A year and a half after the start of George Bush’s controversial war on Iraq the Iraqi population has grown increasingly hostile to its US occupants. Sporadic violence has given way to organised resistance. The sabotage of pipelines has disrupted the flow of Iraqi oil. As a result the price of oil on the international market has been driven to record highs. ibid.
One year after the US invasion of Iraq none of the promises of improvements has been fulfilled. ibid.
My wife passed away for lack of care. This place is not suitable for humans. I wish someone could help us build even a small shelter for ourselves to live. Male refugee of United Nations camp, cited The Oil Factor: Behind the War on Terror
This is not liberation. Believe me, this is chaos. We need security. Male Iraqi, cited The Oil Factor: Behind the War on Terror
The United States military police has been rounding up hundreds of thousands of people from Baghdad. Elizabeth Hodgkin, research coordinator for Iraq Amnesty International
My son was killed on July 24th outside Mosul, Iraq. What happens is when the soldiers come home, they come home at night. And the families are not allowed to be there. Jane Bright, mother of fallen Iraqi military victim, interview The Oil Factor: Behind the War on Terror
American corporations stand to win a huge amount of money in the current reconstruction process in Iraq. And many of those people and corporations have very close ties to the administration. Many contracts so far were given without any bidding process going on. Erik Leaver, Washington Centre for Policy Studies
What we’ve seen is a very quiet plan to privatise Iraq’s oil. David Mulholland, Jane’s Defence Weekly business editor
President Bush is trying to present an $87 billion package as being for the Iraqi people. But if you look at the package – first of all the majority of it is for the military occupation; it’s not for the rebuilding. William Hartung, Senior Fellow World Policy Institute
It’s about Imperialism. It’s about abusing a nation’s natural resources. It’s about greed and power and it’s nothing about keeping America safe, or freedom and democracy for the Iraqi people. Cindy Sheehan, television interview
Iraq [2003] actually is a perfect example of the way the whole system works. So we economic hit-men are the first line of defence. We go in and try to corrupt governments, and get them to accept these huge loans which we then use as leverage to basically own them. If we fail, as I failed ... with men who refuse to be corrupted, then the second line of defense is we send in the jackals. And the jackals either overthrow governments or they assassinate. And once that happens, when the new government comes in, boy, it’s going to tow the line because the new president knows what’ll happen if he doesn’t. And in the case of Iraq, both of those things failed. The economic hit-men were not able to get through to Saddam Hussein; we tried very hard, we tried to get him to accept a deal very similar to what the House of Saud had accepted in Saudi Arabia, but he wouldn’t accept it. And so the jackals went in to take him out. They couldn’t do it. His security was very good. After all, he had one time worked for the CIA; he’d been hired to assassinate a former president of Iraq, and failed. But he knew the system. So in ’91 we send in the troops. And we take out the Iraqi military. So we assume at that point that Saddam Hussein is going to come around. We could have taken him out, of course, at that time, but we didn’t want to, he’s a kind of strong man we like; he controls his people; we thought he could control the Kurds, and keep the Iranians in their border, and keep pumping oil for us, and that once we took out his military, now he’s going to come around. So the economic hit-men go back in in the 90s without success. If they’d had success, he’d still be running the country. We’d be selling him all the fighter jets he wants and everything else he wants, but they couldn’t. They didn’t have success. The jackals couldn’t take him out again. So we sent the military in once again, and this time we did the complete job – we took him out, and in the process created for ourselves some very very lucrative construction deals and to reconstruct a country that we’d essentially destroyed, which is a pretty good deal if you own construction companies [Halliburton], big ones. So Iraq shows the three stages – the economic hit-men failed there, the jackals failed there and as a final measure the military goes in. And in that way we really created an empire; but we’ve done it very very subtly; it’s clandestine. All the empires of the past were built by the military. And everyone knew they were building them ... The majority of the people in the United States had no idea that we’re living off the benefits of a clandestine empire. Today there’s more slavery in the world than ever before. Then you have to ask yourself, well, if it’s an empire, then who is the emperor? ... The Corporatocracy. John Perkins, author Confessions of an Economic Hitman, economist Chas T Main Inc
4The United States spends over $87 billion conducting a war in Iraq while the United Nations estimates that for less than half that amount we could provide clean water, adequate diets, sanitation services and basic education to every person on the planet. And we wonder why terrorists attack us. John Perkins, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man
The intelligence that led to the Iraq War came from a single source. After the war the Intelligence case collapsed. BBC Newsnight: Iraq War Intelligence Probed
One by one in the months after the war Curveball’s claims were publicly discredited. ibid.
