bboc/17_Iraq_victim_of_oil.tex

\chapter{Iraq victim of oil}

\chapterauthor{Subhi TOMA}

The war for oil began in Iraq when in 1908 Emperor Wilhelm II obtained from Sultan Abdül Hamid the grant of a concession for a strip of territory fifteen hundred kilometers long crossing Turkey and Mesopotamia.
By that grant, Germany had not only acquired the right to build a railway line from Constantinople to Baghdad, but also to exlocate the mineral wealth from the subsoil on a strip of thirty kilometres on either side of the said railway.

The defeat of the Ottoman Empire in 1920 allowed England to occupy most of the Middle East.
The United Kingdom, in order to avoid the difficulties inherent in the administration of this vast ensemble populated by multiple communities (Arabs, Kurds, Sunnis, Shi'ites, Christians, Bedouins) formed several states in oil-rich territories.
This is how several principalities were created, including that of Kuwait, in the south of Iraq.
The British mandate over the emirate was set at 99 years, but as early as 1938, the King of Iraq, Ghazi, demanded the annexation of Kuwait to his country, believing that he was being despoiled by the British.
He began a series of steps in this direction with the authority of the colonizer as well as a broad information campaign aimed at the populations in the two territories.
A radio station was set up at the royal palace in Baghdad to invite the Kuwaitis to revolt.
In 1938, during a trip to Switzerland, King Ghazi died as a result of an obscure accident that everything suggests was an assassination.
Since then, no Iraqi government has really abandoned this claim.
Nor even Nuri al Sa'id, who was the man of the British, but tried to convince the Americans to put pressure on England for the return of Kuwait. He too perished, murdered.

In 1961, General Kassem, the leader of the revolution, three years after his accession to power decided to recover Kuwait by force.
British troops, hurriedly dispatched to wage war on Iraq, halted the Iraqi army's advance. In February 1963, Kassem was assassinated by a junta of officers supported by the Kuwaiti government.
In March, the new regime, under pressure from oil companies, immediately recognized Kuwait. The emirate will pay 32 million dinars to the new master of Baghdad.
Britain, weakened by the Second World War, could no longer secure the positions of the major oil companies in the Middle East, and then proposed a pact linking the main countries of the region to the United States.
Apparently, this agreement was intended to protect the \enquote{free world} from Soviet threats; in reality, it was a new alliance between the countries of the region allowing the protection of Western oil companies and the exploitation of oil by the United States and England.

The agreement of Germany and the Ottoman Empire to build a railway linking Berlin to Baghdad and to carry out oil exploration was not to the liking of Britain, which invaded Iraq, then a Turkish province, in 1914, with the help of Indian troops\footnote{Lionard Mosley, \emph{La Guerre du pétrole} (The Oil war), Presse de la Cité, 1974.}.
This was one of the causes of the First World War.
After this, the revolt of the Iraqis, particularly in the south, forced British troops to leave the country, but Britain was given a mandate over Iraq by the League of Nations in 1920.

After the First World War, Britain and France imposed their conception of law in the Middle East by drawing from Paris borders in line with their oil interests.
The question of international law never arose because this law was always adapted to preserve the interests of oil barons.
We will be able to see later how the United States and the other members of the Security Council have interpreted international law.

In 1932, power returned to the Iraqis whose royal government concluded a pact with the British.
From 1920 to 1958, a succession of revolts cost the people enormous sacrifices: repression, executions, hangings perpetrated by the royal power helped by the British.

In 1958, progressive forces, the centre-left, the left and the nationalists formed the United Patriotic Front.
The revolution of 14 July 1958 put an end to royalty and pacts with Great Britain.
Various reforms were initiated, including agrarian reform, personal status and women's equality before inheritance.
The feudal system instituted by the British, which had given 5\% of the population 95\% of the land, was repealed. The land is redistributed to the peasants.

