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Our Workplace Press articlesYes, the Iraq War IS about OIL!
Ever since the U.S. government prepared to invade Iraq, it has vehemently denied that the war was about oil. Most people knew they were lying. But a June 19 announcement confirms what we knew. Four Western oil companies – ExxonMobil, Shell, Total and BP – are cutting a deal with the Iraqi government for the right to run the biggest oil fields in Iraq.
Ever since the 1920s, these same companies had complete control over the rich oil industry in Iraq, their semi-colony. “We basically had the whole country,” said a “nostalgic” Lee Raymond, the former chief executive of Exxon in an interview in Newsweek magazine last year.
The most valuable resources of an entire country went to enrich a few oil companies and their stockholders. For decades, the Iraqi people fought to overturn this. Finally, in 1972, the Iraqi government nationalized the Iraqi oil fields and those oil companies lost some control over “black gold.”
The bloody U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq has now restored these same companies back to their perch and returned Iraq back to semi-colonial status – at a cost of over a million lives, and the destruction of an entire country.
It really is a war of blood for oil.