MI6 told the CIA in 2002: ‘elements of [Curveball’s] behaviour strike us as typical of individuals we would normally assess as fabricators’. ibid.
I believe that they are still interested in permanent military bases there; I believe they are still interested in controlling the oil from that part of the world; and so it will be stay the course; it will be six, seven, eight US troops killed every day. Ray McGovern, CIA analyst under Kennedy & Reagan & Bush
It was 95% charade. Ray McGovern, interview John Pilger
In May 2007 a group of uniformed police officers arrived at the Ministry of Finance in Baghdad. An IT consultant Peter Moore was working there protected by four British security guards. In Iraq nothing is as it seems. Peter Moore’s kidnappers were insurgents who’d infiltrated the police. They murdered his bodyguards and held Moore captive for almost three years. He was freed only after a secret deal was struck. Secret Iraq: Insurgency, BBC 2010
This series tells the story of Iraq since the fall of Saddam. A story shrouded in deceit and lies. It’s the story of an insurgency the invaders failed to understand. ibid.
The police chief ... received complaints that the soldiers were spying on Muslim women. There was a demonstration ... What is certain is that the soldiers opened fire. ibid.
All over Iraq the Americans were seen as occupiers not liberators. ibid.
The Pentagon knew American soldiers were torturing prisoners. ibid.
Al Qaeda put their own indelible mark on the [Iraq] insurgency: the suicide bomb. ibid.
The second Battle of Fallujah had lasted ten days. When the guns fell silent the dead could be counted. ibid.
To the British commander on the ground this incident gave the lie to the continuing rhetoric in London that the British had secured peace. ibid.
Hatred for the occupation itself meant that for many Iraqis killing the Coalition forces was the only appropriate response. ibid.
Two years after the invasion Iraqis were living in mortal fear. They were fighting the Americans and British with ever greater intensity. But they were also killing each other. Secret Iraq: Awakening, BBC 2010
In February 2006 a Sunni group blew up one of the holiest Shia mosques. ibid.
On the last day of 2006 the number of American soldiers killed in Iraq reached 3,000. ibid.
As is always the case in Iraq nothing is as it seems. ibid.
An inconvenient truth: many loathed Saddam Hussein, but hated the occupiers even more. ibid.
The first Gulf War against Saddam was unfinished business. And plans to invade Iraq were soon being dusted off. Less than six months after 9/11 deep within the Pentagon several military intelligence experts became seriously worried about a new secret unit called the OSP, or the Office of Special Plans. It seemed that it was taking too much control of the invasion planning. Conspiracies – Iraq
For years the mighty US dollar has ruled the world. But what if Saddam did have a weapon of mass destruction that would not only have threatened the position of the dollar, but American military might as well? ... The war was actually about protecting the global supremacy of the US dollar ... If you want to buy oil on the international market, the currency is the US dollar. But what would happen if some other currency threatened that position? ibid.
The US has always needed to keep a firm hand on the trading of its oil dollars. But in November 2000 the most serious attack on the sacred dollar was about to take place. If left unchecked it could have been an economic Pearl Harbor. After years of struggling under crippling sanctions, Saddam Hussein decided to use the one WMD that no-one had ever looked for or thought about – the Euro. With the mighty dollar’s position as the world’s number one suddenly under threat, did a ripple of fear go through the Bush administration? ibid.