In 1963, five years after the advent of the Republic, the new Iraqi regime brought to power by a vast popular movement had engaged in a tug-of-war with the powerful I.P.C., the Iraqi oil company, in the hands of the United Kingdom, France and the Netherlands, which had a stranglehold on the country's wealth since the end of the First World War and which did not use all the oil potential in order to to maintain prices, leaving the Iraqis with only a paltry share.
The Iraqi state hoped to have a say in its oil and demanded an increase in its production in order to finance the reconstruction of the country already plundered by the Ottoman Empire and the British colonialists, but the I.P.C. did not want to give up anything.
The government demanded that the British mandate over Kuwait, which it considered an Iraqi province, be cancelled.
(the border had been demarcated in 1922 by the British protectorate, which entrusted power to the sheikh before the Kuwait Oil Company, Anglo-American, awarded itself the concession for exploration and oil exploitation for 99 years).
Faced with the English refusal, the government then decided to nationalize 90\% of the land containing deposits not yet exploited by the I.P.C.

The nationalization provoked the anger of the oil companies who, in 1963, fomented a coup d'état, of which the Ba'ath party was the prime contractor, with the help of the various Anglo-Saxon interest groups, and financed by the Kuwaitis.
After several days of bombing the seat of the republican government and clashes with the population in the streets of Baghdad, the military junta managed, by executing Kassem, head of government and leader of the revolution, and several of his companions, to set up a regime of terror that lasted nine months during which all forms of repression,  torture and exaction were inflicted on anti-imperialist patriots and republican loyalists.
More than 400,000 people were arrested and tortured, 20,000 of whom never returned from concentration camps, died under torture or were summarily executed.
A large number of trade unionists, communist party leaders, intellectuals and simple anti-imperialist militants were thus eliminated in a few months. The patriotic movement was beheaded.

This coup d'état allowed the oil companies to achieve their objectives by cancelling Law No. 80 on the nationalization of oil, abolishing the new Civil Code (which had established equality between men and women) and repealing the agrarian reform by returning the land to the big landowners.
Abolition also of labour law, suspension of negotiations on the rights of the Kurdish people. A few years later, several coup leaders revealed that they were closely linked to Anglo-Saxon circles.
Ali Salh al-Saadi, the party's number two and interior minister, told Lebanese journal Études arabes in 1968: \enquote{Our party was led to power by an American train}.

In July 1963, the Iraqi Minister of Defense officially informed his government that the U.S. military attaché in Baghdad had asked him to host the American experts in charge of studying the manufacture of the T-54 tanks and MiG-21 aircraft in the possession of the Iraqi army.
In return, the U.S. government would be willing to arm Iraq in its war against the Kurds.
Thus the war against the Kurds was indicative of the absence of the sovereignty of the Iraqi government of the time toward the United States\footnote{Lionard Mosley, \emph{La Guerre du pétrole} (The Oil war), Presse de la Cité, 1974.}.

In 1964, the Ba'ath party removed from power, the new leaders of Baghdad showed their sympathy for Nasser and tried to establish in Iraq a socialism modeled on the Egyptian model.
After the nationalization of the banking sector and large industries, the government decided to create a national Iraqi oil company (I.NO.C.) and began negotiations with the I.P.C. with a view to reaching an agreement to associate Iraq with the exploitation of its oil.
Separate agreements were signed with the USSR and France but the conflict with the I.P.C. resulted in the fall of the government.

In July 1968, the Ba'ath Party returned to power. It engages in ruthless repression of the opposition and develops tactical alliances with the superpowers.

In 1975, the new government nationalized all oil. A vast programme of reconstruction of the country, industrialization, infrastructure, education (Iraq won three UNESCO medals), and a literacy campaign were undertaken.
Oil must be used to rebuild the country. Industrialization in 1991 is comparable to that of Europe. The Gulf War will take the country back fifty years.

Between 1970 and 1975, the Iraqi government spent \$1,500 million on the development of Kurdistan.

