Sullivan today quotes "his old friend" Jim Holt:
Iraq has 115 billion barrels of known oil reserves. That is more than five times the total in the United States. And, because of its long isolation, it is the least explored of the world’s oil-rich nations. A mere two thousand wells have been drilled across the entire country; in Texas alone there are a million. It has been estimated, by the Council on Foreign Relations, that Iraq may have a further 220 billion barrels of undiscovered oil; another study puts the figure at 300 billion. If these estimates are anywhere close to the mark, US forces are now sitting on one quarter of the world’s oil resources. The value of Iraqi oil, largely light crude with low production costs, would be of the order of $30 trillion at today’s prices. For purposes of comparison, the projected total cost of the US invasion/occupation is around $1 trillion.
Who will get Iraq’s oil? One of the Bush administration’s ‘benchmarks’ for the Iraqi government is the passage of a law to distribute oil revenues. The draft law that the US has written for the Iraqi congress would cede nearly all the oil to Western companies. The Iraq National Oil Company would retain control of 17 of Iraq’s 80 existing oilfields, leaving the rest – including all yet to be discovered oil – under foreign corporate control for 30 years.
And so when we keep asking the Bush administration for an exit strategy, we are, in fact, asking the wrong question. There is no exit strategy. The point is staying there for ever in order to ensure that energy supplies are secured by the West. Jim goes on:
How will the US maintain hegemony over Iraqi oil? By establishing permanent military bases in Iraq.
Five self-sufficient ‘super-bases’ are in various stages of completion. All are well away from the urban areas where most casualties have occurred… But will the US be able to maintain an indefinite military presence in Iraq? It will plausibly claim a rationale to stay there for as long as civil conflict simmers, or until every groupuscule that conveniently brands itself as ‘al-Qaida’ is exterminated. The civil war may gradually lose intensity as Shias, Sunnis and Kurds withdraw into separate enclaves, reducing the surface area for sectarian friction, and as warlords consolidate local authority. De facto partition will be the result. But this partition can never become de jure.
Wow. He sounds just like that crazy leftist Chomskyite guy Greg Palast. But not to worry. At the end of the post Sullivan says, "Was this a plot from the beginning? I doubt it. But it is an obvious game-plan now." He doubts it?! How typically Sullivan, and how typical of "so-called" moderate opinion in America. They figure out years too late what is really going on and don’t see how they have fundamentally misread the situation from the beginning. I say "so-called" because to have been a moderate since 2000 means to have been an enabler of this bloody criminality.
I guess it’s better late than never to recognize your mistakes, but does Sullivan really still believe that this was not the plot from the beginning? Does he believe that there was ever a plan to leave? Does he still really believe that we went over there for all the noble reasons that moved him to support the war? Does he think American engineers of the Iraq invasison are now saying to themselves–"Well now that things have gone so bad politically over there, let’s make the best of a bad situation and appropriate 25% of the world’s oil supply. Golly, why didn’t we think of that before? All our ideals about freedom and democracy and our obsession with capturing bin Laden must have blinded us to the opportunity."
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