By Matija Šerić
“You have to go where the oil is. I don’t think much about political instability,” said Dick Cheney at a meeting of Texas oilmen in 1998, while he was still CEO of Halliburton, the world’s largest oil infrastructure company. The American administration led by George W. Bush and Vice President Cheney, which governed the United States from 2001 to 2009, had a crystal-clear strategic mission: to establish control over the vast, mineral-rich Eurasian continent—by dividing Russia and China, building a chain of military bases stretching from the Middle East to Georgia, and by dominating oil pipelines across the entire Eurasian landmass.
Within the Pentagon, the military establishment called this plan “full-spectrum dominance”, referring to military control of land, sea, air, space, and even cyberspace. Iraq was at the very center of that strategy.
The Project for the New American Century
For months before the terrorist attacks in New York on September 11, 2001—which provided excellent justification for the invasion of Afghanistan and later of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq—Vice President Cheney had been contemplating how to go “where the oil is.” The main goal of the Bush administration was to implement the think tank plan known as the Project for the New American Century, which advocated regime change in Iraq through military means; Cheney was its most vocal supporter within the administration. On January 23, 2001, just three days after Bush’s inauguration, newly appointed Secretary of State Colin Powell was advised that it was in the U.S. national interest to overthrow Hussein. Few have forgotten Powell’s presentation before the UN Security Council, where he claimed to possess evidence that Saddam Hussein’s regime had weapons of mass destruction.
America Seeks to Control Oil Prices
The situation for Washington’s war hawks soon became critically tense, as it did for major U.S. and British oil companies. UN economic sanctions imposed on Iraq in 1990—after Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait—allowed the U.S. to keep tight control over Iraqi oil exports. That Iraqi invasion was itself influenced by American actions that helped create a situation in which Kuwait would be forced to grant the U.S. permanent military bases. The United States also sought to position itself strategically in Kuwait and Iraq in order to control rising global oil prices.
More than ten years after the First Gulf War, Cheney stated publicly that the sanctions regime was collapsing—undermined both by Hussein and by countries eager to secure a share of Iraq’s vast untapped oil wealth.
From Sanctions to Invasion
Facing mounting international pressure to lift sanctions, the U.S. realized that, once removed, Hussein would be free to strike oil deals with Russia, China, and France. In Cheney’s own admission—given after the invasion—preserving the sanctions system was the primary reason for launching the 2003 war. Just before the invasion, Cheney confirmed that Iraq possessed the world’s second-largest proven oil reserves after Saudi Arabia. Some experts even believed Iraqi reserves could exceed those of the Saudis. Moreover, Iraqi oil was exceptionally cheap to extract—less than one dollar per barrel.
Foreign Companies Gain Access to Iraq’s Oil
By the late 1990s, Saddam Hussein, facing financial collapse, granted exploration and extraction contracts to foreign oil giants. Russia’s Lukoil, France’s Total, and the China National Petroleum Corporation signed major agreements to develop Iraq’s most prolific oil fields. Lukoil secured West Qurna, Total obtained Majnoon, while the Chinese were given North Rumaila, near the Kuwaiti border.
Hussein as an Obstacle to Washington and London
It is no surprise that Russia, China, and France—the three UN Security Council members with significant oil deals in Iraq—demanded the easing of sanctions the U.S. strongly defended. Many other nations soon joined them, recognizing the futility and humanitarian consequences of the embargo. Since Iraq had nationalized its oil industry in 1972, American and British oil companies were legally barred from doing business there. That was the key reason Cheney and others sought Hussein’s removal. A post-sanctions Saddam, free to cooperate with Moscow, Beijing, and Paris, was a direct obstacle to Washington’s global and Middle Eastern strategy.
Reasons behind US invasion of Iraq
A Secret Plan Becomes Public
Five months before the Bush administration launched its almost unilateral invasion, The New York Times revealed in October 2002 that Halliburton had prepared a confidential 500-page document detailing how to manage Iraq’s post-invasion oil industry. This plan existed months before the war and before Halliburton officially received contracts to execute it.
Washington knew that once sanctions were lifted, Russia, China, and France would immediately gain access to Iraq’s vast oil regions. While sanctions enabled the U.S. and UK to obstruct those contracts, increasing global pressure to lift them led Washington to conclude that the strategic risk was too great. Thus, the narrative of a “war on terror” and “weapons of mass destruction” became the official justification.
Terrorism as a Pretext for Regime Change
“Regime change” became the political buzzword immediately after 9/11—even though Iraq had no connection to the attacks or to Osama bin Laden. Nevertheless, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other administration hawks sought to fabricate links between bin Laden and Hussein to justify aggression in the eyes of the American and global public.
Western Officials Admit the Truth
Weeks after the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz admitted that the war had nothing to do with terrorism—it was about oil. In a September 2003 interview with The Guardian, recently dismissed British Environment Minister Michael Meacher stated that Prime Minister Tony Blair supported the invasion due to pressure from British Petroleum, which sought control over oil fields in southern Iraq.
Thus, the 2003 U.S.–British invasion aimed to establish a permanent chain of U.S. military bases capable of controlling the entire oil-rich Persian Gulf—in Cheney’s words, the region “where the oil is.” In June 2003, Wolfowitz reiterated in Singapore: “The biggest difference between North Korea and Iraq was that, economically, in Iraq we had no choice. That country literally floats on oil.”
A Destroyed Iraq
During the 49-day invasion in spring 2003, 196 coalition soldiers and 30,000 Iraqi soldiers were killed. The U.S. remained in Iraq for eight years, and even returned afterward; by 2013 the toll was:
- 4,000 Americans killed,
- 30,000 wounded,
- over $1 trillion in costs,
- 7,269 Iraqi civilians killed during the initial war,
- hundreds of thousands more killed in the years that followed, including during the war against ISIS—some estimates even exceed one million dead.
By 2009, six years after the invasion, Iraqi oil production still had not reached pre-war levels. Neither Washington nor Western oil companies wanted to flood the market with cheap Iraqi oil, which would have lowered global prices that had surged after the invasion. Companies like Halliburton, Bechtel, and ExxonMobil—each linked to architects of Saddam’s overthrow—secured the most lucrative contracts, while others were explicitly told not to bother bidding.
Oil and Gas: The Drivers of U.S. Interventions
ExxonMobil and Chevron were among the loudest advocates of occupying Iraq and its oil fields. Their goal was to cut off and control Iraqi oil flow for years to come—a direct implementation of Cheney’s 1999 London speech, which stressed transferring oil control from Middle Eastern governments to private ownership, i.e., into the hands of American oil giants.
The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq cost U.S. taxpayers more than $1 trillion by 2010—and they were only the beginning of a series of undeclared geopolitical conflicts over oil and natural gas that continue in various forms to this day.
References:
https://www.monde-diplomatique.fr
https://www.britannica.com/event/Iraq-War
Dekanić, I.: Oil – Blessing or Curse, Golden Marketing–Technical Book, Zagreb, 2007.
Engdahl, F. W.: Myths, Lies and Oil Wars, Profil, Zagreb, 2012.
