Black Mass: How Religion Led the World into Crisis (25 page)

Throughout the twentieth century geo-politics – the struggle for control of natural resources – was a powerful factor shaping conflicts between states. Securing oil supplies was a major issue in the Second World War, helping to trigger Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. It continued in the abortive attempt by Britain to seize the Suez Canal in 1956. The British-American overthrow of the secularist Iranian president Mohammed Mossadegh in the CIA-led ‘Operation Ajax’ in 1953 was mounted with the avowed aim of preventing Iran coming under increased
Soviet influence. Its chief goal was to reassert western control of the country’s oil.

The rivalries of the post-Cold War period have developed against a different background. The balance of power between producers and consumers of energy is shifting, with oil-producing states able to dictate the terms on which they do business with the world. Russia is using its position as a supplier of oil and natural gas to reassert itself in global politics, while Iran has emerged as a contender for hegemony in the Gulf. Underlying these shifts is the fact that global oil reserves are being depleted while global demand is rising. Oil is not running out in any simple sense; but the theory of ‘peak oil’ suggests that global production may be near its maximum. Peak oil is taken seriously by governments. A report by the US Department of Energy entitled
Peaking of World Oil Production: Impacts, Mitigation and Risk Management
, which was released in February 2005, concludes: ‘The world has never faced a problem like this. Without massive mitigation more than a decade before the fact, the problem will be pervasive and will not be temporary. Previous energy transitions (wood to coal and coal to oil) were gradual and evolutionary; oil peaking will be abrupt and revolutionary.’
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When dwindling oil is combined with accelerating industrialization the result is bound to be intensifying rivalry for control of the world’s remaining reserves. The geo-politics of peak oil is shaping the policies of great powers.
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The role of oil as the supreme asset was recognized by the Bush administration’s most powerful strategist. In a speech at the Institute of Petroleum’s autumn lunch in 1999, when he was CEO of Haliburton, Dick Cheney observed:

Producing oil is obviously a self-depleting activity. Every year you’ve got to find and develop reserves equal to your output just to stand still, just to stay even. This is true for companies in the broader sense as it is for the world … So where is the oil going to come from? Oil is unique in that it is so strategic in nature. We are not talking about soapflakes or leisurewear here. Energy is truly fundamental to the world’s economy. The Gulf War was a reflection of that reality. The degree of government involvement makes oil a unique commodity … Governments and the national oil companies are obviously controlling about 90 per cent of the assets. Oil
remains fundamentally a government business. While many regions offer great oil opportunities, the Middle East with two thirds of the world’s oil and the lowest cost, is still where the prize ultimately lies.
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Cheney’s remarks show a clear understanding of peak oil, which was reflected in the first Bush administration’s decision to reclassify energy policy under the heading of national security. There can be little doubt that oil was a vital factor in the decision to launch the Iraq war. The US acted to install a regime that would secure America’s oil supplies and to signal its determination to control the reserves of the Gulf as a whole.

The adventure ran aground on the impossibility of establishing an effective state in place of the one that was demolished. It has become conventional wisdom to think that disaster could have been avoided by planning for post-war reconstruction. This view is supported by the fact that some planning did take place – in the US State Department’s 2002 paper on the future of Iraq, for example – but was disregarded by Bush and Rumsfeld.
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Yet the belief that the chaos that followed the American invasion could have been averted is groundless. It assumes the goals of the war were achievable when in fact they were not. If there had been anything resembling realistic forethought, the war would never have been launched. Establishing liberal democracy in the country was impossible, while overthrowing the regime meant destroying the state.

