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Blackwater,
Oil and the Colonial Enterprise
By John Nichols
09/21/07 "The
Nation" - - Blackwater
USA's mercenary mission in Iraq is very much in the news this
week, and rightly so. The private military contractor's
war-for-profit program, which has been so brilliantly exposed by
Jeremy Scahill, may finally get a measure of the official
scrutiny it merits as the corporation scrambles to undo the
revocation by the Iraqi government of its license to operate in
that country. There will be official inquiries in Baghdad, and
in Washington. The U.S. Congress might actually provide some of
the oversight that is its responsibility. Perhaps, and this is a
big "perhaps," Blackwater's "troops" could come home before the
U.S. soldiers who have been forced to fight, and die, in defense
of these international rent-a-cops.
But it is not the specific story of Blackwater that matters so
much as the broader story of imperial excess that it
illustrates.
If Blackwater, with an assist from the U.S. government, beats
back the attempt by the Iraqis to regulate the firm's activities
-- as now appears likely, considering Friday's reports that the
firm has resumed guarding U.S. State Department convoys in
Baghdad -- we will have all the confirmation that is needed of
the great truth of the U.S. occupation of Iraq: This is a
colonial endeavor no different than that of the British Empire
against America's founding generation revolted.
But even if Blackwater loses its fight to stay, even if the
corporation is forced to shut down its multi-billion dollar,
U.S. Treasury-funded operation in Iraq, the brief
"accountability moment" may not be sufficient to open up the
necessary debate about Iraq's colonial status. The danger, for
Iraq and the United States, that honest assessment of the crisis
will lose out to face-saving gestures designed to foster the
fantasy of Iraqi independence.
It is not enough that Blackwater is shamed and perhaps
sanctioned. A Blackwater exit from Iraq will mean little if its
mercenary contracts are merely taken over by one or more of the
140 other U.S.-sanctioned private security firms operating in
that country -- such as Vice President Dick Cheney's
Halliburton.
Whatever the precise play out of this Blackwater moment may be,
the likelihood is that the colonial enterprise will continue.
That's because, in the absence of intense pressure from
grassroots activists and the media, Congress is unlikely to go
beyond a scratch at the surface of what is actually going on in
Iraq.
The deeper discussion requires that a discussion about the
substance that no less a figure than former Federal Reserve
chairman Alan Greenspan describes as the reason for the invasion
and occupation of this particular Middle Eastern land: oil
The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. aptly observed that "colonialism
was made for domination and for exploitation," and there is no
substance that the Bush-Cheney administration is more interested
in dominating and exploiting than oil.
Thus, while it is right to pay close attention to the emerging
discussion about Blackwater's wicked work in Iraq, Americans
would do well to pay an equal measure of attention to the still
largely submerged discussion about an Iraqi oil deal that will
pay huge benefits to the Hunt Oil Company, a Texas firm closely
linked to the administration. How closely? When he was running
Halliburton, Cheney invited Hunt Oil Company CEO Ray Hunt to
serve on the firm's board of directors. Hunt, a "Bush Pioneer"
fund raiser during in 2000 who went on to serve as
donated the tidy sum of $35 million to the Bush presidential
library building fund.
The new "production sharing agreement" between Hunt Oil and the
Kurdistan Regional Government puts one of the administration's
favorite firms in a position to reap immeasurable profits while
undermining essential efforts to assure that Iraq's oil revenues
will be shared by all Iraqis. Hunt's deal upsets hopes that
Iraq's mineral wealth might ultimately be a source of stability,
replacing the promise of economic equity with the prospect of a
black-gold rush that will only widen inequalities and heighten
ethnic and regional resentments.
The Hunt deal is so sleazy -- and so at odds with the stated
goals of the Iraqi government and the U.S. regarding the sharing
of oil revenues -- that even Bush has acknowledged that U.S.
embassy officials in Baghdad are deeply concerned about it. What
Bush and Cheney have been slow to mention is the fact that
Iraq's oil minister, Hussain al-Shahristani, says the deal is
illegal.
As with the Blackwater imbroglio, however, there is no assurance
that the stance of the Iraqi government is definitional with
regard to what happens in Iraq.
That is why it is disturbing that, for the most part, members of
Congress -- even members who say they do not want the United
States to have a long-term presence in Iraq -- have been slow to
start talking about Hunt's oil rigging.
One House member who has raised the alarm is Ohio Democrat
Dennis Kucinich, who in his capacity as a key member of the
House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, has asked
the committee's chairman, California Democrat Henry Waxman, to
launch an investigation into the Hunt Oil deal.
"As I have said for five years, this war is about oil,"
Kucinich, who is mounting an anti-war bid for the Democratic
presidential nomination, declared on the floor of the House this
week. "The Bush Administration desires private control of Iraqi
oil, but we have no right to force Iraq to give up control of
their oil. We have no right to set preconditions to Iraq which
lead Iraq to giving up control of their oil. The Constitution of
Iraq designates that the oil of Iraq is the property for all
Iraqi people."
With that in mind, Kucinich explains, "I am calling for a
Congressional investigation to determine the role the
Administration may have played in the Hunt-Kurdistan deal, the
effect the deal will have on the oil revenue sharing plan and
the attempt by the Administration to privatize Iraqi oil."
Waxman has been ahead of the curve on Blackwater, seeking
testimony from the firm's chairman at hearings scheduled for
early October.
But Waxman needs to expand his focus, and the way to do that is
by heeding Kucinich's call for an investigation into the Hunt
deal.
That inquiry should begin with two fundamental questions:
Who runs Iraq -- the Iraqis or their colonial overlords in
Washington?
And, if the claim is that the Iraqis are in charge, then why is
Ray Hunt about to start steering revenues from that country's
immense oil wealth into the same Texas bank accounts that have
so generously funded the campaigns of George Bush and Dick
Cheney?
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