Preview
IT’S THE CRUDE, DUDE:
WAR, BIG OIL, AND THE FIGHT FOR THE PLANET
Linda McQuaig
Thursday, November 18
Telus Convention Centre
Remember the fall of 2002 and the winter of 2003? You know, when George W. Bush led his merry dance through a long list of reasons to invade Iraq even before Hans Blix and his weapons inspectors had completed their work. Through the whole shocking exercise, everyone knew, and still knows, that what made Iraq special was that this particular non-Weapons of Mass Destruction-concealing, non-bin Laden-supporting dictatorship (on a planet pustulating with dictators) was the one afloat on an ocean of oil. Cheaply exploitable oil. Close-to-pipelines-and-tanker-ports oil. The kind of oil there’s less and less of.
Perhaps Linda McQuaig was responding to this surreal combination of utter obviousness and double-thinking denial over the past two years when she entitled her new book It’s the Crude, Dude: War, Big Oil, and the Fight for the Planet. A sense of ludicrousness joins with anger here, as if the title really just wants to shout, "Well, duh!"
For the first few pages of It’s the Crude, I found myself thinking, "Isn’t this all well known?" McQuaig quotes the likes of Seymour Hersh and Graydon Carter, writers I had already been clinging to like little life-preservers of sanity in an ocean of nuttiness and evil. So at first I thought the book was mainly pulling together material that would be familiar to interested readers.
But then I got to McQuaig’s second chapter, and the energy task force Dick Cheney convened in the spring of 2001. Using documents obtained by the American group Judicial Watch, McQuaig shows that before 9-11, U.S. Vice-President Cheney and friends had their eyes on Iraq not just for ideological reasons, but for commercial ones, too. Task force documents demonstrated that if Iraq’s oil industry were ever to resume peaceful operation after UN sanctions ended, U.S. companies would be out in the cold. Russia, China, France and others were all set to profit.
I asked McQuaig in a telephone interview, as she set out for a full day of interviews and readings in Montreal, whether I was drawing the right conclusions here. Could the U.S. simply not afford a peaceful resumption of the Iraq oil industry?
"I think that was central to their concern," she says, "and that’s why that was a focus of the Cheney task force." She is struck by the vice-president’s urgent need to sort out "this list of all the big oil companies around the world and the status of their negotiations with Saddam for his key oil fields." The problem, she says, "is that U.S. companies weren’t involved." The clear and present danger was that the world’s last "low-hanging fruit," oil-wise, "was about to disappear into the hands of their competitors."
For this reason, among others presented in the book, I’m more ready than ever to believe that for U.S. leaders the oil motive outweighed the liberation motive. Still, the word oil is never mentioned in connection with the invasion. Reporters focus on other issues. Why, I asked McQuaig, does this continue when it’s such an obvious case of "the elephant in the room?"
As McQuaig points out, admitting the oil motive "changes the nature of the war completely. They wanted to present it as a war of self-defence, but I think if it’s a war to get control of oil then it’s a war of aggression." That, she says, won’t fly with Americans, who believe "their government does good in the world; it’s a force for progress, a force for democracy and liberty. That’s just so basic to the American psyche. So to say it’s a war about stealing the resources of another country… I don’t think people would have bought that."
McQuaig paints a picture of leaders who admit their own motivations in private, but realize they must protect their people from the harsh truth. Or in other words, a war for oil "would have been a very hard war to sell."
Now that they’re there, how soon will the U.S. leave Iraq? Not soon, thinks McQuaig, pointing to the U.S. refusal to support a Saudi-proposed Arab peacekeeping force. "The Americans rejected that, even though you’d think that would be great, it would get them off the hook. The stalling point was that the Arabs insisted on reporting to the UN, not the U.S. The Americans wouldn’t accept that because they want control." Control of oil, and not just access to it, is key. "I think the simple truth is not that they particularly want to be there, but they want to have in place a government that is pro-western, specifically pro-U.S., and I don’t think there’s any evidence that they’re willing to give up unless they have that." So we’re left with a war that, in the long run, looks like liberating Big Oil to pump cheap fuel into globally-warming SUVs, and four more years of oilmen and women (Condi Rice served on Chevron’s board) in the White House. But dude, don’t mention the "o" word.
McQuaig speaks in Calgary on Thursday, November 18 at 7:30 p.m. at the Telus Convention Centre. For more information, go to www.ualberta.ca/parkland. |
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