US Imperial Strategy in the Middle East

US in the Middle East

George W. Bush’s team entered office in January 2001 with the firm
intention of overthrowing the regime in Baghdad. Bush had expressed this
intention himself during his presidential campaign.
...
At the risk of annoying those who react to any explanation of U.S.
foreign policy in terms of economic interests, and oil interests in particular,
with cries of “reductionism”: the oil lobby has traditionally played a key role
in formulating U.S. foreign policy, at the very least since the Second World
War.[5]
...
Some administrations are more sensitive than others to oil company
influence, however. The administration of the younger Bush, whose presidential
campaign had all the oil and gas industry’s chief companies (including of course
ExxonMobil, BP Amoco, El Paso, and Chevron) among its main donors, is certainly
one of the most sensitive. Besides his own personal and family ties to the
industry, Bush appointed people with equally close or closer ties to it to key
posts in his administration, including Vice President Dick Cheney (Halliburton)
and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice (Chevron).
...
Indeed, if estimates of future demand are reasonably correct, the
Persian Gulf must expand oil production by almost 80 percent during 2000–2020,
achievable perhaps if foreign investment is allowed to participate and if Iran
and Iraq are free of sanctions.[10]
...
For the Bush administration, as in fact for U.S. capitalism as a
whole, the need to put an end to the embargo imposed on Iraq was becoming
urgent.
...
First, Saddam Hussein had to be overthrown and replaced by a
government under U.S. control. Without this “regime change” Washington would not
contemplate moving to lift the embargo. Paris and Moscow had been calling for
some time to lift the embargo on the Ba’athist regime, precisely because it was
in their interests and contrary to Washington’s.
Baghdad had granted its two privileged partners—historically France
and Russia—major oil concessions whose implementation depended on ending the
embargo. Given the magnitude of what was at stake in Iraq—the huge market for
rebuilding the country, devastated as it was by 20 years of war and embargo, in
addition to its gigantic oil resources—it was out of the question for
Washington, backed by London for identical reasons, to hand it all on a silver
platter to Paris and Moscow.
...
We know from investigative reports and interviews that some
members of Bush’s team wanted to seize the occasion immediately to go after
Iraq, although they knew full well—whatever they claimed—that Baghdad had
nothing to do with the men who had attacked the World Trade Center and Pentagon.
...
The invasion of Afghanistan was also a chance for the Bush
administration to carry out a project it had cherished since the final collapse
of the Soviet Union. But establishing a direct U.S. military presence in the
heart of ex-Soviet Central Asia had seemed even more improbable than a U.S.
occupation of Iraq.[14]A military presence in the heart of the Eurasian
continental mass joining Russia to China—two countries tempted to ally with each
other in order to resist U.S. hegemonic pressure more effectively,[15] or even
to ally with Iran as well—had evident geostrategic value. Besides, a U.S.
military presence in Central Asia and the Caspian basin (in Uzbekistan,
Kyrgyzstan, Georgia and so on) fit into its global and Middle Eastern strategy
of taking control of sources of oil, supplemented in this particular case by
natural gas.
...
Washington has definitely decided to make a huge effort in order to
rebuild an Iraqi state that would be its loyal vassal and capable of ensuring
neocolonial order under U.S. supervision and the protection of U.S. troops. This
perspective was even the sine qua non for invading the country and overthrowing
Saddam Hussein, as we have already explained. The Bush administration’s curt
attitude toward Paris in particular expressed its determination to exclude
France from any share in the booty. Washington knew that France has some major
trump cards in its rivalry with the United States: its long experience with the
Iraqi market and its standing among Arab peoples, which contrasts sharply with
the general hostility to the U.S.-British tandem.
...
The myth that Washington wants to endow Iraq with a democratic
government that would be a model for the whole region, the myth that the United
States is replaying in Iraq the tape of Germany and Japan’s post-1945
democratization, will not stand up for long to the test of events. In the two
big countries defeated in the Second World War, sizable capitalist classes with
ideological hegemony over their societies were ready to collaborate with the
U.S. occupier and rebuild their countries under its tutelage and with its
aid—all the more willingly because they lived in terror of the “communist”
threat. While allied with the United States, they were still capable of
governing on the basis of genuine electoral majorities.
...
So what remains of the prospects for “democracy” in the Middle
East? In fact the term “democracy” has increasingly given way in official U.S.
statements to the term “freedom,” the term that was used by the way to name the
invasion of Iraq: “Iraqi Freedom.” But what kind of “freedom” is this? George W.
Bush has not delayed passing on the good news to the peoples of the Middle East:
in a speech on May 9, 2003, he proposed to them “the establishment of a
U.S.–Middle East free trade area within a decade”![24]