Education was compulsory and free. The number of primary school pupils was 2,200,000 in 1986. In secondary schools, 640,000 and 90,000 in technical colleges.
In the five universities 130,000 students. In total, in 1986, one third of the population was in education, including 3 million students and pupils and 2 million adults in literacy classes.

If there is the problem of political freedom, women's freedom is acquired. Women have taken a considerable place in modern Iraqi society, although many of them still work the land.
Before the first Gulf War, they accounted for 38\% of teachers, 31\% of doctors, 30\% of civil servants, 11\% of factory workers. In all, 30\% of the working population.

In 1981, the budget of the Ministry of Culture reached \$30 million\footnote{Charles Saint-Prot, \emph{Saddam Hussein}, Albin Michel, 1987.}.

\section{War with Iran}

Britain had consciously drawn imprecise fictitious boundaries between Iran and Iraq. Border claims will trigger the war waged by Saddam Hussein. 

France as well as other countries has lent planes, the Super Etendards\rfootnote{French jet fighters}, and sold armaments to Iraq.
Thirty governments, more than a thousand companies have competed with zeal and ingenuity to equip Iraq with a powerful war machine.
A global loss in gross products of \$500 billion!\footnote{Alain Gresh and Dominique Vidal, \emph{Golfe, clefs pour une guerre} (Gulf, keys for a war), Le Monde édition, 1991.} For their part, arms dealers have provided \$50 billion worth of arms on credit.

Iraq had \$15 billion in foreign exchange reserves in 1980, before the war, but in 1988 it was with \$70 billion in external debts, including \$40 billion to the West and the Third World and \$30 billion to the Gulf countries (Saudi Arabia and Kuwait).
The debt to France amounted to 28 billion francs. 

Iraq had been supported and encouraged by both the West and the oil monarchies to stop the Iranian republic. All the countries of Europe, the United States, were friends of Iraq.  
Meanwhile, Kuwait had an Iraqi oil field (Rumaliyah) to increase production and cause prices to fall.

Eight-year war will kill three million people and leave two countries\rfootnote{Part of the sentence appear to be missing in the pdf version used for the translation.}

\section{The guet-apens}

Westerners want to retain control of oil in the Middle East, so states must not have their independence.
In Iran, when Mossadegh, prime minister, nationalized oil, the CIA dispatched its agent, General Scharwzkopf (father of the First Gulf War!) to foment an uprising against the power elected by universal suffrage.
Scharwzkopf maintained excellent relations with the officers of the imperial army, of which he had been the instructor from '42 to '48. He led the repression with his friend, General Zahedi.
After sentencing Prime Minister Mossadegh to death for high treason, the Shah's power inflicted bloody repression on the people, especially in the oil fields where thousands of workers were murdered and in Abadan where thousands of people were imprisoned or shot.
US imperialism has always been ingenious in maintaining conflicts in order to seize wealth. He relied on the weakening of the region to ensure its economic power. 
It does not want a strong state capable of ensuring its independence.

After the war against Iran, the Americans immediately asked Iraq to reduce its military capacity and decreed the embargo to make it bend.
When Saddam Hussein expressed his desire to reconquer Kuwait, the United States reassured the Iraqis. \enquote{This is a matter that does not concern us}.
At the end of July 1990, Iraq massacred its troops on the border with Kuwait, a movement that the US had been following hour by hour since July 14\footnote{Bob Woodward, \emph{chefs de guerre} (Warlords), Calmann-Lévy, 1991.}.
Saddam thought he had the green light, the Westerners owed him that.

But as soon as Kuwait was invaded, the war process began.

