Bloody Oil

So, in one sense it is not news. Ask anyone why the West gets involved in overseas wars and the answer nine times out of ten is "oil". The public know this, and somehow cynically accept it, bemoaning the fact, but often simultaneously setting it to one side, perhaps in the hope that, while it is necessary for the sake of our current carbon fuel-dependent societies, it can't really be that bad. Can it?

Well, yes it is, and worse. We heard earlier this year, Tony Blair's sanctimonious defence of his toadying up to George Bush over the bloody war in Iraq, shifting from his original claims about weapons of mass destruction to defending the objective of regime change, allegedly because this would be good for the Iraqi people. The tens of thousands of deaths, the millions of refugees and the immense damage to infrastructure caused by his activities were all apparently worth it on these grounds.

And this week, we have found out for certain just exactly who all this mayhem was for.

The "Independent" newspaper in the UK published a series of emails showing how in the months up to the Iraq invasion - when Blair was publically insisting that war might still be avoided - BP and other oil companies were busy petitioning the UK Government for a slice of the anticipated post-war bonanza. They even went so far as to claim that if the Iraqi oil fields were privatised (rather than kept in the hands of the new supposedly democratic government to hel rebuild the country) this would represent an apparent reward for the UK's support of the American invasion.

So now we know, our troops were there to kill and be killed so that, in return, BP, a big multinational company with a deeply tarnished history of involvement in killings and corruption in the Middle East, could get a reward.

And it duly has. Unreported, unfocused on by the complicit western media, the Iraqi state was dismantled following the war. Its assets were sold off to foreign companies and individuals - many of them Israelis - and among these BP benefited with good deals on acquiring huge stakes in large tracts of the rich Iraqi oilfields. Even where they don't own the fields, the oil companies make a killing, extracting oil at less than $1.15 per barrel and selling them on at over one hundred times (or, put another way, 10,000%) that cost. They were by no means the only oil company involved, and the American government was even more generous to its friends, such as Halliburton and Blackwater, in doling out Iraqi money, largely unaudited and unaccounted for. But Blair's sickening insistence that he acted out of pure motives and a desire to do the right thing finally stand exposed as nothing more than a squalid deal with big corporations - both of the oil and non-oil varieties.

And what of now, in Libya? Again and again in recent weeks, the Gaddafi regime has been portrayed as somehow uniquely brutal among Middle Eastern despots and so deserving of unique treatment by the West. Even although Gaddafi's government has now offered an internationally monitored ceasefire and elections for the leadership of the country run by the UN, the mysterious coalition of rebels continue to receive unqualified western aid in spite of rejecting the offer. We are indefinitely underwriting a bloody war with allies of dubious provenance even although the other side have accepted more than the original demands of the United Nations.

Why? It could be for oil - but with just 2% of the world's reserves, while rich, Libya does not represent to carbon cornucopia that Iraq offered. And BP was already well-ensconced with the Gaddafi regime, so regime change could potentially disturb rather than assist their exploitation of the country's richest natural resource (although, of course, any Middle Eastern war is handy for oil companies in facilitating a rise in prices at the pumps - entirely unnecessary and unjustifiable, but easily sold to an unsuspecting public).

Libya offers other delights for western companies, however, just as Iraq did but other states like Bahrain and Egypt did not. Both Saddam and Gaddafi, for all their brutal faults, came from socialist backgrounds. Acquiring power was not purely about self-aggrandisement, though both men clearly revelled in it. It was also about using the state for the benefit of the citizens, however totalitarian in their control of their citizens they sought to be. Consequently, both Iraq and Libya under their respective tyrants had large public sectors and enjoyed some of the best education, health and welfare systems in the world - all free of charge. And, of course, all hanging like ripe fruit to fall into the bags of privatising privateers when the American juggernaut crashed into town.

Under the neoliberal philosophy that continues to inform American and British foreign policy, "freedom" is not at the end of the day expressed via the ballot box or by the mass of citizens. When they talk of freedom, it is in  fact about free markets - about private enterprise and the supposed freedom to buy and sell, accumulate, speculate and profit. Hence, under this philosophy, oil as a bounty for blood is more than acceptable - indeed, it is necessary, it is the whole purpose of the exercise. And not just oil - just as whole segments of Iraqi public services have been auctioned off to western-owned interests, so Libya now holds the same tempting prospect.

