part of the conversation. Mr. Bush acknowledged it, but brushed it aside: "We will be in Baghdad at the end of March," he said.(14)
A repeat performance was underway here. George Bush could attack Afghanistan only as long as Osama bin Laden remained at large: now he needed Saddam Hussein in Baghdad to justify invading Iraq. The rhetoric about "regime change" was simply another element of the propaganda campaign.
Conscientious Larceny: Securing the Oil
Three weeks later Mr. Bush and Mr. Aznar met with UK Prime Minister Tony Blair at a U.S. airbase on Terceira Island in the Azores. They were hoping for a Security Council resolution to legitimize their use force against Iraq, but the Security Council demurred. On March 17 Bush and Blair claimed they could proceed without a new resolution, and on March 21, 2003, Operation Iraqi Freedom was launched with a fierce bombardment of Baghdad.
Two months later the Security Council did pass a resolution, No. 1483. It recognized the U.S. and U.K. as occupying powers with authority in Iraq. As head of the "Coalition Provisional Authority," Mr. L. Paul Bremer, an American, set about reconstructing the political economy of the defeated nation.
On the outskirts of Baghdad, he watched a new U.S. embassy being built. It was ten times larger than any other American embassy in the world. It contained 21 multi-story buildings on 104 acres, to accommodate 5,000 diplomats, staff people, and their families. Surrounded by a concrete wall fifteen feet thick, it encompassed a self-contained utility system, a commissary, a movie complex, swimming pools, retail shopping areas, restaurants, schools, and a fire station.
The Bush Administration no longer mentioned "regime change:" the embassy spoke of permanent occupation.
And it was time to move ahead with the "...capture of new and existing oil and gas fields." Working with representatives of U.S. and British oil companies, the Coalition Provisional Authority eventually produced the draft of a "hydrocarbon law." It featured the production sharing contracts specified by the State Department's "Future of Iraq Project," facilitating the de facto seizure of much
of Iraq's fossil fuel resources. The law was written in English.
In June of 2004 the Security Council endorsed the replacement of the Coalition Provisional Authority by an interim structure of Iraqi governance, and after several subsequent iterations, an elected government was in place. The hydrocarbon law was translated into Arabic. It was approved on February 15, 2007 by Prime Minister Maliki's cabinet and forwarded to the Iraqi Parliament for enactment. Very few members of Parliament had ever seen it.
Exxon/Mobil, Chevron/Texaco, Royal Dutch/Shell, and BP/Amoco waited anxiously. These
four American and British companies stood to gain "effective control of as much as 87 percent of
Iraq's oil."(15) But the hydrocarbon law stalled in the Iraqi Parliament as conflicts about the measure between Baghdad and the regional interests of the Kurds proved too stubborn to reconcile.
President Bush forced the issue. He signed a war funding bill on May 25, 2007, which specified a list of mandatory "benchmarks" for the Maliki government to meet. Failing to to do so would threaten seriously the financial and military support of the U.S. Prominent among the benchmarks was the passage of the hydrocarbon law, but the tensions between Baghdad and the Kurds continued: Maliki missed the benchmark.
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