Hitchens: "Iraqi auction disproves war-for-oil thesis"

[Orphia Nay]

IF the intervention in Iraq was indeed a war for oil, some of that war's more positive consequences were to be seen in Baghdad last week. The country's oil minister, Hussain al-Shahristani, presided over an auction at which development rights for seven major oil fields were awarded in competitive bidding among several international consortiums.
Three features of the outcome were worthy of note. The auction was to award service contracts rather than the production sharing agreements that the major corporations prefer.

The prices were set at less than half the $US4 ($4.50) per barrel that the bidders originally proposed. And corporations from the US were generally not the winners in an auction in which consortiums identified with Malaysia, Russia and even Angola did best. (ExxonMobil and Occidental Petroleum have, in previous negotiations, been awarded contacts in other Iraqi oilfields.)

Thus, the vulgar and hysterical part of the war-for-oil interpretation has been discredited: Iraq retains its autonomy, the share awarded to outsiders in development is far from exorbitant and there is no real correlation between US interests and the outcome. Except that we do have a genuine interest in the success of this endeavour as it unfolds.
[...]

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/new...r-for-oil-thesis/story-e6frg6zo-1225811867893

The main winners in the auction were:

Russia's Lukoil and Gazprom
Malaysia's Petronas
Royal Dutch Shell
Norway's Statoil
China's National Petroleum Corp.
Angola's Sonangol.

 

[Skeptic]

Oh, the horror! A bid for getting oil from Iraqi oilfields were won BY OIL COMPANIES!!!

Unless the rights to get oil from the next field is awarded to a bakery, it was WAR FOR OIL!

War for oil by noble, philanthropic American oil companies, I should add, who just couldn't stand the fact that they are winning so many contracts, and wanted to liberate Iraq so that foreign oil companies will get into the action, too.

 

[Orphia Nay]

Oh, the horror! A bid for getting oil from Iraqi oilfields were won BY OIL COMPANIES!!!

Unless the rights to get oil from the next field is awarded to a bakery, it was WAR FOR OIL!

Angola and Malaysia sent troops to Iraq to win their contracts?

I think Hitchens is saying that it was not a US war for oil.

War for oil by noble, philanthropic American oil companies, I should add, who just couldn't stand the fact that they are winning so many contracts, and wanted to liberate Iraq so that foreign oil companies will get into the action, too.

Could you translate that from Sarcasm to English please?

 

[scratchy]

I dont see how the result of an auction can be interpreted either way on this question. That there was an auction in the first place might carry some weight though. But it seems a bit far fetched, with all these years since the war began.

ETA: If oil hade any role i would expect it to more complicated than just grabbing it and setting up an auction. What i would like to know: without oil, would there have been a war? I dont know, but i suspect it wouldnt.

 

[SezMe]

I'm with scratchy in that the internal logic here fails. Just because an auction was eventually held and other-than-USA companies were successful has no bearing on whether the original effort had oil as one its roots.

 

[Orphia Nay]

I don't understand how the perpetrators (and who exactly are they?) of this conspiracy could have been so powerful that they could get multiple countries to go to war for the sole purpose of oil, and yet have no successful plan to obtain that oil.

 

[gtc]

I don't understand how the perpretrators (and who exactly are they?) of this conspiracy could have been so powerful that they could get multiple countries to go to war for the sole purpose of oil, and yet have a successful plan to obtain that oil.

Did you mean:

and yet <not> have a successful plan to obtain that oil.

 

[Skeptic]

Angola and Malaysia sent troops to Iraq to win their contracts?

I think Hitchens is saying that it was not a US war for oil.

I wasn't sarcastic at you, I was making fun of the "US started the war for oil" conspiracy theories, who would surely use this fact, too, to "prove" their thesis.

 

[Orphia Nay]

Did you mean:

Yes, something like that. I just edited it before I saw your reply. Cheers.

I wasn't sarcastic at you, I was making fun of the "US started the war for oil" conspiracy theories, who would surely use this fact, too, to "prove" their thesis.

Ah. Thanks for clearing that up.

