Just a bit of business

Overlooked by critics searching for why the US is so intent on stirring up massive trouble in the Middle East are the staggering business profits that country's arms and banking businesses have earned after 25 years of the US government mucking things up there

by Kevin Potvin <kpotvin@republic-news.org>

George Bush's first-term cabinet was dominated by figures drawn from the oil industry. That widely-seized upon detail may have distracted from a more essential element in his appointments: Bush's second term cabinet no less than his first is dominated by big business.

His are arguably the most business friendly cabinets ever. This fact has been overlooked. Previous cabinets, even those of typically business-friendly Republican administrations, have usually struck a balance between business interests and social interests, be those environmental, educational, religious, intellectual, etc. This White House, despite its notorious religiosity, secrecy, vengeance, and mysterious motives, is in fact all business.

Tellingly, at the same time, critics of this administration seem unable to convincingly conclude what drove this Bush cabinet to war in the Middle East. The same range of ambivalence about war aims that characterized statements by White House officials characterizes also what critics have suggested the war is really all about.

For the proponents of war, it was at first a police raid to sequester existing weapons of mass destruction, which then segued into a pre-emptive war to prevent the acquisition of such weapons, before the whole matter of weapons was abandoned altogether in favour of a war of liberation, which in turn has been discarded in favour of a war to pin down Homeland-attacking terrorists safely far away from American shores.

Critics have covered an equal expanse of ground. It is, they have suggested, a war to capture specific oil fields; a war to remove a potential threat to allies in Israel; a war to establish military bases from which to project power in the region; a war to set up a more important war against Iran; a war to avenge the perceived humiliation of the president's father; a war to distract Americans from noticing the disaster in domestic policy; or a war to set the stage for a welcomed Biblical Armageddon. There are many more besides, tiling a landscape way out beyond the fringes of maddening infinity.

None of the critics have been any more convincing than have the proponents. This universal ambivalence is surely one of the distinguishing features of this war. It's hard to think of any other war in history where the stated purposes for it have shifted so dramatically, and where critics of it have diverged one from the other so widely as well.

And yet, given the make-up of the Bush cabinet, the answer to that frustratingly evasive riddle about what this war is really all about might have been staring us in the face all along. In 1925, then-President Calvin Coolidge reminded newspaper editors in a speech that “ the chief business of the American people is business.” The cabinet has never been more business-oriented than it is right now. Armageddon, domestic policy inertia, vengeance, military projection, protection of Israel, and oil grabs may be as much a boat of red herrings as liberation, terrorism, and weapons of mass destruction ever were. Perhaps, to borrow from mobster-ese, this whole thing is “just business, a little bit of business.”

Consider, for example, what American and European administrations alike characterized last week as the most important development on the world stage this year: an agreement by the so-called Paris Club of nations to erase 80% of Iraq's foreign debt owed to them, or about US$33 billion. This tidy agreement may not be just a means to an end as suggested by those who negotiated it. It may be a part of the intended end of the whole exercise itself. This war might be nothing more than part of a banal, albeit large, money grab that's been developing for decades.

Iraq's finances have never been clear and nowhere is there any concise and reliable accounting of who Iraq owes and how much. The vast bulk of Iraq's large external debt arises from expenses (and accumulated interest on them) it incurred in waging its horrendously destructive eight-year-long war launched against the Islamist revolutionary government of Iran just 19 months after it seized power in Tehran in February 1979.

The Iranian revolutionaries are Shias, and so are the majority populations in Iraq and Saudi Arabia. But a more wealthy and powerful Sunni minority has long commanded political power in each of these long-standing dictatorships, as well as in oil-soaked and Shia-surrounded Kuwait. These three critical and oil-financed dictatorships also had originally been installed, or critically propped up, by Western governments, most notably the US and the UK.

There was good reason for Western regimes to fear that the successful Iranian-based Islamist revolution would spread to the majority Shia populations in Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and around Kuwait, bringing those countries, and more importantly, their oil fields, under the control of regimes hostile to Western powers. It therefore would have been paramount in the minds of Western regimes to contain the Iranian Islamist revolution to Iran.

Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the US, as well as the UK, France, Russia, and Germany contributed tens of billions of dollars to the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein to help Iraq defray the costs of making war with Iran and stopping the Western-threatening Islamist revolution.

Kuwait and Saudi Arabia together fronted about US$30 billion for the war effort. Western nations loaned in cash or military transfers anywhere up to US$50 billion, though the true figure is shrouded in mystery. There was much clandestine contact between Western political and business leaders and their counterparts in Iraq. The largely unresolved Iran-Contra affair that nearly sank the Reagan administration in scandal flows directly out of apparently conflicting American efforts in the Iran-Iraq war.