On 6 August 1990, the Security Council decided on military and economic sanctions against Iraq. On 25 September, he imposed the air embargo.
On 29 November it decided to use all means to punish Iraq from 15 January 1991.
Moreover, the same Council has repeatedly tried to impose sanctions against Israel without any success because of the American vetoes.
Here are some examples: US veto against the Security Council resolution that imposed the military and economic embargo on Israel in 1982 due to the occupation of Syrian territories.
On June '82, the United States vetoed the Council's resolution to impose sanctions on Israel because of its refusal to withdraw from Lebanon.
In August '82, the US reiterated its veto against a new resolution that demanded Israel's withdrawal from Lebanon.
On August '83, the United States opposed the Security Council resolution that threatened to impose sanctions on Israel because of its expansionist policies.
In January '88, a new US veto against a resolution condemning Israel for its policy of disrespecting human rights towards the Palestinians.
In '89, the Security Council issued five resolutions condemning Israel. The US makes three of them fail thanks to its veto power.
In May '89, US veto against the Security Council resolution condemning the Israeli occupation in southern Lebanon.
In November '89, the US veto defeated the resolution protesting the destruction of Palestinian homes.
In November '89, the resolution of the United Nations General Assembly calling for a settlement of the Palestinian-Israeli problem on the basis of the creation of two states received 151 votes in favor against three votes (United States, Israel and the Dominican Republic) but the next day the New York Times published an article denouncing the influence of the Arab states on the UN.
However, this same newspaper never mentioned US pressure on the Security Council\footnote{Norman Finklsten, political sciences professor, \emph{AL Quds} 16.12.97}. Until 1990 no state had really complied with the multiple UN resolutions.

A coalition of the 33 most powerful countries in the world. Unprecedented propaganda to mobilize public opinion.
Iraqis are referred to as 18 million fascists who threaten humanity. Manipulated opinion accepts the idea of war: 
Iraq had become a threat to world peace while its economic power represented 1/1,000 of that of the opposing powers. 
The press in Saudi Arabia and Israel was subject to military control. During the war, Western journalists were able to work in better conditions in Iraq than in these two countries.
And in any case, Iraq left and arrived defeated in the media competition. In the great game of propaganda, disinformation, lies, Saddam and his family didn't weight much\footnote{Dominique Jamet et Régine Deforges, \emph{La Partie de Golfe} (The Game of Gulf), (éditions 1991)}.

Saddam Hussein's chemical arsenal was rudimentary. The two gases that had his predilection, tabun and sarin, already used by the Germans against the Jews, kill, by spreading, those who breathe them.
The FAE bomb (Fuel air explosive) or vacuum bomb, the latest in American technology kills everything that breathes by sucking by a combustion effect all the oxygen available in a circle of one square kilometer.
The Americans who effectively banned Saddam Hussein from tabun and sarin allowed themselves to use the vacuum bomb, not to mention napalm and phosphorus bombs, eminently clean weapons that clean everything they touch\footnote{Dominique Jamet et Régine Deforges, \emph{La Partie de Golfe} (The Game of Gulf), (éditions 1991)}.
As for the use of uranium, it would have contaminated 60,000 American soldiers and 10,000 British. We do not know its impact on the populations of southern Iraq.

A clean, fast, effective, inexpensive war. That was the slogan.
We must forget the most powerful aviation ever assembled, leaving every day from Saudi Arabia, Turkey, France, Spain, England, the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean to drop its deadly bombs on a people of 18 million inhabitants. 
We must forget about missiles, napalm, vacuum and fragmentation bombs. Result: 
the conflict had almost apocalyptic effects on the economic infrastructure of what was until January 1991 a highly urbanized and mechanized society. 
Most of the means of support of modern life have been destroyed or made precarious. 
Iraq has been returned, for a long time, to a pre-industrial era, but with all the drawbacks of a post-industrial dependence on intensive use of energy and technology\footnote{Report of the mission sent to Iraq by the UN, 20 March 1991.}.
Bush promised it: an independent government managing its wealth cannot be accepted.

