‘You’ve got to go where the oil is’

around President Putin.) The U.S. removal of the Taliban also gave the world a fl ood of heroin, as old warlords suppressed by the Taliban were able to resume poppy cultivation.

The U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, Wendy Chamberlain, in January 2002 met with Usman Aminuddin, Pakistan’s oil minister. The talks were about how to continue plans for a north–south pipeline to Pakistan’s Arabian Sea oil terminal. In May 2002, according to a BBC report, Karzai announced plans to hold talks with Pakistan and Turkmenistan on a $2 billion gas pipeline from Turkmenistan to India. A deal was quietly signed in early January 2003, with no international press fanfare.

No sooner had Washington installed Karzai in Kabul than Bush and Cheney began beating the drums of war against Saddam Hussein, Washington’s new Adolf Hitler, replacing Slobodan Milosevic in the gallery of evil tyrants. Washington set out to apply the Bush doctrine, regardless of whether the UN Security Council agreed. And they didn’t.3

‘YOU’VE GOT TO GO WHERE THE OIL IS’

Washington prepared its military attack on Baghdad in 2002 without UN Security Council backing, in violation of the UN Charter and without the support of most of its major allies, apart from Britain’s Blair, Portugal and Spain, Poland and a few others. Russia, China, France and even Germany openly opposed the U.S. decision to go to war with Iraq. Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov issued an offi cial statement that Moscow was opposed to any U.S. military operation against Iraq. Russia’s Lukoil and two Russian government companies had a 23-year contract to develop Iraq’s West Qurna oilfi eld. China also was against war. Its China National Petroleum Company held a potentially huge oil contract in western Iraq. France too held rights to exploit Iraqi oil under the Saddam regime. All three powers knew that a unilateral U.S. war could end their Iraqi oil dreams for good.

China by then was well on its way to replace Japan as the world’s second largest oil importer after the United States. Within ten years, at present growth rates, it would easily become the world’s largest consumer of oil, almost all imported. It had not been able to fi nd enough domestic oil. China knew its very future as an economic power depended on securing its oil. Now the most promising sources were about to be fi rmly put under American military control. In Beijing, the message was clear and very alarming.

As the countdown for Bush’s Iraq war proceeded, despite pleas from the world community, the large unanswered question for much of the world was, Why? Why would the United States risk its entire standing as a force for peace and stability, its so-called ‘soft power’? Why would it risk creating instability in the entire oil-producing world, perhaps even triggering a new oil price shock and a global economic depression, in order to strike Iraq? The offi cial Washington answer was that Saddam Hussein had an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction and that he had ties to Al Qaida terrorists. Was that suffi cient to explain the clear obsession of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and others in Washington for a new Iraq war? Many were not convinced. Their skepticism was confi rmed, but only after 130,000 American troops had been fi rmly entrenched in Iraq.

The military phase of the attack on Iraq, Operation Shock and Awe, was predictably over within weeks. It was no contest. Fighting was offi cially declared over in May 2003. There had been only token resistance, and no Iraqi use of dreaded weapons. Perhaps never in history had such a small land been hit with such devastating force and destruction. CNN and Rupert Murdoch’s Fox Network made sure the message was seen around the world in graphic clarity. America was not to be treated lightly. The clear message was that the United States meant what George Bush had said, ‘You are either with us or you are against us.’

Washington had insisted repeatedly that the justifi cation for going to war had been to remove the imminent threat to the United States of Iraq’s alleged arsenal of chemical, biological and even nuclear weapons. When UN inspectors found no weapons, they shifted, arguing that the real reason was that Saddam Hussein had forged an alliance with Osama bin Laden and the elusive Al Qaida terror group. Later, the argument was fl oated that it was desirable to replace a dictator with a democratic regime. After the war, Bush made the democracy theme the ‘forward strategy of freedom’ for U.S. policy in the Middle East. Ominously, buried in his January 2004 State of the Union address, Bush called for a doubling of the budget for the National Endowment for Democracy in order to develop ‘free elections, free markets, free press and free labor unions in the Middle East.’ Just as in Yugoslavia and across eastern Europe, Washington clearly planned to soften up the existing regimes for a change. The implications were enormous.

Once U.S. troops held control of the country, the weapons and terrorism arguments for war fell away, one-by-one. Tony Blair was exposed as having staked his political future on a fraudulent case. At times it appeared that his Washington allies had set Blair up to be a fall guy. Soon after U.S. occupation of Baghdad and Iraq’s oilfi elds, various Washington offi cials began to admit that the reasons had not been what they had said.

The most brazen was Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, author of the 1992 white paper calling for preemptive wars, coauthor of the September 2000 Project for the New American Century report and leading war hawk. In June 2003, less than a month after Bush officially declared an end to the fight for Iraq, Wolfowitz told delegates to a Singapore security conference, ‘Let’s look at it simply. The most important difference between North Korea and Iraq is that economically, we just had no choice in Iraq. The country swims on a sea of oil.’ The fact that North Korea had admitted developing nuclear warheads and missiles was apparently of little concern to Wolfowitz and others in the Pentagon. Iraq was their goal.

By the end of December 2003, Washington had quietly removed a 400-man U.S.-led task force that had spent months searching for any clue of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. They had come up with nothing. By January 2004, Colin Powell was forced to admit that the United States had no proof of Iraq–Al Qaida links, feebly insisting that the ‘possibility’ of such links had existed and that that was enough. Powell argued that Bush went to war because ‘he believed that the region was in danger, America was in danger.’ A respected Washington think tank, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, accused the administration of ‘systematically misrepresenting’ the danger of the alleged Iraqi weapons. The Powell comments left many wondering why Washington had risked so much on no fi rm evidence of imminent danger.

The Pentagon was in control of postwar reconstruction, not the State Department as would have been normal. The Pentagon’s Wolfowitz made clear that only the administration’s good friends would get lucrative contracts for the Iraqi oil industry. Cheney’s Halliburton Corp. was at the top of the list, along with Bechtel and U.S. and British oil companies. Adding insult to injury, Washington then asked its allies in Europe, Russia and elsewhere to forgive their old debts to Iraq. As Washington had almost none, it stood to gain. It also asked foreign troops to take the burden, while refusing to allow UN control of peacekeeping. All in all, Washington’s attitude