At a time when Iraqis are dying by the dozens every day from terrorist attacks and U.S. and British troops continue to fight multi-faceted guerrilla attacks from various quarters, the British newspaper, The Observer, has published an important story in its Sunday, February 25th. It concerns the pressure being put on Iraq's government to enact legislation which will give transnational oil companies the “right” through “exploration contracts” to exploit Iraq's oil, the second largest reserves of all on earth, for the next 30 years, while retaining the façade that the oil is still publicly owned.
The Observer received a leaked draft of the new law which, if it is passed, will do exactly that. In Britain, antiwar activists and dissident members of the Labour Party have denounced these maneuvers by the Blair government and British oil companies. (One would be surprised if the Bush administration and Texas-based U.S. oil companies are not similarly involved.)
Ruth Tanner, with the British group War on Want, responded to the emerging Iraqi oil scandal with the following comments: “Iraq is under occupation and its people are facing relentless insecurity and crippling poverty. Yet with the support of our government, multinationals are poised to take control of Iraq's oil wealth.”
The role of Tony Blair's “New Labor” government in bringing this about was made public when Kim Howells, foreign office minister, in response to a question in parliament from Alan Simpson, an anti-war Labor member, on the issue said that British officials have participated in discussions “of Iraq's evolving hydrocarbons legislation where British international oil companies have valuable perspectives to offer based on their experience in other countries.”
Valuable perspectives based on their experience in other countries? Is this Monty Python talking or Margaret Thatcher?
One thinks immediately of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, which also had the “right” to exploit Iranian oil in exchange for royalties paid to the Iranian Government until the early 1950s. At that time, the company paid the government a tiny fraction of the oil's worth and kept all of the professional and managerial jobs in the oil industry reserved for Britons and Europeans. Meanwhile, Iran was a desperately poor country with a high level of illiteracy, infant mortality, and other conditions associated everywhere with destitution poverty.
When Mohammed Mossadegh, the last democratically elected secular Prime Minister of Iran, nationalized the oil, the CIA with British assistance created a political crisis and organized a coup against him in 1953, leading to the restoration of the Shah and the establishment of a brutal and ruthless dictatorship allied closely to the U.S. in cold war regional politics. Although anti-Communism was the official excuse for the coup Iranian oil was “re-divided “ among British, U.S. and Dutch firms in what was almost a text-book example of Lenin's conception of imperialism as the division and re-division of the world's resources by imperialist states representing the interests of monopoly capitalists.
The seeds for 1978 popular revolution against the Shah, led and eventually betrayed by sections of the Islamic clergy, were planted in those events, that is the U.S. and Britain's overthrow of a government oriented toward liberal democracy (the kind of government it claims to support in Iraq) in order to protect “international oil companies” from that government's attempt to use Iranian oil to benefit the Iranian people.
Today, the Iraqi Communist Party and the Iraqi Labor movement actively oppose any law which will turn over Iraqi oil to foreign corporations. According to the Observer article, Jumah Awwad al-Asadi, leader of the oil workers union formed following the ouster of the Ba'ath regime in 2003 is quoted as saying “history will not forgive those who play recklessly with the wealth and destiny of a people.”
Al-Asadi is right. History has a way of exacting its (or rather the people's) revenge on exploiters and oppressors, often in ways that the exploiters and oppressors never imagine at the time. Labor MP Alan Simpson is also right when he, according to the Observer article, states that “this confirms the view of those who have said all along that the war in Iraq was not about weapons of mass destruction, but the control of the levers of mass production….this is a cartel carve-up by the occupying powers.” That is exactly what happened through the Shah's government in Iran after the 1953 coup, and that is exactly what the Blair and Bush governments along with the transnational oil companies are pressuring Iraq to do today.
History doesn't have to repeat itself in this grotesque way. In Britain, there is vocal opposition to these developments by opponents of the Blair government within the Labour Party and within Parliament and by groups fighting global exploitation and poverty.
The peace movement should continue to be involved in what remains, along with militarization and environmental destruction, the most salient international issue, namely the deepening poverty and the ensuing human misery that monopoly capitalism is creating as it seeks to organize the whole world around the interests of transnational corporations, their owners and investors.
In the U.S. before the invasion of Iraq, the slogan “No War for Oil” was used widely. The occupation has not ended the validity of that slogan. Now, in solidarity with Iraqi labor and the Iraqi people we must fight to insure that those who did invade Iraq to control and profit from its oil reserves are not rewarded with a law and a policy that will enable them to do exactly that.
