Crude World (24 page)

As April turned to May, Khashab found himself in the strange position of asking not for Americans to leave his refinery but for more of them to come. In May, security duties were placed in the hands of Captain Tom Hough, who, along with fifty GIs, made a barracks out of a home just inside the refinery’s grounds. It was like a frat house in which corridors were littered not with kegs of beer but M-16s and ammunition. Their job consisted of turning back would-be looters in a catch-and-release program. The usual punishment for teenagers was a round of push-ups before being sent home. Adults had it somewhat worse, turned loose with their hands bound behind their backs by a shaming set of plastic cuffs. It was endless work. “We have very efficient thieves,” Khashab noted. “Better than Al Capone.”

Khashab and Hough were bound together by isolation. A farm boy whose hobbies included fishing and hunting, Hough’s experience in the oil business consisted of filling up his car in the Midwest. The
Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), which was supposed to run the occupation, had not sent anyone to offer him advice or assistance, so he had to cope with a bewildering set of tasks. Workers who hadn’t been paid for months demanded money that wasn’t there; mysterious banners urged a struggle against the infidels; families with domestic disputes sought his arbitration because the local police and courts were AWOL; workers tried to beat up corrupt managers who had stolen their wages or generally oppressed them; and an Iraqi interpreter was found dead one morning with a bullet in the back of his head and a note on his body that said, “This is what we do to traitors.” It was Hough’s new job to take care of all of this.

“I don’t have any idea what the Bush policy is,” he told me. “I don’t know what they’re planning for the future of Iraq. I am just making it up as we go along because I sure didn’t read the latest State Department policy paper.”

The pairing was particularly odd because Khashab, the civilian, wanted looters shot, while Hough, the soldier, refused. In these early days of occupation, his unit’s rules of engagement allowed lethal force only if soldiers were fired on, and most looters were smart enough not to shoot at the Americans. Khashab thought this was ludicrous, because calisthenics were a feeble deterrent. I sat through dozens of meetings and, in its Alice-in-Wonderland way, the scenario rarely varied. Khashab chain-smoked Gauloise cigarettes while Hough spit tobacco juice into an empty water bottle. Hough, the blond, can-do captain, was dressed in battle fatigues and desert boots, while Khashab, old enough to be his father, wore soiled overalls and workaday loafers. They met in Khashab’s office, under a painting that showed the refinery against an orange sky.

“Your efforts will go down the drain if you don’t do anything about security,” Khashab advised one day. “I mean, you are occupying the country. Secure it! Act more violently!”

“We’re not doing a good job,” Hough said. “It’s embarrassing to me. I don’t know how to rebuild countries. I don’t know what I’m doing. If we come to a country and destroy its government and destroy
its army, we have to rebuild it. But I’m wondering, Where are the people who rebuild countries? I just jump out of planes and kill people.”

On good days in the spring of 2003, the refinery limped along at one-third its approximately 150,000-barrel-a-day capacity. American generals and even the occasional CPA official began visiting as May turned to June, drinking tea in Khashab’s office, listening to his complaints and, when it was time to go to their next exercise in occupational futility, offering a reassuring pat on the shoulder for a job well done and for the good times that were certainly ahead. Even Paul Bremer, head of the CPA, eventually stopped by and marveled at the refinery’s control room, saying that the vintage machinery reminded him of the Flash Gordon television show he saw as a child. But the wizard of America’s muddled occupation had little to offer other than words of encouragement. The Dora refinery was like a neglected stray looking for an owner.

Iraq’s oil and America’s desire for it continued to confound me.

The war-for-oil argument was alluring. The argument tended to be prefaced with reference to Cheney’s work, before he became vice president, as chief executive of Halliburton, whose KBR subsidiary was rewarded with billions of dollars in contracts in Iraq during the occupation. The argument referenced Cheney’s chairing, in 2001, of a secret task force of government officials and oil executives who discussed energy policy. Bush’s background as a Texas oilman, though a failed one bailed out by friends, was evoked in the same breath. Oilmen always desire more oil, so the motive for war seemed as obvious as the tattooed marines in front of the Oil Ministry. Clearly, the Texans in the White House wanted to control Iraq’s 110 billion barrels of crude.

