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Spoils of War
| Date: |
04 May 2003 12:00 |
| Producer: |
Diana Lucas
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| Show: | Carte Blanche |
Twenty-eight thousand bombs later and the regime of Saddam Hussein has been relegated to history. But as fast as Saddam's government was toppled, talk has turned to the rebuilding of Iraq.
It will cost at least US $60-billion and already the first two major contracts have been given out. A $640-million contract was awarded to a San Francisco based company, Bechtel. Another $7-billion contract went to Halleburton, whose headquarters are in Houston. Both companies have one thing in common - lots of very close friends in very high places
The major accusations levelled against the politicians who took America into the war is that many of them have been through what is called a revolving door between government and big business and that their approach has been shaped, not so much by the national interest, as by their links to big companies - many of them with oil interests.
Jim Vallette: 'What these folks who are now in power in Washington are concerned with is the global marketplace and securing - not human rights, not human dignity, not human needs, but corporate profits for their closest corporate friends.'
Jim Vallette is with the Institute of Policy Studies in Washington. He has been tracking the relationship between the American government and large oil companies.
Jim: 'Since 1986 we have seen tens of billions of dollars of US government financing going towards companies like Shell and Exxon-Mobil and Halleburton and Enron, supporting their investments overseas and pipelines and oil and gas production.'
Last month Jim published a controversial report based on a number of classified documents, telexes and memos never before released. They describe what US government officials were doing in Iraq and Jordan between 1982 and 1985.
Jim: 'The most interesting to me were these corporate memoranda that were in the archives that revealed how deeply entrenched Bechtel was in the White House - in the Reagan White House - in the National Security Advisor's office, in the State Department and in Rumsfeld's actions and in George Schulz's briefs.'
Not all of these documents were freely available; on the contrary, most were classified. But once the researchers knew what they were looking for, they had a powerful tool at hand - the American Freedom of Information Act. Under this law they could request any document and the state had to give a reason if they didn't want to release it.
It's taken ten years for some of these documents to be released and they cover the early '80s when Ronald Reagan was President of United States and Saddam Hussein the dictator of Iraq. It was the years of the Iran-Iraq wars. Saddam was using chemical weapons against Iranian soldiers and civilians - I3 000 chemical bombs were dropped and the country was a hotbed of human rights violations.
Jim: 'In the 1980s certainly the US's relationship with Saddam Hussein was dominated by oil. The US tried to play the Iran-Iraq conflict in a way that would ensure that neither country would achieve dominance over the region's oil supplies.
Saddam Hussein's use of chemical weapons didn't deter the Americans in the 1980s from trying to strike a major deal with Iraq. It concerned an oil pipeline that was to run from the Iraqi oil fields, through Jordan to the Red Sea.
Bechtel was the company negotiating to build this pipeline. George Schulz was at the time the Secretary of State to the Reagan administration but, before joining the Reagan administration, he had been President of Bechtel.
Jim: 'While George Schulz was Secretary of State, he pushed - behind the scenes - this pipeline project for Bechtel. Then after he left the Reagan administration he rejoined Bechtel. He's on the board of directors of Bechtel to this day. He's an extraordinarily influential outside-advisor to the Bush-Cheney regime. So he embodies this revolving door.'
In I983 Schulz and Reagan hired Donald Rumsfeld officially as a Peace Envoy for the US government in Baghdad.
Ruda Landman, Carte Blanche Correspondent: 'So what was his brief? What did he have to go and do?'
Jim: 'Out of public view the actual marching orders for Rumsfeld was much different to what he has claimed. In December 1983 George Schultz, the CEO of Bechtel, gave Rumsfeld talking points for meetings with Tariq Azis and Saddam Hussein. These talking points really emphasised a Bechtel oil pipeline project.'
Secret State Department cables detail a meeting between Rumsfeld and
Saddam. In these cables, Rumsfeld expresses the United States' wish to help Iraq increase its oil exports.
Jim: 'All this was going on at a time when Saddam Hussein was actually using weapons of mass destruction. It wasn't just some theory; it was actually happening. And Don Rumsfeld was in Baghdad. His priority was not the use of weapons of mass destruction. His priority was pushing his pipeline project at George Schulz's and Bechtel's request.'
Jim's investigation and research into these previously secret documents trace the years between 1983 and 1985 when Reagan administration officials, Bechtel and pipeline promoters spent a lot of energy trying to woo Saddam while publicly the US government was condemning Iraq's use of chemical weapons.
Jim: 'Saddam Hussein was worried about the Israeli threat and, for the next two years, US government officials were consumed with his quest to get a firm guarantee from the Israelis.
But the pipeline project never got off the ground. Saddam Hussein backed out, partly worried about the Israeli threat, partly because of Bechtel's high construction costs. Instead, in the following years, lucrative oil contracts were signed between Baghdad and corporations from France, Russia and China. This, Jim claims, was the turning point in US-Iraqi relations.
But that was then and this is now. How is all that relevant twenty years later?
Jim: 'With President Reagan we saw a kind of foreshadowing of the policy that Bush and Cheney are executing around the world, which is a policy to do business with whomever will sign contracts with US corporations. Now, after the US has waged a tragic war in Iraq, Rumsfeld and the Bush-Cheney administration have hired on Bechtel to rebuild Iraq. There's a tremendous hypocrisy.'
Ruda: 'Why do you call it hypocrisy?'
Jim: 'Bechtel should not profit from this war. Bechtel should not be rewarded for cleaning up a mess it helped to create in the 1980s.'
Ruda: 'But will a government really take a nation to war for the sake of the profit of an oil company?'
