Gideon Rachman, chief foreign affairs columnist for the Financial Times, makes an admirable, if not entirely successful, foray into the realm of truth-telling in today's column:
With the oil price heading upwards and President George W. Bush heading for Saudi Arabia, as part of a Middle Eastern tour, it is time to accept the truth. The pursuit of oil is fundamental to US foreign policy.
The importance of oil to American foreign policy is both obvious and curiously difficult to acknowledge in public. In the run-up to the Iraq war it was left to the left to make the argument that this was a “war for oil”. Establishment people – those in the know – rolled their eyes at this “conspiracy theory”.
... It is common to say that the Gulf is a “vital strategic area”. “Strategic” is shorthand for saying that it is home to two-thirds of the world’s known oil reserves.
Unfortunately, when it comes to the crunch, Rachman bottles it. Writes he:
It is unfair to mock. The Iraq war was about lots of things: WMD, remaking the Middle East, democratisation, human rights, Israel, terrorism, the desire for a massive demonstration of American power. But oil was certainly among the motives.
We know, of course, how far WMD matters to the Bushites. Enough for their own troops to use chemical weapons against Iraqis, to use WMD as a convenient pretext for war, to use it to ensure the "facts were fixed around the policy", determined well in advance, of war on Iraq. The extent to which democratisation has been a key goal is evidenced rather starkly by recent US policy in Gaza. The war can plausibly be said to have been about terrorism insofar as it was predicted to increase the threat of terror, and has now done so. A brief tour around the relevant pages of the mainstream human rights monitors, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and B'Tselem (the Israeli centre for human rights in the occupied territories) - or a look at Norman Finkelstein's own brilliant, painstaking trawl through these sources - should be sufficient to demonstrate why "human rights" followed by "Israel" (the recipient of billions of dollars in military aid from the US annually) as putative motives for invasion strain credibility just a little bit.
As Rachman's column does help demonstrate, however, one can often read things in the business press that wouldn't make it into the more popular press. Even here, though, such is the state of the mainstream media that you often can't get away with stating the bleedin' obvious without sugaring the pill with propaganda. Which is a shame for us readers - and catastrophic for Iraq.