It is for this reason that so much of the opposition to the West in the Arab world stems from a religious starting point. Although castigated in the West as wild-eyed bearded ones lusting for blood and vengeance for ancient slight, groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Hizbollah in the Lebanon are widely supported by their people because they are grounded in ethics and principles diametrically opposed to the corrupt regimes such as Mubarak's sponsored and sustained by the West (the USA for example, paid for Mubarak's brutal security services for most of his rule).

Old Friends - The British Queen & The Blood-soaked Emir of Bahrain

It is also why the West is so deeply distrusted in the Arab world - every time Arab people have agitated for freedom, they have been opposed by dictators whose strings have been pulled very firmly either by western governments or by western oil companies or, more often than not, by both. The brutal regime in Bahrain is probably the epitome of this, but in the West, it is exempted from the fate of the Libyan regime. Bahrain is sanitized by the approval of its regime by the British monarchy and the repeated visits by members of the Royal Family (who invited the ruler of Bahrain to kate and William's Big Day just hours after the massacre of 45 protesters on the streets of his capital city), - and besides, we already own everything there anyway; there is nothing left to sell.

But in Benghazi...never mind the crosshairs; its dollars that are in western sights.

Butcher Blair - Keep His Bloody Hands off Iran

Facing his questioners at the Chilcot Inquiry into the Iraq invasion earlier today, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair deftly deflected the line of investigation from his support for President Bush' bloody and illegal attack to make a call for the West to take on Iran in a new military adventure (click here for video in immediately previous post).

Ignoring the fact that, even as he spoke, Iran was opening discussions in Istanbul with a range of countries to seek a resolution of the nuclear issue, Blair said the time had now come to "get our heads out of the sand" and take action against Iran.

"I say this with all the passion I possibly can," insisted former "straight kind of guy" and now multi-millionaire Blair, bizarrely now a Peace Envoy for the Middle East, as he went on to claim that Iran's malign influence is everywhere. This from the man who used to claim that Saddam was supposedly capable of striking almost anywhere with his non-existant weapons of mass destruction. He opined yesterday, "The fact is they (Iran) are doing it because they disagree fundamentally with our way of life and they'll carry on doing it unless they are met by the requisite determination and, if necessary, force."

His lies are breathtaking. Totally discredited over his misleading of the British Parliament over weapons of mass destruction, here he now is smugly proclaiming a new crusade before sanctimoniously expressing his dry-eyed regret for the deaths caused by his last war.

Iran's current Government has a troubled record - but mostly within its own borders. To portray it as some sort of international pariah is to mistake or misrepresent the rhetoric of some of its political leaders for actual acts. Iran has no links to al-Qaeda - quite the contrary: its last President rounded up hundreds of al-Qaeda suspects after 9/11; Iran was instrumental in persuading the Northern Alliance to ally with the USA in its invasion of Afghanistan; Iran tracked down and arrested Bin Laden's son and offered him up to the Americans in 2002 - only to be rebuffed by George Bush and then denounced as part of the utterly fictitious "Axis of Evil". Even just three weeks ago, Iranian authorities arrested seven of Bin Laden's associates - a fact largely unreported in the West.

Blair is a man ignorant of the past and Britain and Iran's historical relationship - intertwined in many ways, with much in common, but also much confused and damaged by British economic imperialism and military interference, including the subversion of the Iranian democracy of 1953. He remains as ignorant of the present, callously using the prejudices of the rightwing media to try to deflect criticism of his blood-soaked intervention in the Fertile Crescent in 2003.

Iran is surrounded by nuclear weapon states - Pakistan, India, Russia, Israel (which, as revealed by the badly persecuted Vanunu Mordechai, has long had an nuclear arsenal of as many as 200 warheads) and the American forces in the Gulf and Mediterranean. By the warped logic of nuclear deterrence theory, the Tehran Government would be crazy not to seek a nuclear arsenal of its own to deter these states, none of which have shown any particular benevolence previously. If the world wants real reassurance that Iran will not develop these awful weapons, it would do well to seek international disarmament, rather than somehow expect it to remain non-nuclear and trust in its neighbours' previously unproven goodwill.

The outcome of the Chilcott Inquiry will be a report on "the lessons to be learned" from the Iraq war and the actions of Blair and his cohorts. It is frankly rather unlikely to have him arrested and carted off to The Hague to face arraignment as a war criminal for his past acts of aggression. But it could at least make clear that, as he pleads some special insight in spite of his ill-informed, prejudiced take on the world, no one shares his analysis, no one cares or believes what he thinks and, perhaps what would hopefully sting this would-be latter-day Caesar the most, no one is listening any more.

