul Wolfowitz; Douglas Feith and David Wurmser.
However the case for war in Iraq was based upon bad intelligence purchased from Ahmed Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress, a shadowy group of anti-Saddam agents whose paymasters were the aforementioned civilian Pentagon Neo-conservatives. [5b] Meanwhile Middle East specialists, uniformed military officers and CIA operatives alike were marginalized by the Neocons, and their views on Iraq were ignored by the Bush administration at every level. "I've heard from people on the Middle East staff in the Pentagon," says Borg, referring to the staff under neocon Peter Rodman, the assistant secretary of defense for International Security Affairs. "The Middle East experts in those offices are as cut off from the policy side as people in the State Department are."
But the sharpest battle was fought between the Pentagon's civilian Neo-conservative hawks and the CIA. "There is tremendous pressure on [the CIA] to come up with information to support policies that have already been adopted," says Vincent Cannistraro, a former senior CIA official and counterterrorism expert. But the CIA was not in tune with the Neo-conservative version of reality, and whenever the CIA attempted to provide objective, unbiased intelligence to the White House such intelligence was invariably rejected. Ironically, CIA director Tenet had no problem adopting the Neo-con predilection for war so favored by Richard Cheney and the White House, and Tenet's statement [linking Iraq and al-Qaeda] was a significant departure from the consensus view among intelligence professionals. Prior to the 911 attacks intelligence experts rejected the notion that Iraq provided any support to al-Qaeda, and intelligence experts continue to reject the notion today.
Daniel Benjamin co-author of The Age of Sacred Terror, was Director of Counterterrorism at the National Security Council (NSC) in the late 1990s; Benjamin's group oversaw a comprehensive review of Iraq and its relation to terrorism, and the group concluded that there was no relation. "In 1998, we went through every piece of intelligence we could find to see if there was a link [between] al-Qaeda and Iraq," says Benjamin. "We came to the conclusion that our intelligence agencies had it right: there was no noteworthy relationship between al-Qaeda and Iraq. I know that for a fact. No other issue has been as closely scrutinized as this one."
Furthermore, the State Department's annual review with regard to state-sponsored terrorism concluded that there was no link between Hussein and Al-Qaeda. "It's demoralizing to a number of the analysts," says Cannistraro. "The analysts are human, and some of them are also ambitious. What you have to worry about is the 'chill factor.' If people are ignoring your intelligence, and the Pentagon and NSC keep telling you, 'What about this? What about this? Keep looking!' -- well, then you start focusing on one thing instead of the other thing, because you know that's what your political masters want to hear."
One of the main sources of Defense Department pressure on the CIA was the Orwellian sounding "Office of Special Plans" a rump intelligence unit created by Defense Undersecretary Douglas Feith. The OSP was established to provide Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz with data expressly designed to disparage, undermine and contradict the CIA's Iraq intelligence, and furthermore to incite the American people to war. Established post 9-11, the unit's primary focus related to Iraq's alleged links to al-Qaeda, and focussed on Iraq's alleged intent to use nuclear, chemical and biological weapons versus Israel and the West.
In a controversial briefing at the Pentagon [possibly intended to be humorous] Rumsfeld noted that the primary purpose of the OSP was to provide Rumsfeld with ammunition that would allow him to harass a CIA staffer who was briefing him every morning, presumably with intelligence that he refused to accept. "In comes the briefer, and she walks through the daily brief and I ask questions," said Rumsfeld. "What I could do is say, 'Gee, what about this? Or what about that? Has somebody thought of this?'" With their access to reams of intelligence facts and 'plausible disinformation' Feith's team could easily create a steady stream of data bits for Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Feith - "intelligence" which actually consisted of manufactured disinformation designed to pick apart the CIA's conclusions, thus sending the CIA's analysts back to rewrite their reports.
