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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Techplayer who wrote (391663)	4/14/2003 1:22:17 AM
From: Krowbar	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 769667

Yes, It Is About Oil By DAVID LINDORFF Is the war against Iraq all about oil? Not to hear Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld tell it. Back on Nov. 15, he called the notion that oil was the real reason behind the Bush administration's drive against Saddam Hussein "nonsense," saying, "It has nothing to do with oil, literally nothing to do with oil." But a new study released by the Institute for Policy Studies, based upon secret diplomatic cables just declassified by the National Archives, and internal communications of the Bechtel Corporation, suggests just the opposite?that oil is the underlying cause of this war. The study, which discloses the intimate links between the Bechtel Corporation and Bechtel executives and U.S. policy towards Iraq, also shows that some key players in the push for America's war against Iraq, including Rumsfeld, Vice President Dick Cheney, and other former Reagan administration officials Roger Robinson, Judge William B. Clark and Robert McFarlane, have been intimately involved in issues relating to Iraqi oil as far back as the1980s. Titled "Crude Vision: How Oil Interests Obscured US Government Focus on Chemical Weapons Use by Saddam Hussein," this report traces an intense effort by Reagan officials in the mid-OE80s to win Hussein's approval for a $2-billion oil pipeline to be built by Bechtel, running from the Euphrates oilfields in southern Iraq westward to Jordan and the Gulf of Aqaba. A key player in that effort was Rumsfeld, then the CEO of Searle drugs, the giant phramaceutical company. One particularly revealing 1983 memo, declassified for the first time in February by the National Archives, concerns a trip by Rumsfeld to Iraq. Acting as a special White House "peace envoy" allegedly to discuss with Hussein and then foreign minister Tarik Aziz the bloody war between Iran and Iraq, Rumsfeld turns out according to this memo to have been talking not about that war, but about Bechtel's proposed Aqaba pipeline. In his memo to Secretary of State George Schultz reporting on the meeting with Hussein, Rumsfeld talks at length about the pipeline discussion, but makes no mention of having discussed either the war or charges that Hussein's army was using chemical weapons against the Iranians. The intense focus of Rumsfeld, Schultz (a former president of Bechtel), Cheney and other Reagan officials, in concert with Bechtel, on the pipeline, reads like an abbreviated, or mini "Pentagon Papers," laying the groundwork for a collapse in relations between the U.S. and Iraq, and eventually to war. The documents also cast Bechtel's current position as one of two top candidates for the lucrative contract to "rebuild Iraq" in a troubling light. As American troops press into Baghdad, and Iraqi casualties run into the thousands, Counterpunch speaks with Jim Valette, director of research at the Sustainable Energy and Economy Network, and one of the three authors of "Crude Vision." counterpunch.org Del