Did Big Oil participate in planning invasion of Iraq?, Thomas Eley, WSWS

An official White House document recently acquired by the Washington Post puts the lie to testimony given by executives of five leading oil firms on November 9 before a joint meeting of the Senate Energy and Commerce committees regarding their collaboration in 2001 with Vice President Dick Cheney’s “energy task force,” officially known as the National Energy Policy Development Group.

Even before the hearings, the oil bosses had been offered a blank check to lie by Republican Commerce Committee Chairman Ted Stevens of Alaska. Stevens, in a transparent attempt to spare the executives possible charges of perjury, waived the normal procedure of swearing in witnesses before congressional committees. The hearings were ostensibly called to discuss the suspiciously rapid increase in oil prices in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, but Stevens’s maneuver suggests that he expected the matter of Cheney’s task force might arise. Nonetheless, the executives have placed themselves in potential legal jeopardy through their apparently false testimony. According to US Code, it is illegal to make “any materially false, fictitious or fraudulent statement or representation” before Congress.
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In fact, the Bush administration’s energy policy was not based only on the dismantling of corporate regulations and the loosening of restrictions on oil exploration in the United States. It had an even more important foreign component: the plan to invade and colonize Iraq, and then privatize and expropriate its enormous oil wealth for the direct benefit of American oil concerns and US capitalism as a whole.

It has been long-since established that in 2001, Cheney’s task force discussed Iraq’s oil. In 2003, Judicial Watch gained access to Commerce Department papers that had been produced by the task force. Found among the documents, according to a July 18, 2003, Associated Press report, were “a detailed map of Iraq’s oil fields, terminals and pipelines as well as a list entitled ‘Foreign Suitors of Iraqi Oilfield Contracts.’ ” Among the specifically listed “foreign suitors” were Russian and French concerns.

It is more than plausible that during White House meetings, oil executives discussed such a “hypothetical” invasion of the defenseless country. The oil companies stood to benefit enormously, and there is no reason to believe that these powerful and well-connected men were unaware that the Bush administration and its coterie of neo-liberal strategists had placed the invasion of Iraq as a top priority. Indeed, the plan to invade Iraq was well known and publicly discussed among the Washington elite for years.

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