But there was a flip side. Oilmen prefer to deal with dictators rather than kill them. In Equatorial Guinea, Saudi Arabia, Kazakhstan, Angola and elsewhere, Americans have not hesitated to nuzzle and sign contracts with tyrants who reside at the top of the repulsiveness scale. History shows this tendency to hold true even in Iraq, where Saddam Hussein’s gassing of Iranians and his own people did not harm his sales
to America, which held steady until 1990. Days after the invasion of Kuwait, United Nations sanctions halted Iraqi oil exports, but the First Gulf War was only a temporary obstruction.

The sanctions were loosened in 1996 so Iraq could export oil and use the proceeds to buy humanitarian goods. This was the oil-for-food program, and one of its twists was that the largest purchaser of Iraqi oil was, once again, the United States. Even though American F-16s were dropping bombs on Iraq to enforce the no-fly zones in the north and south of the country, American consumers were gassing up with Iraqi crude. Another twist involved Saddam selling discounted oil to buyers willing to pay kickbacks. Chevron was one of the buyers; in 2007 the firm admitted that a trader had funneled money to Iraqi officials. War, sanctions, genocide, laws—these were no more difficult to get over than speed bumps.

American oilmen certainly wanted greater access to Iraq’s underproduced fields, but their preference was to lift sanctions that prevented them from working there. That was also their preference in Libya, where Muammar Qaddafi’s misbehaving but oil-rich regime had been under sanctions since the Reagan era. Their slogan tended to be “Make business, not war.” This was pointed out a year after the invasion of Iraq by Anthony Sampson, who wrote a classic history of political manipulations by oil firms. “It is tempting to depict the war in Iraq as a straightforward attempt to control its oil reserves in the interests of the big corporations,” he noted in 2004, just months before he died. “[But] both Sir Philip Watts of Shell and Lord Browne of BP were warning that war in Iraq was likely to destabilize supplies and antagonize other Islamic oil producers. It might seem surprising, but it has happened before. When Sir Anthony Eden launched the Suez War in 1956, also claiming to defend British interests, he did not consult Shell or BP, which had the most to lose. Both companies were deeply worried that such a dangerous adventure would antagonize Arab oil producers throughout the Middle East—which it did.” Sampson concluded, “Governments that are bent on military adventures—contrary to most conspiracy theories—become curiously resistant to advice from commercial concerns, which often understand much more about the consequences.”
The Gulf War of 1990-91 offered an example of the nonrewards of military action in the modern Middle East. After their American-assisted return to power, Kuwait’s royal family did not let its gratitude extend to the granting of oil deals to American firms; minor reconstruction contracts were doled out to them but not the invaluable production-sharing agreements that are the manna of the oil industry.

The Oil Ministry was just one of many places in Iraq and America where people had told me, “It’s all about oil.” Literally, the phrase
was
true. The keyboard I type on, the clothes I wear, the heat in my apartment, the shoes on my feet, the pots in my kitchen, the cars and planes that transport me—they are oil’s spawn. When I visited an oil museum in Saudi Arabia, an exhibit noted that almost everything in the industrial world contains oil—plastics, fertilizers, even toothpaste. Products that don’t contain oil depend on it to be manufactured and moved to markets: the wood in my desk was almost certainly felled by a gas-fueled chain saw and transported to me by a ship, train or truck that would not budge an inch without fuel for its engine.

The question is not
whether
war is about oil but
how
it is about oil. Even Paul Wolfowitz, the neoconservative deputy secretary of defense and the official with the highest quotient of pro-democracy idealism in the Bush administration, had oil on his mind. His interest in Iraq, as James Mann wrote in
Rise of the Vulcans
, dated from the 1970s and stemmed from his concern that a regime hostile to U.S. interests would dominate the oil fields of the gulf. There are complexities behind the everything-for-oil philosophy. Even psychological issues might have played a minor role in the decision to invade, because as Bush famously said of Saddam, “This is the guy that tried to kill my dad.”