Jim: 'While Rumsfeld and other architects of the war were out of office, they were in think tanks and corporations devising a strategy to get back in Iraq.'
Daniel Yergin, political analyst: 'When people say this war was about oil I would say, 'Yes, tell me the second or the third sentence'. What does it mean? There's no problem about access to oil in the world. There are lots of places to go. It has to me this kind of 1920s, post-WW1 flavour to it. And the notion that George Bush - or for that matter Tony Blair - would risk his entire political career for some oil contracts, seems to me just about absurd.'
Daniel Yergin is one of the world's authorities on oil. He won a Pulitzer Prize for his book, 'The Prize', which revealed how and why oil became the largest industry in the world.
Daniel: 'There has been an oil connection to this whole question, of course, and that is the security, stability of the Persian Gulf region - the whole region - from which over a quarter of the world's oil flows. And there, obviously, Saddam Hussein has a track record. He invaded Iran in 1980, he invaded Kuwait in 1990, his ambitions to dominate the region - and particularly if he were to have weapons of mass destruction, it would put him in a position to have a dominating influence - would change the calculations for the world. But it would affect everybody in the world.'
But Bechtel's contract has raised eyebrows even amongst supporters of the war. A New York Times editorial called it 'a deplorable message to a sceptical world' that the 'invasion was launched for the control of oil'. The contract could be worth up to $680-million. Over the next three years they will be building two international and three domestic airports, roads, schools and hospitals. Also included is supply of electricity and water to the new Iraq.
Charlie Cray, corporate reform campaigner: 'Well, there's a 'revolving door' that operates in Washington. The current administration - the Bush administration - has at least 40 members in top level positions that are connected to or have had careers inside the oil and gas industry.'
Charlie Cray is with Citizenworks, an NGO that investigates corruption and abuse of power by government and corporations. They are scrutinising an estimated $7-billion contract a Halleburton subsidiary was secretly awarded before the war even started. These visuals show them already at work putting out the oil fires, which is part of their contract.
Charlie: 'It's an insiders game. We have an administration that was unwilling to meet with anybody who opposed the war leading up to it. We are talking about former top-level military officials, members of very large civil society groups, churches, labour, Vietnam veterans and others. None of these people had access to this administration before the decision was made to go to war. Meanwhile, they're meeting with representatives of the oil industry and who knows who else to plan this war and the outcome afterwards.'
Vice-President of the United States, Dick Cheney, is the former CEO of Halleburton. During the five years he was with them Halleburton nearly doubled the value of government contracts they received from $1.2-billion to $2.3-billion.
Charlie: 'It's no secret that Vice-President Cheney was the fulcrum of foreign policy and pushed for the war. Meanwhile his friends at Halleburton, where he used to be the CEO, are meeting with administration officials to plan post-war oil production. Then they get a no-bid contract to put out the oil well fires.'
Ruda: 'Are there other companies in the world, you think, who could do it as efficiently?'
Charlie: 'Well, Wade Oil put out two of the oil well fires in Iraq after the war at no profit.'
Daniel: 'You know, it's not my job to defend or not defend or explain what Dick Cheney did in his years in the political wilderness. It's the nature of the American system that our governmental system draws much more on the private sector and people go from the private service into public service and then go back again. That's the nature of the American system.'
Ruda: 'Isn't it at least politically insensitive to give out the major contracts to companies like Bechtel and Halleburton?'
Daniel: 'Iraq has enormous reconstruction needs that have to be dealt with quickly and in the world there are maybe six or eight companies who have the capabilities to aggregate all the skills and technologies to take on and organise big projects.'
Usually competitive bidding is essential. Since January, however, an emergency ruling has allowed the American government to award contracts to any company - without tender - when national security interests are at stake.
Charlie: 'When contracts are given out, what we hear are the criteria by which these companies are brought in to bid, largely because they have National Security clearance. But what about other criteria? For instance, why are we giving contracts out to companies that either provided weapons of mass destruction or did other kinds of business with Saddam? In Bechtel's case, they were one of the companies listed in the United Nations report that supplied dual use chemical production technology to Saddam Hussein up until 1991. Should that be looked at before we give them a contract? I think so.
War for Oil, War Against Terror or War to Liberate the Iraqi's? It's a contentious topic in America's capital right now, but what most American's have no argument with is that it was a war precipitated by that tragic day two years go.
Daniel: 'I think what people don't understand outside the United States is that this country was changed by September 11th. It was changed profoundly by September 11th. And I think that is ... if you sat down with senior leaders of either party of this country and talked about it, about what happened on September 11th, you would realise there is a different perspective about threats that had until now been considered theoretical in terms of weapons of mass destruction.
'We came to within 30 minutes of losing the Capitol. And that is seared into the mental processes of decision-makers in this country.'
Jim: 'In the days immediately after 9/11, the Defence Policy Board met and decided that Iraq would be number 2 on the hit list after Afghanistan, even though there's been no evidence that Saddam Hussein was connected with September 11th.'
Ruda: 'You don't think that the world is a better place for having removed Saddam Hussein?'
Jim: 'Certainly Saddam Hussein is and was quite a violent human being and a repressive, brutal dictator. But the world is peppered with these guys, with Saddam Husseins, with whom the US government is eager to do business and continues to do business with. And it is where contracts are signed, the sabres are not rattled.'
IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER:While every attempt has been made to ensure this transcript or summary is accurate, Carte Blanche or its agents cannot be held liable for any claims arising out of inaccuracies caused by human error or electronic fault. This transcript was typed from a transcription recording unit and not from an original script, so due to the possibility of mishearing and the difficulty, in some cases, of identifying individual speakers, errors cannot be ruled out.
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