Iran's nuclear noose - its' neighbours India, Pakistan, Russia and Israel are armed with nuclear weapons, while US & UK forces based nearby in Afghanistan, the Persian Gulf, Iraq and Cyprus have ready access to atomic arsenals.

Lest We Forget Lithium - or why we will never leave Afghanistan

I'm fed up to the ears with old men dreaming up wars for young men to die in.

~George McGovern, US Democrat Presidential candidate, 1972

Today, Remembrance Day, we commemorate the dead of the wars since 1914 - the hundred and twenty million souls, military and civilian, lost in conflict on the most massive scale in human history. And this year as for the last nine, we have to remember the dead of wars Britain is currently engaged in support of its American ally. Iraq may be over, but in the mountains of the Hindu Kush, the Afghan war continues unabated as it has ever since the US-led invasion of October 2001.

"Old men make wars, and
young men fight them."

Barely four weeks after the attack on the Twin Towers, with the participation of Britain and Australia, American forces invaded Afghanistan and joined with the Northern Alliance rebels. In a lightning campaign, they overthrew the fundamentalist Muslim Taliban government which had hosted the al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden and his closest acolytes. Elections were held and the pro-western Hamid Karzai was duly installed as President. It was proclaimed that this war-torn country, at odds with first the Soviets and then with itself for over twenty years, would finally have some peace and time to repair its shattered lands.

The war was originally justified as necessary retribution for 9/11 and the incredible speed of the invasion reflected American anxieties that their high level of international support in the wake of the Twin Towers atrocity might evaporate in the event of any delay. Unlike the Iraq war, where oil was to be seen as a determining factor in the desire to invade, Afghanistan had no apparent cornucopia of raw material wealth to make an invasion a profitable option. Rather, this was a war to protect the world from terrorism, to extend democracy and, in a unique burst of right-wing altruism, to improve the position of women in a society where it had been a serious crime for a woman to emerge from the home in anything other than an all-encompassing burka.

Now, nearly a decade on, what is Afghanistan's position?

Taking to the hills in late 2001, the Taliban licked its wounds and then resumed the conflict. As the Karzai regime became more and more corrupt, blatantly stealing the Presidential election of 2009 with the approval of the Americans and British, the fundamentalists support grew again. In the conflict, over 1,200 American, 342 British and nearly 500 Canadians, French, Germans and other allied soldiers have died as well as thousands of Afghan soldiers. Largely uncounted, so too have thousands of ordinary Afghan and Pakistani civilians  perished, often caught in the crossfire or the victims of indiscriminate bombing attacks by US "drones" - robot planes piloted from the safety of a computer screen back in the United States, firing at targets on relayed satellite picture screens. The toll of dead civilians, and children especially, has been dreadful, turning more and more Afghans against the occupying forces and the government in Kabul.

As for the Americans, British and their allies, billions of dollars and pounds have been poured into a conflict in a land that has swallowed whole armies since the days of Alexander the Great. Remote and mountainous, with bitter winters and scorching summers, squaddies from Huddersfield and Glasgow and marines from Iowa have trudged across a landscape often almost as alien and inhospitable as the surface of Mars on ceaseless patrols. There, they have died under assault from snipers, guerrillas and the dreadful IED - "improvised explosive devices" - set at roadsides to destroy even well-armoured vehicles. Yet just this week, a senior British commander has warned the recent noises of optimism are misplaced and the war is as intractable as ever.

342 British soldiers have died.

So why do we continue? There is much talk of an eventual exit strategy, of handing over to the Afghan army, but  beyond vague hopes for certain conditions being met by 2014, there is no timetable. Nor will there be.

American and Britain will never leave Afghanistan unless they do so in defeat. As victory is even more unlikely, what it means is that the war will go on, but it will not continue in order to secure human rights and democracy. Rather it will continue in order to secure lithium.

Lithium is a rare white metal, the seventh (out of 32) most scarce of the chemical elements. Suitably processed, it has a wide range of applications in western society, including in medicine, but its most valuable potential is its use in electrical batteries. It is over 30% more efficient than lead acid and double as effective as zinc carbon. Currently used in the likes of laptop batteries, it will be a key resource in the years ahead as, with the world now passing peak oil production, electrical power in transport especially becomes more and more important. Electrically powered vehicles will become exponentially more practical over the next few years and the world's billion vehicles will begin a rapid transition towards battery power. Lithium will become increasingly valuable .