The fact that the Office of Special Plans was overseen by Douglas Feith [a radical partisan extremist who has consistently called for outright war versus Palestinians] immediately discredited the organization and raised fundamental questions about its impartiality. "It's one thing to create a unit to provide an independent look, and it's another thing to go on a fishing expedition," says Benjamin, the former NSC official. "The fact that this unit has been there for more than a year suggests that it is a fishing expedition."
Feith appointed fellow Neo-conservative extremists, William Luti and Abram Shulsky to staff the Office of Special Plans, and Strauss desciple Shulsky was another key member of the Perle-Wolfowitz group of radicals. When Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.) was elected to the Senate in 1976, he "brought with him some of [Sen. Henry M.] Jackson's most militantly neoconservative former aides, among them Elliott Abrams, Chester Finn, Abram Shulsky and Gary Schmitt," according to a 1986 account in The Washington Post.
Perle was also a former Henry "Scoop" Jackson aide, and Shulsky, Perle and many kindred thinkers worked in Reagan's Department of Defense in the 1980's. Shulsky also did significant time at the Consortium for the Study of Intelligence, a project of the National Strategy Information Center (NSIC), and at the RAND Corporation. At RAND, along with other fellow neocons, including Lewis "Scooter" Libby - now Richard Cheney's chief of staff - Shulsky contributed a study called "From Containment to Global Leadership: America and the World after the Cold War". That study was a forerunner of the "Clean Break" document which promoted the Orwellian idea of pre-emptive war as a means to enforce the peace.
The OSP and Cheney's Pentagon policy arm supplied the bulk of the false/bogus Iraq intelligence to a compliant media, much of it based upon specific false information supplied to them by the INC and by Israeli intelligence. While US media operations never questioned the bogus intelligence on Iraq and accepted it as fact, Colin Powell rejected the "script" supplied by Feith's Israeli/INC operation in preparation for Powell's address to the United Nations Security Council on February 5th, 2003. For the UNSC presentation, Powell rejected Rumsfeld's false and fictional Iraqi National Council and Israeli-inspired intelligence, and he used the National Intelligence Council's 'National Intelligence Estimate' on Iraq instead, even though the NIE material contained almost as many inaccuracies as the Neo-con Israeli/INC material did.
Chalabi's Bogus Iraqi National Congress [5b]
Rumsfeld's Pentagon operatives and their war against the CIA relied heavily upon bogus intelligence from the Iraqi National Congress, a group established by the discredited Ahmed Chalabi, under Paymasters and handlers reporting to Feith himself. Most Iraq experts considered the INC's intelligence-gathering capabilities to be exactly nil. Yet, Perle, Woolsey and the Pentagon's policymakers, used the INC as their primary source of information about Iraq's weapons programs and Iraq's supposed relationship to international terrorism. "A lot of what is useful with respect to what's going on in Iraq is coming from defectors, and furthermore they are defectors who have often come through an organization, namely, the INC, that neither [the] State [Department] nor the CIA likes very much," according to former CIA director Woolsey.
Early in 2004 the State Department abruptly stopped funding the INC's schemes to collect intelligence inside Iraq. "The INC could only account for $2.5 million out of $4.5 million they received for the program," says a State Department official. "I can't say that there was evidence of corruption or embezzlement, but $2 million was unaccounted for." Rumsfeld's hawks privately funded the INC and their "intelligence gathering" activities [via the State Department] a situation which created tremendous tension between the State Department and Rumsfeld's Pentagon extremists. "The only reason they stopped paying for that program is that the State Department hates the INC," says a knowledgeable source. The situation was therefore altered so that the INC's 'intelligence' could be funded and delivered directly to the Department of Defense. According to Col. David Lapan. "The intelligence guys here get the information first and do the analysis," he says. Goodman, the former CIA analyst, concurs, saying, "The INC is in the Pentagon every day."