The US undertook three types of war against Iraq: military, embargo, destruction of the social fabric. 
First, the destruction of military forces and infrastructure. Then an attempt to destroy national unity by manipulating the Kurdish people and the Shi'ites.
Help and protection are promised to incite revolt and then the rebels are abandoned to repression. The Kurds were always the stake of blackmail and manipulation. 
In truth, neither the US nor England ever wanted to solve the Kurdish problem, they never accepted the independence of Kurdistan. 
In 1920, the Sèvres, Lausanne and Versailles agreements did not grant independence to the Kurds.
In 1922, when a Kurdish king was proclaimed after the First World War, the populations were bombed and gassed by the British. 
As early as 1991, the Kurds were subject to the embargo. Turkey is killing in Kurdistan tens of thousands, but Turkey is on the \enquote{right side}, therefore unassailable. 
Divide and rule is the motto, we encourage ethnic, confessional rebellions: Shi'ites, Sunnis, Arabs, Christians. Lebanon is the most tragic example. 
The goal of the conflict was to have cheap oil. For this it was necessary to put the nation under tutelage, to massacre its population and to destroy the productive apparatus of the country.

The United States reaped the first industrial benefits of the war against Iraq by winning most of the arms markets in the region. 
The profits of the arms industry come from external markets rather than from the domestic market. 
These external markets have shrunk considerably (before 1990) because large buyers, such as those in the Middle East, have seen the financial windfall reduced. 
The world arms market fell by 60\% in 1990. 
This has exacerbated price competition and therefore a search for cost savings, logically leading to a drastic reduction in the number of operators on the market. 
Thus, in a decade, the US defense industry has experienced an unprecedented wave of restructuring and mergers, with divestments and acquisitions of activities or entire companies in this sector amounting to more than \$100 billion\footnote{Pierre Dussauge, Professor of Corporate Political Strategy at the H.E.C. Group, \emph{Le Monde} 20.1.98}.
These operations gave birth to three giants. 
Cumulative arms sales by the companies that are now part of Lockheed-Martin, Boeing-MacDonnell Douglas and Raytheon in 1996 amounted to nearly \$50 billion and were about as much as the Pentagon's acquisition budget (excluding research).
American industry, buoyed by the collapse of the USSR and especially by its leading role in the coalition against Iraq, is widening the gap with its competitors, according to data from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI). 
In 1996, the United States captured 44\% of the market (some specialists even put the percentage at 50\%). 
They enjoy in this sector a supremacy which they no longer have in any civil field\footnote{Claude Serfati, \emph{Le Monde}, 20 January 1998.}.
After the Gulf War, the United States, in four or five years, secured control of half of the markets (all materials included).
France held in 1985 nearly 10\% of the world market, it now has only 4 to 5\% after having been dethroned by the British who hold double\footnote{Christian Schmid: President of the Association of Defence Economists:\emph{Le Monde}, 20.1.98.}.

Iraq ravaged, the war continues economically by the embargo.  Oil revenues were \$20 billion, of which \$5 billion was spent on the import of medicine and food. 
Eight years later, only 2 billion a year in oil sales are authorized and most of it is used to pay the war debt to Kuwait.

The embargo is nothing but a process designed to bring Iraq back to pre-industrial age and to remove any possibility of economic independence in oil matters. 
The Western powers do not want to let an independent state, with military power, develop and play a role in the region. 
It intends to control all oil wealth. Iraqi soil still contains for a century or two of oil. It was inevitable that it would be hit.

Arms control is a comedy that no longer deceives anyone.
We will not be led to believe that in eight years the UN experts, and particularly the Americans, with all the ultra-sophisticated means of detection at their disposal, telecommunications, radars, satellites, etc. have not been able to verify their existence or absence.

Before the embargo in 1990, Iraq met the criteria of the World Health Organization. 
It spent \$30 a month per individual, whereas today it spends only \$2, a drop of 93\%.

The most tragic consequences of the embargo particularly affect the vulnerable segments of the population, especially children.

