GLOBAL WAR TRIBUTE

The US had hoped for cheap oil after occupying Iraq. However the resistance ruined the business. Now the whole world pays for this miscalculation.

By Rainer Rupp

[This article originally published in: junge Welt, October 25, 2004 is translated from the German on her World Wide Web, www.jungewelt.de/2004/10-25/010.php.]


On Saturday, new bombing attacks were carried out on two pipelines in Iraq. This is not worth any headline any more to international media although billions in damages are inflicted on US occupiers and their marionette-government through the lost export profits. The price of oil is now setting a record on the world market. The high price is only the “result of speculation” and “not of a supply shortage”. Sycophants of the Bush administration try to divert the question of responsibility for this development in the wrong direction. On the other hand, the energy expert of the Wall Street Journal, Youssef M. Ibrahim, sees the reason in “Iraqi oil lost to the world market”.

“Instead of the rosy promises of the neoconservatives who wanted to turn Iraq into America’s private gas station, the opposite is happening”, he writes. On a daily average, “two million barrels of Iraqi oil have disappeared from the world market” (a barrel equals 159 liters) which has “enormous consequences for economies around the globe”. The war-mongerers in Washington imagined this very simply: abundant Iraqi oil would finance a rapid rebuilding of the occupied land in which mainly US corporations would profit. Assistant US Defense secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz promised this before the war and generated a gold-digger mentality in the US.

How the US could destroy the OPEC-cartel with the help of massive oil exports was speculated. The global economy would be stimulated on account of low oil prices and car drivers all over the world would be thankful to Americans. However the Bush-gang made their simple-minded reasoning without considering the tenacious and determined resistance of the Iraqi people. Pipelines and oil terminals are blown up again and again from the northern production areas near Kirkuk to the loading stations in the south of Iraq near Basra. The northern pipeline that pumps Iraqi oil to the Turkish mediterranean harbor Ceyhan was destroyed 37 times in the past twelve months. The terminals in the South have been attacked at least ten times. No oil can be exported any more.

Under Saddam Hussein, Iraq produced nearly 3.5 million barrels per day. 2.5 million barrels were exported under the “Oil for Food” program supervised by the UN. At that time the country produced a half million barrels a day for its own consumption. The oil was processed in the refineries plundered and destroyed since the invasion. Iraq “smuggled” 300,000 to 500,000 barrels daily across the borders to Iran, Jordan, Syria and Turkey whose profits were amassed by the Saddam government without UN oversight. Since the US invasion, “the largest part of Iraqi exports disappeared from the world market”, Ibrahim calculated in the Wall Street Journal. This happens at a moment when the growing demand from China and India increased oil consumption last year 1.3 percent to 81 million barrels a day. As a result, the world market price for oil of different qualities has reached the highest level in 20 years.

Therefore the European economy is crawling at the edge of a recession. The world economy is also threatened with collapse on account of the high oil price. The main source of energy of developed capitalism is so expensive that many experts no longer exclude a worldwide economic crisis. Threshold- and developing countries without their own crude oil at the bottom in the pecking order of the world system can hardly cover their energy needs or only at the cost of more poverty. Thus the whole world has to pay for the disappeared oil from the Tigris and Euphrates land on account of the US crimes against the Iraqi people.