Pentagon critics were appalled to learn that intelligence provided by the INC was used to shape US policy with regard to the war in Iraq, an unlawful and criminal state of affairs, since taxpayer funds were misused to instigate an illegal war based upon intentionally false data. The CIA and the State Department viewed Ahmed Chalabi, the INC's leader, as the point man representing a corrupt organization skilled at lobbying and public relations, but totally inept at gathering real intelligence. [See "Tinker, Banker, Neocon, Spy," tap, Nov. 18.] "The [INC's] intelligence isn't reliable at all," says Cannistraro. "Much of it is propaganda. Much of it is telling the Defense Department what they want to hear. And much of it is used to support Chalabi's own presidential ambitions. They make no distinction between intelligence and propaganda, using alleged informants and defectors who say what Chalabi wants them to say, [creating] cooked information that goes right into presidential and vice-presidential speeches." Adds Cannistraro, "They're willing to twist information in order to serve that interest. They've opened up a channel at the Pentagon to collect intelligence from Iraqi exiles, using people off the books, contractors. It's getting pretty close to an Iran-Contra type of situation."
The hostility of the Neo-cons toward the CIA on Iraq is key to understanding the root of bad intelligence and the unlawful foundation upon which the war in Iraq was sold. Quoting Perle himself: [The CIA's analysis of Iraq] "isn't worth the paper it's written on," and he adds that the CIA is afraid of rocking the ark in the Middle East. "The CIA is status-quo oriented," said Perle. "They don't want to take risks. They don't like the INC because they only like to work with people they can control."
The Oil Triumvirate and Iran's Islamic Revolution 1978-1979
Revolutionary Iran's active, high level, and persistent support of SAIRI [Shia anti-Hussein] activities inside Iraq is designed to undermine the Hussein regime and pave the way for the establishment of an Iranian-type Islamic government in Iraq. [12]
America's covert influence within Iran did not end with the installation of the Shah Reza Pahlavi, however details on American covert activities within Iran from 1953 to 1979 are beyond the scope of this paper. It is most notable that the Shah was installed in power by the United States and likewise the US participated in removing the Shah from power; America therefore had a direct role in the Shah's rise and fall due to Iran's extreme strategic importance as an oil exporting nation.
Remarkably, the rise of Iran's embryonic Islamic Republic and aggressive Arab nationalization of the Arab and Persian oil cartels crystallized between 1973 and 1979 with the ascendance of OPEC as a key global oil exporting entity. [One curious Iraq war question relates to the manner in which Iraq - as a sovereign nation and not occupied by a foreign power - will ever participate in future OPEC activities should Iraq ever seriously resume oil exports.]
The nationalization of Iraq's oil industry took place between 1972 and 1974, and this event effectively electrified Iraqis and stunned the oil industry worldwide. Iraq's nationalization of its oil industry set the oil kingdom dominoes falling throughout the Persian Gulf and the OPEC nations, as other countries ousted the multinationals and created state-owned enterprises. Eventually, even Saudi Arabia seized control of all-powerful Aramco Oil, the titanic consortium of Exxon, Mobil, Texaco and Chevron which had long been the petro-colossus of the Persian Gulf. Now, cautiously, the oil industry foresaw a war in Iraq as a way to win back what had been lost.
With regard to the Road to War in Iraq, the oil triumvirate itself is an extremely important entity. The Oil Triumvirate is simply the geologic triangle of Iraq, Iran and Saudi Arabia, where the tremendous strategic importance of world energy supplies cannot be calculated, estimated or imagined.
We can see that with the collapse of influence in any one leg of the Triumvirate then the entire apparatus tends to become unstable; when two legs of the Triumvirate collapse then the dynamic becomes untenable. And this is the precise state of affairs with regard to Iran since 1979 and with Iraq since 1991 - essentially major oil exports from two legs of the Oil Triumvirate were lost to the United States.