None of this is hindsight. The insurgency that followed the initial military success was widely anticipated,
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while the history of Iraq shows that the risks of majority rule in the country were well understood generations ago. First known as Mesopotamia, the state of Iraq is largely the work of the British diplomat Gertrude Bell, who – along with T. E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) and Harry St John Philby, the British colonial officer and father of the Soviet spy Kim Philby –constructed it from three provinces of the collapsed Ottoman Empire and established it as a Hashemite kingdom in 1921. With the fall of the Ottomans in 1919, Bell – the first woman to be appointed a political officer in the British colonial service – became secretary to the British high commissioner, Sir Percy Cox, and began building a new state. In 1920 Bell met Seyyid Hasan al-Sadr, the leading figure
among Iraq’s Shias and great-grandfather of Moqtada al-Sadr, the commander of the Mahdi Army that rebelled against the American occupation in 2004. She recognized that democratic government would mean theocratic rule: ‘I do not for a moment doubt that the final authority must be in the hands of the Sunnis, in spite of their numerical inferiority, because otherwise we will have a theocratic state, which is the very devil.’ One of her chief goals was to ‘keep the Shia divines from taking charge of public affairs’, which required rule by the Sunni elite. A British strategic interest was to retain control of the country’s northern oilfields. By creating a new kingdom in which the Shias were kept from power and the Kurds denied a separate state these two objectives could be achieved together.

One reason Bell was able to construct the new kingdom was that she was deeply versed in the culture of the region. Fluent in Arabic and Persian, she translated the verses of the Sufilibertine-mystic Hafiz into English. She founded the Baghdad Archaeological Museum, later the National Museum of Antiquities, which after nearly eighty years of conservation of the country’s treasures was looted in the aftermath of the American invasion. The looting – which occurred while the Oil Ministry alone among government institutions was under American guard – drew from Donald Rumsfeld the comment, ‘Stuff happens.’
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From the early 1920s onwards Bell was out of sympathy with British policy in the country. In 1926, sidelined by the colonial service and lacking influence over events, she took an overdose of sleeping pills in Baghdad, where she was buried in the British cemetery.
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Bell knew the state she had created could never be democratic. In the Shia regions democracy would mean theocracy, in Sunni areas sectarian conflict, and separatism in the Kurdish north. The kingdom Bell created lasted until Nasserite officers murdered the royal family in 1958 two years after the collapse of British power in the region that followed the ill-conceived Franco-British attempt to seize control of the Suez Canal. Saddam’s despotism was based on the same realities of sectarian division and Sunni rule that sustained Bell’s kingdom. Overthrowing the regime meant destroying the state through which it operated and creating the theocracy Bell had warned against. While it was never as fully totalitarian, Saddam’s Iraq was an Enlightenment regime on the lines of Soviet Russia. It was thoroughly secular, the
only state in the Gulf not ruled by Islamic Sharia law but by a western-style legal code, and implacably hostile to Islamism – a fact accepted by the US in the 1980s when it supplied Saddam with weaponry and intelligence in the war with Iran.

Iraq has always been a composite state with deep internal divisions. Though it was more repressive, Saddam’s regime was built on the same foundations as Bell’s kingdom. Saddam held Iraq together while repressing the Shia majority, the Kurds and others. Destroying Saddam’s regime emancipated these groups and left the Iraqi state without power or legitimacy. Democracy was impossible, for it required a degree of trust among the communities that make up the underlying society that did not exist. Minorities need to be assured that they will not be permanent losers, or else they will secede to set up a state of their own. The Kurds were bound to follow this path, and the five million Sunnis were sure to resist majority rule by the Shias. The fissures between these groups were too deep for Iraq’s rickety structures to survive. Nearly everywhere, states that suddenly become democratic tend to break apart, as happened in the USSR and former Yugoslavia. There was never any reason to think Iraq would be different, and by the time of Saddam’s sordid and chaotic execution in December 2006 the Iraqi state had ceased to exist.

Though at every stage it has been joined with a crazed version of
realpolitik
, the neo-conservative project of regime change in Iraq is a classic example of the utopian mind at work. For the neo-conservatives who masterminded the war democracy would come about simply through the overthrow of tyranny. If there were transitional difficulties they could be resolved by applying universal – that is to say, American – principles. Hence the construction of an imaginary structure of federalism that followed. The system that was devised for Iraq expressed a faith in paper constitutions that hardly squares with the history of the United States, which achieved national unity only via the route of civil war.