By an allegedly amazing coincidence, Afghanistan has suddenly been declared to be awash with valuable minerals, including huge lithium deposits - $1 trillion worth at current prices. In June the Pentagon identified Afghanistan as the "Saudi Arabia" of lithium, rivalling Bolivia as the world's largest reserve. The only problem is that much of it lies in Ghazni province, which remains largely in Taliban hands. It is perhaps more than coincidence then that, concurrent with the report, the Karzai government stepped up its contacts with the rebel movement to seek an armistice and peace talks - so far with little success.

So Afghanistan is as much an Energy War as Iraq ever was - simply about a different form of fuel. The long term strategic interests of the West come into sharp focus when George Bush's warning that the War against Terror will last for 40 or 50years. In this context, the long, slow retreat by the USA from Saudi and redeployment to Kabul takes on a very different and sinister hue to the noble war for freedom portrayed so resolutely and repeatedly by the Presidents and Premiers.

Britain invaded Afghanistan twice
in the 19th century

As we remember those who have fallen, we may also contemplate those who are yet to be cut down in their prime - the 18 and 19 year olds, fresh from school, put up against a land that held back Britain's forces a century ago and  broke the Soviet army (and arguably the entire Soviet Bloc) during the 1980s. Now, without an unforeseeable major change of policy, our forces are set to stay in one guise or role or another, dying indefinitely on the distant Bactrian battlegrounds while politicians and corporations sate their thirst for new sources of energy and money.

Caught in the midst as ever too are the Afghan people, some fighters, but most innocent, desperate victims who eke out a pitiful living at the best of times. In a just world, lithium could offer them the lifeline to a more prosperous and peaceful existence than they dare dream of for now. But just as British soldiers are set to continue to be betrayed, their bravery and bodies tossed nonchalantly by hand wringing double dealers into the cauldron of conflict, so the prospect of the Afghans' natural resources being used to the benefit of their own land seems somehow very distant still.

As the drones circle, ready to spit their latest molten arrows of death into the helpless, nameless people scattering on the ground below, we do well to recall the words of the British Opposition Leader, William Ewart Gladstone, when he railed against the second British invasion of Afghanistan in 1878:

“Remember the rights of the (Afghan)…Remember that the happiness of his humble home, remember that the sanctity of life in the hill villages of Afghanistan, among the winter snows, is as inviolable in the eye of Almighty God, as can be your own.”



JUST A DAY AT THE OFFICE : SEE HOW AMERICA CONDUCTS WAR FROM THE SAFETY AND COMFORT OF A BASE 9,000 MILES FROM THE CONFLICT ZONE

CAUTION - CONTAINS DISTURBING IMAGES

Why Do They Hate Us So Much?

The ghost book of the year is published today. "Decision Points" (allegedly) by George W Bush recounts the Texan Cowboy's eight year stint at the Whitehouse and to perhaps no one's surprise is his disclosure that he actively planned for attacks on Iran. Ultimately, these came to nothing - Bush's finger was itching on the trigger for months, but even he had to stand down when in 2008 the CIA declared that there was no evidence of a current Iranian nuclear weapons programme. His successor, Barak Obama, has however repeatedly refused to rule out a military assault on Iran and the nuclear issue refuses to go away.

Bush: linked Iran and Iraq to 9/11 with
 no evidence at all

Bush's closest (maybe only) ally, the then British PM Tony Blair had similarly wielded the figurative cudgel at Iran. Blair reportedly bleated to journalist, Jon Snow, in reference to Iran, "Why do they hate us so much?" Snow in response suggested, "Perhaps because of Mossadeq..." to the blank stare of the hapless Premier. Now while most westerners would undoubtedly have shared Blair's bafflement, the would-be war leader's ignorance of Mossadeq is in fact quite inexcusable, though it is also certainly a penetrating insight into the shallow understanding of Iran among politicians in the West.

Iran was once the superpower of the world, the Persian Empire, creating many innovations, including the first postal service. Although remaining a significant realm for much of its history, by the 19th century, it was hard pressed by the two global players of the age, Russia and Britain, who saw Iran as an objective in their "Great Game" of colonial ambition. The Qajar dynasty of Shahs (kings) tried to modernise in response, reforming Iran's education and finance systems. The Majlis, an elected parliament, was established and began to assert a degree of control over the Shah's government.

A recommended history
of ancient Persia

However, Iran's blessing and curse was the discovery of massive oil fields by a British prospector, in Khuzestan in the south-west in 1901. When British dreadnought battleships converted from coal to oil for their fuel, Iran was cajoled into major concessions to the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (which would later become BP). For a tiny annual fee, the country's entire oil reserves were handed over to the British, a state of affairs that would continue, with the Americans joining in, for over 75 years. And just to be sure, in 1921, with British support, a junior army officer, Reza Pahlavi, seized the throne, guaranteeing continued hegemony for the UK.