Of course the United States could not allow two-thirds of the Oil Triumvirate to be lost to it and the logical conclusion follows, that domination of the Oil Triumvirate is not limited to Iraq: Saudi Arabia and Iran also participate in the triangle. The Islamic Republic of Iran has been counted out within the US sphere of influence, but influence over Saudi affairs and the Iraq occupation has reformed the Middle Eastern energy resource equation.
We briefly consider the third leg of the Oil Triumvirate, namely Saudi Arabia, and the unique problems the House of Saud presents for America's re-design of the Middle East.
"Even in Saudi Arabia, all we can do is buy their oil," says an American oil company official. U.S. companies, this executive confirmed, want to return to greater direct control, perhaps through so-called production-sharing agreements that would give them both a direct stake in the oil fields and a greater share of the profits.
Ultimately US neoconservatives and US oil executives look beyond Iraq and even Iran to their ultimate prize in Saudi Arabia. Since the first oil embargo of the 1970's political scientists have proposed and American occupation of Saudi Arabia's oil fields. The occupation of Saudi oil fields has been a cherished vision for a small but influential circle of political insiders and strategists from George H Bush to Richard Cheney. In 2001 Richard Perle invited a RAND Corporation analyst to speak to the Defense Policy Board on exactly that topic. Earlier in 2002 an article entitled "Free the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia," by Husdon Institute founder Max Singer suggested that the United States should help create a Muslim Republic of East Arabia. "I meant it seriously," says Singer. "Saudi Arabia is vulnerable not only to a U.S. seizure of their land but to U.S. unofficial participation in a rebellion by minority Shi'a in the Eastern Province." The Eastern Province, which is largely Shi'a, happens to include the vast bulk of Saudi Arabia's oil fields.
Finally, consider the following lofty Neo-conservative notion: that America's control of the currency hegemon and the energy commodity itself [and in conjunction with the IMF and G-8 financial institutions whilst marginalizing the United Nations] enables America to effectively secure its position as a primary world economic leader for the forseeable future. Therefore the next logical step in US domination of the Oil Triumvirate is to leverage more effective control of Saudi Arabia's energy resources while, at the same time, provoking a new conflict for control of Iran.
Richard Cheney and the Task Force on Energy
Fadel Gheit, Oil Analyst at Oppenheimer & Co's New York Office reports:
A select group of oil company executives met with Bush administration energy officials in the spring of 2001 for secret high level discussions regarding Iraq's oil reserves.[13]
Iraq is nestled in the heart of an area of heaviest oil concentration in the world with easy accessibility - no permafrost, no deep water, just giant pools of oil right beneath the warm ground. Iraq has vast quantities of untapped and easily accessible oil, almost untouched.
"Think of Iraq as virgin territory .... This is bigger than anything Exxon is involved in currently .... It is the superstar of the future," says Gheit, "That's why Iraq becomes the most sought-after real estate on the face of the earth."
Gheit just smiles at the notion that oil was not a major factor in the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Gheit compares Iraq to Russia, which also has large undeveloped oil reserves. But Russia has nuclear weapons. "We can't just go over and ... occupy (Russian) oil fields," says Gheit. "It's a different ballgame."
Iraq, however, was defenceless and utterly lacking in weapons of mass destruction [ironically] thus making it a particularly easy target. And its location nestled between Saudi Arabia and Iran, makes Iraq an ideal location for an ongoing US military presence from which the US will control the entire Gulf region.
Gheit smiles again: "Think of Iraq as a military base with a very large oil reserve underneath .... You can't ask for better than that."
Although the Bush administration vociferously objected, another Task Force sourced document was released under court order, entitled "Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfields". The "Foreign Suitors" document identifies 63 oil companies from 30 countries and specifies the particular Iraqi oil fields each company was interested in and the status of relevant negotiations with Saddam Hussein's regime on their exploitation. Royal Dutch/Shell, Russia's Lukoil and France's Total/Elf Aquitaine, were all identified as potential developers in the fabulous, 25-billion-barrrel Majnoon oil field. Baghdad had "agreed in principle" to the French company's plans to develop this major oil holding in Iraq, however Cheney's Energy Task Force could not allow plans for French exploitation of the Iraqi fields to proceed.