In practice the Bush administration was clueless. Weeks before the invasion, it had no idea how the country was to be governed. Opinion oscillated between installing a military-style governor on the model of post-war Japan and implementing an immediate transition to democracy. Donald Rumsfeld – a military bureaucrat and American
nationalist rather than any kind of neo-conservative – never had any interest in bringing democracy to Iraq, but equally he had never proposed any strategy for governing the country once the Saddam regime had been overthrown. Replacing Saddam by a military governor – as some British officials suggested – was not a realistic option, for it meant setting up what would in effect be a colonial administration whose longer-term viability would be highly dubious and which the US was in any case predisposed to reject. For a powerful faction in the Bush administration, the war had always been a means of imposing American-style democracy on the country. This was notably true of Paul Wolfowitz. James Mann, author of a study of the self-styled ‘Vulcans’ – the circle of defence strategists who made up George W. Bush’s war cabinet – has written that Wolfowitz

became the administration official most closely associated with the invasion of Iraq. In the midst of the invasion Americans working in the war zone came up with the nickname Wolfowitz of Arabia for the deputy secretary of defence; the phrase captures the degree of intensity, passion and even, it sometimes seemed, romantic fervour with which he pursued the goals of overthrowing Saddam Hussein and bringing democracy to the Middle East.
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For Wolfowitz, the chief architect of the war, the invasion was a prelude to democratizing the entire region. In the event, the incompetence of Bush’s proconsul in Baghdad, Paul Bremer, was so devastating that a sudden move to democracy in Iraq soon came to be accepted as the only way the American administration could pretend to any kind of legitimacy.

In his first communiqués in May 2003 Bremer disbanded the Iraqi Army and sacked Baathist public officials, including university professors and primary school teachers, nurses and doctors. The
Washington Post
’s Pentagon correspondent Thomas E. Ricks has described Bremer’s decision:

… on May 23, Bremer issued CPA (Coalition Provisional Authority) Order Number 2, Dissolution of Iraqi Entities, formally doing away with several groups: the Iraqi armed forces, which accounted for 385,000 people; the staff of the Ministry of the Interior, which amounted to a surprisingly high
285,000 people because it included police and domestic security forces; and the presidential security units, a force of some 50,000 … Many of these men were armed.
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Disbanding Iraqi forces came after Bremer’s Order Number 1 –De-Baathification of Iraq Society – which had barred senior Baathist party members from public office. Taken together, the two orders –which Ricks reports were strongly opposed by the CIA station chief in Baghdad – left over half a million people unemployed. In a country where families average around six people, this meant over two and a half million – about a tenth of the population – lost their income. Bremer appears to have issued the orders on the advice of Ahmed Chalabi, who aimed to install his allies in the positions left vacant.

The effect of Bremer’s orders was to dismantle the Iraqi state. The police and security forces ceased to be national institutions and were captured by sectarian militias, which used them to kidnap, torture and murder. Outside the Green Zone – the high-security area in central Baghdad where the American and British embassies and the coalition-backed Iraq government are located – the country became a zone of anarchy. By the end of 2006 around a hundred people were being killed every day, and according to a UNestimate torture was worse than under Saddam.
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The perception fostered by the Bush administration that Iraq has a fledging government that is rebuilding the country has no basis in reality. The American-backed government is a battleground of sectarian forces, while the Iraqi state has disappeared into history’s memory hole. If Saddam had been assassinated or had died of natural causes, the regime would most likely have survived. By imposing regime change, the Bush administration created a failed state, with a fragile government heavily dependent on the Shia militias – a fact ignored in Bush’s buffoonish criticisms of its policies. The resulting chaos has left the declared goal of the invasion – finding and destroying Saddam’s supposed WMD programme – beyond reach. If Saddam possessed any chemical or biological weapons – as he certainly did in the nineties –they have disappeared along with the state of Iraq.