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(1) ded it further. And Iraq urgently needs to start producing more oil. Why? Again because of the war. The country is shattered, and the billions handed out in no-bid contracts to Western firms have failed to rebuild the country. And that’s where the new no-bid contracts come in: they will raise more money, but Iraq has become such a treacherous place that the oil majors must be induced to take the risk of investing. Thus the invasion of Iraq neatly creates the argument for its subsequent pillage.
Several of the architects of the Iraq War no longer even bother to deny that oil was a major motivator. On National Public Radio’s To the Point, Fadhil Chalabi, one of the primary Iraqi advisers to the Bush Administration in the lead-up to the invasion, recently described the war as “a strategic move on the part of the United States of America and the UK to have a military presence in the Gulf in order to secure [oil] supplies in the future.” Chalabi, who served as Iraq’s oil under secretary and met with the oil majors before the invasion, described this as “a primary objective.”
Invading countries to seize their natural resources is illegal under the Geneva Conventions. That means that the huge task of rebuilding Iraq’s infrastructure – including its oil infrastructure – is the financial responsibility of Iraq’s invaders. They should be forced to pay reparations. (Recall that Saddam Hussein’s regime paid $9 billion to Kuwait in reparations for its 1990 invasion.) Instead, Iraq is being forced to sell 75 percent of its national patrimony to pay the bills for its own illegal invasion and occupation.
Extract from Disaster Capitalism: State of Extortion, by Naomi Klein. Published on Thursday, July 3, 2008 by The Nation.
(2) civil liberties in exchange for "security"; and (3) To further enrich those who profit enormously from a state of endless war. After 9/11, the Bush junta's decision to pursue a "war", rather than a police action, was taken because a war gave the United States a free hand to do whatever it deemed necessary to achieve its objectives. In other words, if it killed a few thousand civilians during an attempt to capture either a "terrorist" or a lucrative piece of real estate, it could always claim that, in war, such "collateral damage" is unavoidable.
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