Cheney's Energy Task Force documents have attracted surprisingly little attention, despite their possible relevance to the question of Washington's 'mysterious' motives for its invasion of Iraq.Certainly any suggestion that private oil interests were in any way involved is hooted down with charges of conspiracy theory. However the documents suggest that those who took part in the Cheney task force -- including senior oil company executives -- were very interested in Iraq's oil and also specifically interested in the possibility of Iraq's oil falling into the hands of foreign [non-US] oil companies, rather than into the rightful hands of the US oil corporates.
As the documents show, prior to Bush's invasion, foreign oil companies were nicely positioned for future oil exploration and exploitation in Iraq, while major US corporates were shut out fo the Iraqi oil picture after a dozen years of US-Iraqi hostilities; indeed, the US majors would have been the big losers if UN sanctions against Iraq had simply been lifted. "The US majors stand to lose if Saddam makes a deal with the UN (on lifting sanctions)," noted a report by Germany's Deutsche Bank in October 2002.
We therefore arrive at a central point: The United States could not allow sanctions versus Iraq to be lifted upon completion of the UN Inspector's work there, because the exploitation of the tremendous Majnoon oil resources would then be fully open to a foreign corporate while Saddam Hussein would remain in power, and the US would remain shut out of a major new source of oil reserves. [14]
== War in the Middle East [commentary] ==
The war on terror is widely touted in the media as an essential core political ideal in the current phase, but the "war on terror" is certainly an artificial construct intended to reinforce desired opinions and behaviors among first world populations, and in no way approaches any real or imagined ideal state of affairs with regard to the conduct of foreign policy.
The "war on terror" is a favored distortion of global petro-village rhetoric because this construct of misunderstanding conveniently masks the monopoly of violence already maintained by the state itself. The foundation for the so-called "war on terror" is the state's promotion [and defense] of its own ability to control populations through propaganda, disinformation, fear and violence; however the Third World War versus third world populations - including Iraq - is certainly a very real war, presently and historically.[8]
America's Military Power since World War 2: The United States achieved superpower status as a weapons manufacturer of first resort until the Soviet Union collapsed under its own weight in the early 1990's. Instead of reaping the so-called 'peace dividend' the US discovered that it too lost the cold war by relying upon its weapons manufacturing base to support its economy. Post-1991 the US faced a choice similar to that of the former USSR: face economic ruin or find new markets for US weapons. Besides new aggressive/interventionist foreign policies the result of this lost cold war is apparent in the state's inability to contain conditions under which [popular notions of] terrorism may thrive.
It is therefore logical to ignore the artificial construct of the "war on terror" and refer to the real war in the third world as Petrol War 1 or the Third World War, which began in earnest with explosive violence in Lebanon's civil war of 1975/76, following the western oil crisis and the Yom Kippur war of 1973, and the floating of the dollar in 1971; these four noteworthy events are inextricably linked in time, cause and purpose. We shall briefly consider each event and its contribution to the road to war in Iraq.
War in Lebanon
The United States is prepared to use armed forces to assist any nation or group of such nations requesting assistance against armed aggressors from any country controlled by international communism. -- Dulles, 1958
The road to war in Iraq begins in Iran with the US-led 1953 coup which ousted the democratically elected government of Mossadegh; but the road to ideological confrontation begins in Lebanon where terrorism, unholy political alliances and a US failure to lead and/or constructively participate in middle eastern affairs ultimately leads to continuing escalation of violent conflict.
The global petro-village came of age with the first true oil crisis and Arab oil embargoes of the early 1970's. Then as today powerful economic forces dictated a sea-change in diplomatic relations, and Lebanon's melting pot of radical religious groups, assorted martyrs, New Phoenician business people and influx of radical Palestinians conspired to create an unholy political powder keg destined to explode.