 

[Puppycow]

ETA: If oil hade any role i would expect it to more complicated than just grabbing it and setting up an auction. What i would like to know: without oil, would there have been a war? I dont know, but i suspect it wouldnt.

Did Vietnam and Korea have oil?
Did Bosnia or Kosovo?

 

[Upchurch]

I have no particular opinion on the issue of this being a "war for oil", but I fail to see how this auction that took place over a year after the people who started the war in the first place speaks to their motivations.

Did the Bush administration have plans for this in place before it ended? More importantly, did they have plans for this sort of thing before they started the war, or only after it turned into such a PR mess and they had to re-think their approach?

 

[Puppycow]

Oh, I know! All these companies are sekritly owned by the Masonic Jewish Illuminati! They're just pretending to bid against each other.

 

[scratchy]

Did Vietnam and Korea have oil?
Did Bosnia or Kosovo?

No, no, no and no.

 

[Skeptic]

Ah. Thanks for clearing that up.

I keep forgetting sarcasm doesn't work on the internet...

 

[Puppycow]

No, no, no and no.

So. . . Does that change your mind about this?

without oil, would there have been a war? I dont know, but i suspect it wouldnt.

 

[Skeptic]

I have no particular opinion on the issue of this being a "war for oil", but I fail to see how this auction that took place over a year after the people who started the war in the first place speaks to their motivations.

True, of course, but the problem is that the "war for oil" meme was never more than a "activists"' demonstration slogan that morphed into a conspiracy theory due to the lack of any credible evidence for it; it from that start had about as much "evidence" for it as the "Afghan pipeline" conspiracy theory did.

Hitchens merely notes that we've got yet another reason to distrust this conspiracy theory.

 

[Bikewer]

If the so-called "Neo-Con agenda" was in any way true, then oil would only have been a secondary (but desirable) effect.
That notion, that Iraq would rapidly convert itself into a functioning, secular democracy which could then stand as a shining example of same in the area...Has not exactly materialized.

 

[JoeTheJuggler]

I have no particular opinion on the issue of this being a "war for oil", but I fail to see how this auction that took place over a year after the people who started the war in the first place speaks to their motivations.

Did the Bush administration have plans for this in place before it ended? More importantly, did they have plans for this sort of thing before they started the war, or only after it turned into such a PR mess and they had to re-think their approach?

Good point.

Also, I'm not sure the "war for oil" theory is as simple as formulated by Hitchens' argument. (That is, I think Hitchens is arguing against a particularly oversimplified and weak version of the argument. If U.S. oil companies didn't win the auction, then it proves the war wasn't partly motivated by concerns about the price and supply of oil.)

But Hitchens seems to be aware of this point, and admits that (only) "the vulgar and hysterical part of the war-for-oil interpretation has been discredited".

Isn't $4.50 per barrel an extremely low price? (It's selling for $70+ right now, and these companies aren't building the infrastructure to get the oil out of the ground from scratch.)

By the way, I don't understand how this could be an "auction" if the price was "set". (And why weren't Exxon and the others interested in buying at this price or bidding the price up? Ignoring the fact that, as Hitchens also admits, some of these U.S. companies already have contracts that give them access to the oilfields in Iraq.)

 

[JoeTheJuggler]

Did Vietnam and Korea have oil?
Did Bosnia or Kosovo?

Did anyone allege that those were wars also motivated by oil?

The reasoning that says for the invasion of Iraq to have been motivated by oil the U.S.'s military interventions in all these other countries must also have been motivated by oil is not logical.

 

[Distracted1]

I never felt that "war for oil" was a statement that the U.S. was invading to steal the oil in Iraq- or to make oil exceedingly cheap.

I have had discussions with those who have disagreed with me, and it often seems they think I am implying just that when I assert that I think we went to war on behalf of oil companies.

What purpose would it serve the "oil-lobby administration" of Bush and Co.to LOWER the price of oil?

Our war for oil was to take greater control of the price of oil- Saddam could not be allowed to open the spigots all at once flooding the market and making the oil already controlled by the U.S. oil companies worth less than the cost of extracting it.

The American people were fine with a war for oil when they think it was to lower the cost at the pump. The part that really stings is when one considers that ones' own government went to war to raise those prices.