In the 1970s, in
Shah of Shahs
, Ryszard Kapuscinski described oil as a substance that “anesthetizes thought, blurs vision, corrupts.” His data point was petroleum-mad Iran, but his thesis applied broadly. America’s desires were so influenced by Iraq’s inebriating crude that Washington could not think straight about the reasons for invading. And it was a difficult time to think straight. The post-9/11 political climate in America was characterized by enormous fear of another terrorist attack. The specter of dirty bombs caused more concern in Washington
than $4-a-gallon gasoline. The WMD threat from Iraq has proved to be nonexistent, with the “evidence” having been concocted or manipulated, but that does not mean Bush and Cheney did not believe in this peril that didn’t exist. A threat need not be real for it to inspire fear or exaggeration.

The chore of figuring out oil’s role in the 2003 invasion has been complicated by the Bush team’s reluctance to discuss the subject. I prefer lies to silence, because lies yield information. Rumsfeld’s insistence that oil had literally nothing to do with the war was unintentionally revealing, in the fashion of “the lady doth protest too much.” Yet clues were provided, notably by the invasion’s most notorious and notoriously silent instigator.

On August 26, 2002, Cheney visited Nashville and spoke to a convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars. He repeated the charge, later proved false, that Iraq had resumed its efforts to acquire nuclear weapons. His speech came to a crucial passage that illustrated, in its description of Saddam’s alleged menace, how oil was deeply embedded with other motives for war.

“Should all his ambitions be realized,” Cheney said,

the implications would be enormous for the Middle East, for the United States, and for the peace of the world. The whole range of weapons of mass destruction then would rest in the hands of a dictator who has already shown his willingness to use such weapons, and has done so, both in his war with Iran and against his own people. Armed with an arsenal of these weapons of terror, and seated atop ten percent of the world’s oil reserves, Saddam Hussein could then be expected to seek domination of the entire Middle East, take control of a great portion of the world’s energy supplies, directly threaten America’s friends throughout the region, and subject the United States or any other nation to nuclear blackmail.

In his eight years as vice president, Cheney was cynical, manipulative and inept. History might judge him the most ruinous public servant
ever. But it is hard to conclude from the available evidence that he did not believe at least a portion of his fear-mongering about WMD. The evidence suggests that oil and WMD reinforced each other, like volatile elements in a laboratory that explode when combined. And it’s important to remember that Cheney was not commander in chief. President Bush had his own mixture of priorities and fears, as did the men and women whom he listened to. Neither Cheney’s motives nor the motives of the administration he served can be distilled into one word. WMD, democracy, religion, Oedipus, oil—America was like a drunk fumbling with a set of keys at night.

What does our desire do to others? In its impact on Iraq, oil was like a volcano that erupted every decade or two with a new cataclysm. Because it can be a hindrance to stand atop the volcano as it erupts, I left Baghdad and found a calmer station a hundred miles away in Najaf, where I could get a different perspective.

Najaf is home to the tomb of Imam Ali, whom the world’s Shiites regard as the successor to the prophet Mohammed. It is a holy city, and one of the greatest Shiite seminaries is located there, along with some of the faith’s greatest thinkers and leaders. Najaf attracts a stream of pilgrims who visit the gold-domed mosque that contains Imam Ali’s remains, and many of these worshippers bring their dead for burial outside the city. The caskets are carried around the mosque and then taken to Wadi al-Salam, the Valley of Peace, where millions of people were buried.

Even though Najaf had more dead souls than barrels of crude—the largest reservoirs were hundreds of miles away—it had much to teach about oil’s impact. One of the best classrooms was a small, ramshackle building on an alley near the mosque. I visited several times, and people were always pushing, shouting and pleading to get inside; the guards, who were hard men, let in just a few at a time. After taking off their shoes, the visitors entered a darkened atrium that was like a musty library that had not been dusted for years. It was crowded with clerics and religious students who talked in whispers and smoked Yemeni cigarettes. (American products were
haram
, forbidden.) Overhead fans
creaked and kept the air moving but not fresh or cool. One day I was taken to a small, windowless upstairs room that was furnished with a long-suffering couch and a similarly distressed armchair. I sat on the couch and waited. The religious leader Muqtada al-Sadr would arrive soon, I was told.