Historically Lebanon was viewed as the Asian-western edge of Christendom while the Lebanese christians considered themselves as the eastern-most inhabitants of western Christendom. And until 1973 Lebanon played an important role as a business/banking hub for the West in the Middle east and business staging area for oil exploration; however the onset of the first energy crisis and Arab oil emabargo of 1973 crippled Lebanon's influence, and with this eclipse the smoldering socio-economic underbelly exploded.
From the early 1970's Lebanon has been a violent playground for various middle eastern power factions whether Muslim, Palestinian, Syrian, Israeli, Maronite/Christian, American or European. Specifically and to the point, the conflicts in Lebanon, even into antiquity, may be seen as a microcosm of the religious, political, social and economic conflict that we experience in the Middle East and indeed throughout the world today.
Principally Beirut was a center for Palestinian fedayeen activity and specifically, the 1972 Sabena hijacking, Lod airport shootings and Munich massacre of Israeli athletes were all masterminded by Palestinian terror groups in Beirut at the time. Lebanon's sympathy for radical Palestinians, coupled with a changing business and economic climate in a land known for its hotbed of politico-religious splinter groups was bound to be the Lebanon's undoing.
Significantly within Lebanon and the civil war of 1975 until the subsequent Israeli-led invasion in 1982, we see new developments in new-age concepts of terrorism [for exammple airline hijacking and high-profile hostage-taking] and
in Lebanon we also see unusual political alliances among diparate religious groups, for example among Maronites
and Israelis.
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The Israeli-Palestinian War in Lebanon, 1982
The Israeli-Palestinian war was initiated by Israel in 1982 and deserves special mention because the background and concept of the war includes many parallels to the Bush invasion and occupation of Iraq; in typical doublespeak worthy of any bureaucrat today Israel called its war on the Palestinians "Operation Peace for Gallilee" and the irony when compared to America's war on Iraq called "Operation Iraqi Freedom" is immediately apparent.
By 1981/82 the Begin-Sharon government could no longer tolerate the perceived PLO threat on its northern border especially after the shellings of Gallilee with many Israeli fatalities, and the Reaganite extremist General Haig now allowed Israel free reign with zero US intervention; the UN was perceived by Reaganites as a thorn in the side of Israel's attempt to finally end all Palestinian resistance.
Certainly the high-point of Palestinian resistance, Israel's massive invasion of Lebanon failed to defeat the PLO in spite of glaring odds in Israel's favor. A stalemate in the fighting caused a UN attempt to broker peace - Israeli propaganda represented the stalemate as a strategic halt due their unforseen rapid advance on Beirut beyond the 40 KM perimeter originally envisaged by Sharon - but the fact is that Israel could not decisively defeat the PLO militia by June 13th, 1982.
This is the mystery and untold wonder of modern military history, that Israel's massive military machine which included one-half million soldiers in over seventy Army brigades, over eight thousand armored vehicles, five hundred advanced combat aircraft, ninety naval vessels, and billions of dollars in military funding [courtesy of the American taxpayer] yet could not decisively defeat a rag-tag improvised and poorly armed militia of approximately fifteen-thousand Palestinians.
UN Security Council resolution 509 demanded Israel's withdrawal of all troops from Lebanon but Israel ignored the resolution and surrounded Beirut, with two key Palestinian camps under siege. In an alliance with Maronite Christians, the state of Israel and CIA [9] allowed Maronite terrorists to enter the Shatila, Sabra and Tal PLO camps. Official Red Cross figures put the number of dead Palestinian civilians at 543, however independent sources estimate the number of massacred Palestinian civilians to be far higher. [10] Certainly Israel's free reign in targeting Palestinian civilians now peaked under Reagan's regime where Alexander Haig failed to provide the US brake on Israel's military activities, a brake that maintained some sort of uneasy balance of power in the region since 1948.