By the 1940s, however, Reza's ineffectual son, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, was struggling to stem calls for democracy. In 1944, elections were held which saw success for democratic nationalists. Prominent among these was Mohammed Mossadeq, a 70 year old reformist from a patrician background elected on a ticket of nationalising the oil industry. By 1951, he was Prime Minister.

Western "democracy" - tanks
correct the election result,
Tehran 1953

Prompted by alarmed British Premier Winston Churchill, the USA actively undermined Mossadeq, who continued to plan to sequester BP's assets in his country. In 1953, the CIA and MI6 sponsored a military coup d'etat which deposed Mossadeq and placed him under house arrest for the remaining 14 years of his life. The Shah's powers were reinstated, the Majlis downgraded and the Iranian secret police, SAVAK, instituted a regime of torture and suppression of anyone suspected of the vaguest opposition to Pahlavi. While the Shah and his Queen courted the western mass media with a film-star like existence, Iranian democracy was savagely crushed. The only outlet for expression became the mosques, where even many religious leaders were harassed or driven into exile - including a cleric from the city of Qom, Ruyollah Khomeini.


Ex-Premier Mossadeq was tried and
confined for life after the coup

Over the next 25 years, the Shah's regime was slowly worn down until in early 1979 it collapsed and Ayatollah Khomeini returned from France to head a new regime. An initially pluralist revolution was quickly subverted by religious radicals and the leftist elements led by Bani-Sadr were suppressed. Yet even then Iran never quite became the monolithic Islamic dictatorship it is portrayed as in the West. The Majlis continued to be elected, although candidates are now vetted by the "Council of the Guardians of the Islamic Republic" as opposed to by the Shah. Women continued to have the vote and by the late 1990s reformists were gaining ground. Iran also played a generally supportive role towards the USA during the 1990-1 Gulf War crisis, even although the Americans' rush to defend Kuwait from Saddam Hussein contrasted sharply with their readiness to supply Iraq with arms for its long and bloody war of aggression against Iran from 1980-1988.

In 1997, President Khatami was elected on a platform of constitutional government and legal reform. Women's rights increased, with many in the cities undertaking the so-called "Lipstick Jihad" where they pushed dress code increasingly to a point of meaninglessness. The press and media became more and more plural, and some rapprochement with the USA was sought.

Following the 9/11 attacks on the US, the Iranians quickly condemned the event, with the government banning the revolutionary slogan "Death to America". In the streets, thousands of Iranians held candlelit vigils as a mark of respect for the American dead. Khatami sent envoys to the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan to persuade it to side with the US invasion and to accept democratic elections. The Iranians arrested and handed over scores of suspected al-Qaeda operatives to the USA and even offered to deport Osama Bin Laden's son, Saad, in 2003 - an offer that Bush rejected, to the bewilderment of the Iranians.

But all became clear shortly after when, in return for all their gestures and actions of goodwill to the USA, Bush rounded on Iran and declared it to be part of his spurious "Axis of Evil", allegedly in league with Iraq and, even more bizarrely, with North Korea. Without a shred of evidence to back his claims, Bush then trundled his tanks into Iraq, unleashing years of mayhem and over 100,000 deaths - a higher rate than anything seen under Saddam - and repeatedly menacing Iran,now just a short Humvee ride away for the huge American forces based out of Bagdhad.

Unsurprisingly, when Iranians next went to the polls, anti-American candidates performed well and the conservative President Ahmadinejad, renowned for his anti-corruption drives when he was mayor of Tehran, was elected. The gulf between the American government and Iran soon widened further. Although in 2009 the new US President Barak Obama initially offered talks, many analysts speculate that with his recent drubbing in the mid-term elections, the chances of him undertaking a military operation have grown. He has certainly left his options open following America's partial withdrawal from Iraq, possibly with Israel as his proxy.

It can only be hoped that Obama is dissuaded from such a dreadful, self-serving course. Iran is an ancient nation which does not respond positively to the posturings and threats of others. America and the West are living with the consequences of our own hypocrisy of calling for democracy as long as it gets the "right result". It is not the first time - as Spain in 1936, Chile in 1973 and Gaza in 2006 show clearly - and it may not be the last. They may or may not hate us, but it has certainly left our victims confused and sceptical about us. And in many cases bloodied and dead as well.

Does that answer your question, Mr Blair?

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