But this is exactly where the tale unravels. Investigations into the Iran-Contra scandal revealed that top Reagan officials were also supplying Iran with arms, money, and intelligence to better prosecute their side of the Iran-Iraq war. What emerges from those investigations is the sense that the opportunity for big Western businesses to make profits from the conflict was too tempting to pass up, even if playing both sides risked spreading an unpredictable Islamist revolutionary movement throughout the region. Possibly, it was that potential Islamist revolution that Western businesses used to shake down their clients.

This conclusion is only buttressed by reference to the same officials in Washington who at the same time happily armed and financed Islamist revolutionaries in the mountains of Afghanistan, then resisting secular Soviet occupation. Al Qaeda was the invention of Zbigniew Brzezinski, then-President Jimmy Carter's Secretary of State, and Osama bin Laden, its leader, was hired by the CIA to channel more than US$2 billion from ISI agents in Pakistan to his hired mujahadeen fighers then filling up the CIA-financed tunnels of Tora Bora Mountain, in preparation for a war on Russian occupying forces.

When the Iran-Iraq war came to an inconclusive and exhausted end in 1988, leaders of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia surprised their hired saviors in Baghdad by demanding quick repayment of loans that Iraq had considered to be grants. Iraq had, after all, saved the skins of the ruling elites in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. But then another funny thing happened: both Kuwait and Saudi Arabia began clandestinely breaching their OPEC quotas and dumping excessive quantities of oil onto the markets, plunging the price of oil down to under US$10 a barrel. As Iraq's oil exports have always been the country's only source of income, the collapse of the price of oil ensured Iraq would default on its loan repayments. To make matters worse, Kuwait was able to pump the extra quantities onto the market because it was slant-drilling under Iraqi land and into disputed oil fields.

It is impossible that Kuwait would do so without American acquiescence. The behavior of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia can only be understood as a provocation meant to draw Iraq into another war. Diplomatic missions by Baghdad to Cairo and Riyadh to enlist support in stopping Kuwait's theft fell on deaf ears. A diplomatic query with American representatives about a limited Iraqi war on Kuwait to stop the illegal drilling and discourage the damaging dumping of excessive oil exports was met with encouragement.

In the resulting Persian Gulf War, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait handed the US upwards of US$80 billion, largely to protect them this time from Iraqi invasion.

The vast bulk of the $US30 billion that Kuwait and Saudi Arabia “loaned” Iraq to defend them from Islamist revolution from Iran went to purchases of Western-manufactured arms, from primarily American, British, French, and Russian manufacturers. The vast bulk of the US$80 billion that the same two countries paid during the Persian Gulf War largely went to the same arms industries in the same countries.

Similarly, it is estimated that the US has spent so far US$140 billion prosecuting its second war on Iraq in as many decades, money that has gone almost entirely to American manufacturers of arms.

The Iraqi loan cancellation announced last week by Germany and the US concerns money “loaned” to Iraq to purchase from Germany and the US, as well as other European arms-producing countries, arms needed to fight Iranian revolutionaries in the 80s, revolutionaries the US none-too-secretly supported. Inasmuch as the money was more a grant than a loan, the US$30 billion deal announced last week is in essence an erasing of the books that record the transfer of those funds from the coffers of Western governments' treasuries to the bank accounts of private arms producing companies in those countries.

All told, these four Middle Eastern nations have transferred to American and European arms and financial companies something on the order of US$185 billion in today's dollars. US taxpayers have transferred to those same companies in the last 18 months another estimated $140 billion. The Iraqi debt canceling deal announced last week is the first part of what is hoped to be a complete canceling of all Iraqi external debt, estimated to be between US$120 and US$200 billion. Most of that is owed ultimately to Western-based financial institutions, and will be covered by Western taxpayers, bringing the entire amount Western arms manufacturers and banks have earned from people in the Middle East and in Europe and America after 25 years fomenting conflict involving Iraq to something between US$450 billion and US$525 billion.

Successive US administrations, which are after all strictly about business, encouraged the Iraqi attack on Iran, helped the Iranians resist that attack, subsequently worked with the Kuwaitis and Saudis to inflict economic war on Iraq, then encouraged Iraq to make war on Kuwait in response, and then created and financed Al Qeada, only later to destroy Iraq on the pretense of fighting the terrorism spawned by that group, even while fleecing the American treasury for new funds to fight Al Qeada around the world.

That is to say, Western—mostly American—banking and arms businesses have earned something like half a trillion dollars from US government manipulations in Iraq, Iran, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia, not a dime of which has anything to do with oil, power, vengeance, Israel, or the Bible. Like business people always say, it's just business.

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