Under heavy fire from the newly found Lebanese Resistance, Israel partially withdrew from central Lebanon in 1984 and 1985 but enlarged its occupation of the southern part of the country up to the area of Jezzine. On April 11, 1996, following an escalation in intermittent skirmishes, Israel commenced a bombardment of southern Lebanon and certain other targets in Lebanon, including the southern suburbs of Beirut. On April 27, 1996 a cease-fire "April Understanding" came into effect. The cease-fire was based on a written but unsigned agreement drawn up by France and the United States and setting out a position mutually acceptable to Israel, Syria and Lebanon, which expanded and consolidated oral cease-fire understandings reached in July 1993. These arrangements established an international group composed of representatives of the United States, France, Syria, Lebanon and Israel to monitor the cease-fire.
On May 24, 2000, Israel withdrew its troops from a large territory in southern Lebanon which Israel has occupied since 1978. A significant issue relating to the withdrawal remains unsettled: certain villages and adjacent land on the eastern side of Alsheikh Mountain, known as the “Shebaa Farms” have been occupied by Israel since 1967; the Lebanese government has advised the United Nations that it considers this area to be Lebanese territory and, as such, the withdrawal must encompass the Shebaa Farms. At a news conference in Paris, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad announced that Damascus will demarcate their countries' border with Lebanon at Shebaa Farms after Israel withdraws from the region. Because of this, many Lebanese people feel that Syria is fighting a war by proxy with Israel on Lebanese soil.
The conflict in Lebanon is inextricably intertwined with Bush's war in Iraq, complicated by regional territorial wars such as the Shebaa Farms and the Haifa oil pipeline project which ran from Kirkuk in Iraq to the port of Tripoli in Lebanon.
The Haifa pipeline
There is ample evidence that the plan to reopen the Haifa pipeline [closed in 1948] from Iraq to Israel has been in the works for many years, with Henry Kissinger an early progenitor of the project. James Akins, a former US ambassador to the region and one of America's leading Arabists explains: "There would be a fee for transit rights through Jordan, just as there would be fees for Israel from those using what would be the Haifa terminal. After all, this is a new world order now. This is what things look like particularly if we wipe out Syria. It just goes to show that it is all about oil, for the United States and its ally Israel."
Akins was ambassador to Saudi Arabia before he was fired after a series of conflicts with then Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, father of the vision to pipe oil west from Iraq. "Operation: Free Iraq Oil" dates back to 1975, when Kissinger signed what forms the basis for the Haifa project: a Memorandum of Understanding whereby the US would guarantee Israel's oil reserves and energy supply in exchange for political favors. Kissinger was also master of the American plan in the mid-Eighties - when Saddam Hussein was a key US ally - to run an oil pipeline from Iraq to Aqaba in Jordan, opposite the Israeli port of Eilat.
The plan was promoted at the time by Donald Rumsfeld, and the pipeline was to be built by the Bechtel company, which the Bush administration has now awarded multi-billion dollar contracts for the reconstruction of Iraq. The memorandum has been quietly renewed every five years, with special legislation attached whereby the US stocks strategic oil reserves for Israel even if it entails domestic shortages. In 2002 the cost of ensuring Israeli reserves by these means cost US taxpayers $3 billion. However the new Iraqi pipeline will slash these costs with the added advantage of giving the US reliable access to a new source of Gulf oil.
An anonymous senior CIA source maintains: "It has long been a dream of a powerful section of the people now driving this administration [of President George W. Bush] and the war in Iraq to safeguard Israel's energy supply as well as that of the United States. The Haifa pipeline was something that existed, was resurrected as a dream and is now a viable project."
Currency and Empire
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Iraq_War
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"Marsh Goddess " Photo taken in Ottawa, Ontario Copyright 2002 Alisha Fisher all rights reserved 
