"One document, headed 'Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield Contracts,' lists companies from 30 countries - including France, Germany, Russia and the United Kingdom - their specialties, bidding histories, and in some cases their particular areas of interest," Suskind wrote in recounting O'Neill's observations.
"An attached document maps Iraq with markings for 'supergiant oilfield,' 'other oilfield,' and 'earmarked for production sharing,' while demarking the largely undeveloped southwest of the country into nine 'blocks' to designate areas for future exploration.
"The desire to 'dissuade' countries from engaging in 'asymmetrical challenges' to the United States " matched with plans for how the world's second largest oil reserve might be divided among the world's contractors made for an irresistible combination, O'Neill later said."
Air Force Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski, who was among the career military officers pulled into the war planning, said she and her fellow officers were troubled by how the American people were manipulated.
"Many of us in the Pentagon, conservatives and liberals alike, felt that this (Iraq) agenda, whatever its flaws or merits, had never been openly presented to the American people," she wrote. "Instead, the public story line was a fear-peddling and confusing set of messages, designed to take Congress and the country into a war of executive choice, a war based on false pretenses." [See Salon.com's "The New Pentagon Papers."
Wilkerson's Critique
By contrast, Wilkerson openly acknowledged the oil factor both in explaining the U.S. invasion and in justifying the need to remain in Iraq to ensure that any new government is not hostile to American interests.
Despite his earlier doubts about the wisdom of invading, the former chief of staff to Secretary of State Powell said the Middle East's oil reserves makes withdrawal from Iraq more dangerous than leaving Vietnam three decades ago.
"We can't leave Iraq; we simply can't," Wilkerson said in his Oct. 19 speech to the New America Foundation in Washington.
"I'm not evaluating the decision to go to war. That's a different matter. But we're there, we've done it, and we cannot leave. I would submit to you that if we leave precipitously or we leave in a way that doesn't leave something there we can trust, if we do that, we will mobilize the nation, put five million men and women under arms and go back and take the Middle East within a decade. That's what we'll have to do."
Wilkerson made clear that what made Iraq such a strategic concern was the oil.
"We consume 60 percent of the world's resources," he said. "We have an economy and we have a society that is built on the consumption of those resources. We better get fast at work changing the foundation - and I don't see us fast at work on that, by the way, another failure of this administration, in my mind - or we better be ready to take those assets (in the Middle East).
"If you want those resources and you want (Middle Eastern) governments that aren't inimical to your interests with regard to those resources, then you better pay attention to the area and you better not leave it in a mess."
So, it appears those Iraq "blood-for-oil" accusations were right all along, at least in identifying one of the real reasons for invading Iraq. The present danger, however, is that U.S. policy-makers have no better solution to the quagmire in Iraq than continuing indefinitely to barter more blood for a continued supply of oil.
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