In 1977, French researchers sent to Iraq predicted a population of 25 million by the end of the century\footnote{Alain Guerreau, \emph{L’Irak, développement et contradiction} (Iraq, development and contradiction ), le Sycomore, 1978.}. It will be 22 million.
UNICEF, the F.A.U., the United Nations Commission on Social and Economic Rights estimate that 1,300 thousand children under the age of 5 have died because of the embargo. 
One million children no longer go to school. Out of 5 million children under the age of five, 1 million will never have normal mental faculties due to a lack of protein and milk to develop their brains. 
Thus, a quarter of the future population is now estimated to be lost.

Thus a people is sacrificed, for purely economic purposes, as an offering to the oil god.

Whereas in Iraq there were once several million immigrants from neighbouring countries, we are witnessing an emigration abroad of intellectuals, the brightest minds. 
This is a loss of substance for Iraqi society. Many families are torn apart by emigration.  Many women find themselves alone. Families are disunited, delinquency is on the rise. 
Women must control family misery, share food between their children, one day one will eat, the next day will be the turn of the other. 
A father can walk twenty kilometres to take his sick child to a hospital where he cannot be treated because there are no medicines.

Medicines or food cannot be imported, but neither can spare parts for medical equipment, for tools, for vehicles, nor can we import notebooks, pencils or books for school children. 
For eight years, Iraq has not been able to import scientific publications. Researchers may not travel abroad or attend international conferences. 
You cannot equip yourself with computers or have access to the Internet, to the knowledge that other countries are developing. 
It is estimated that the delay will be 30 to 40 years by reducing the chances of communicating with the new culture of the world. 
All sectors are affected. It is a deliberate desire to reduce Iraq to the rank of a Third World country. 
The oil-for-food deal solved nothing. It is mainly used to pay the war debt. The country receives only 20\%. As far as health expenditure is concerned, the same is true. 
And import agreements are not even respected. As for the frozen Iraqi contributions abroad, it is obvious theft.

It is indeed the will of the powerful that dominates the Security Council to impose an unprecedented blockade to prevent a country from developing, to ruin its future, a country that had the economic means to help the Third World. 
After the filthy war, the embargo is still a colonial war of an economic nature, whatever the pretext, even if it is international law.

Yet this people has demonstrated its will to resist and survive, to preserve its dignity. But the people cannot be asked to sacrifice themselves for honor. 
It is forced to ensure his survival. Contrary to what had been hoped when the embargo was imposed, the differences with the regime have faded if not forgotten. 
A hungry population seeks only to feed itself, it does not make revolution. 
Iraqis are aware that what they are suffering is being done to prevent their country from developing. They are resisting, but they will not be able to resist for another 10 years. 
This people is in peril. If a civil war broke out in Iraq, no one could contain it, the whole region would be affected. 
The Americans play the sorcerer's apprentice but no longer know how to control when Pandora's box is opened. 
They have not been able to control fundamentalism and conflicts in Afghanistan for 25 years. 
Whatever the regime, it is up to the people to determine. 
The embargo is the war waged against all progressive or indocile regimes against the United States. 
Solidarity with the Iraqi people should animate all progressive forces in the world.

\rauthor{Subhi Toma}

Subhi Toma is a sociologist of Iraqi origin, exiled in France since 1971. He was secretary general of iraqi students opposed to the Baghdad regime. 
Co-founder of the international coordination against embargoes, he has led several observation missions in Iraq since the 1991 war.

\section{Before embargo:}

~~~\, 30,000 hospital beds built after the nationalization of oil.

Budget: \$500 million. Medical stocks were a quarter of a billion.

Infant mortality: 24 per 1,000. — Less than 5 years: 540 per month. Over 5 years: 650

\section{After embargo:}

~~~\, Budget: \$37 million. Zero stocks.

Infant mortality: 92 per 1,000. Under 5 years: 7,500 per month. More than 5 years: 9,000 per month.

Malnutrition: 1,100 calories per person instead of 2,500. Children's weight decreased by 22\%.

\begin{flushright}(Unicef Health Observatory)\end{flushright}