by Greg Palast
Unlike the wussies at State, these were real warriors, unafraid of moving toy tanks around the Pentagon War Room. Bush Security Advisor Michael Ledeen, one of the desktop Napoleons, encouraged his fellow neo-cons with this rallying cry,
Wage a total war… and our children will sing great songs about us years from now.
It was inspiring but not original. “Wollt ihr den totalen Krieg?” Do you want total war? Joseph Goebbels asked his Nazi Party faithful in February 1943. Two years later, the total warriors of 1943 would be crushed. But in November 2001, after the easy conquest of Afghanistan, total war looked like a cakewalk, and the neo-conservatives exploited the patriotic, triumphal mood to draft their “Plan B” for Iraq.
Plan B: “Especially the Oil”
It was nothing like State’s three-day quickie. The neo-cons’ 101-page confidential document goes boldly where no invasion plan had gone before: the complete rewrite of the conquered state’s “policies, laws and regulations.” Here’s a sample:
Pages 8 & 21: A big income tax cut for Iraq’s wealthiest and complete elimination of taxes on business revenues.
Pages 35 & 73: The quick sale of Iraq’s banks, bridges and water companies to foreign operators.
Page 45: The application for Iraq to join the World Trade Organization, kindly ghostwritten by U.S. government contractors.
Page 28: A “market-friendly” customs law—a kind of super-NAFTA—aiming for a complete wipeout of tariffs that had protected Iraq’s industry from cheap foreign imports.
Page 44: New copyright laws protecting foreign (i.e., American) software, music and drug companies
Odd to attach to an invasion plan. It was more like a corporate takeover, except with Abrams tanks instead of junk bonds. There wasn’t a whole lot of thinking going on about strengthening the borders against insurgents, disarming private armies or securing Baghdad from looters; and not a thing about elections or “democracy.” Instead, there was much about securing a “market-friendly regulatory environment” and “strengthening property rights-related legislation, corporate and contract law.”
The draft that came my way, in February 2003, just as our tanks were about to cross Iraq’s border, has a pleasant title: “Moving the Iraqi Economy from Recovery to Sustainable Growth.”
What would get “moved”? Selling off banks and bridges was just the beginning. The would-be conquistadors left nothing to chance—or to the Iraqis. At page 74, the plan’s authors required Iraq to “privatize” (i.e., sell off) “all state-owned companies.” In Iraq, that’s just about everything worth having.
And it would all be open to foreign ownership. That would be convenient for Anglo-American bidders. Post-invasion, Iraqis with their just-about-worthless Saddam dinars would have nothing to bid with anyway.
All this—from the big asset sell-off to the World Trade application—would have to take longer than the State Department’s three-days-slam-bam invasion plan. According to Annex D of the plan, the schedule, economic conquest would take 270 to 360 days. Logically, that would require 270 to 360 days of American boots on the ground, a year of full-scale occupation before Iraq could be given back to the Iraqis.
And certainly, this full year of occupation would be needed for the big prize targeted on page 73:
…privatization, asset sales, concessions, leases and management contracts, especially those in the oil and supporting industries.
Especially the oil: complete and total sell-off of Iraq’s oil assets from the pipes to the pumps to the crude in the ground.
The Plan makes it clear to me that, even if we didn’t go into Iraq for the oil, we sure as hell weren’t leaving without it.
Nose-Twist’s Hidden Hand
The document gave off a strange odor. The weird details gave it away. I smelled Grover Norquist.
Norquist is the capo di tutti capi of lobbyists of the rich and the Right. In Washington, every Wednesday, Norquist, former lobbyist for Bill Gates and for American Express, hosts a powwow of big business political operatives, conservative media moguls, the National Rifle Association and right-wing muscle groups. Officially, he fronts Americans for Tax Reform, a kind of trade union for billionaires (he won’t name them) whose cause is a regressive “flat-tax” scheme to cap income taxes on the super-rich.
Plan B: Neo-Con’s Oil Field Sell-Off
Neo-Cons planned to create a Chile on the Tigris, a free-market miracle including “privatization,” i.e., the sell-off of all state-owned enterprises, “especially those in the oil and supporting industries.” This is a confidential draft copy from February 2001.
Karl Rove calls him, with admiration, “The Impresario.” You could call him “Satan’s lobbyist,” but that would be wrong. After all, his Wednesday group includes the Lord’s designated representatives, Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition. Indeed, the devout Norquist channeled nearly a million dollars from his tax group to the Alabama Christian Coalition to fight the devil’s tool, legalized gambling. He didn’t tell them he got the cash from an Indian tribe running a casino in Mississippi that didn’t want competition in next-door Alabama. But then, the “Christians” didn’t ask.
Who drafted the extraordinary “Economy Plan”? The Defense Department flat-out denied involvement, but after a week of calls, our research team (working for BBC TV London, Rolling Stone, and Harper’s magazine, New York) reached a diplomat in Kazakhstan, a State Department man, who confirmed that the Pentagon had barged in on the drafting. If the Pentagon was in on it, that meant neo-cons were involved. And if neo-cons were toying with another nation’s assets, Norquist was certain to be circling nearby, salivating for a taste of the asset action. I’d picked up that several likely lobbyists were hanging their balls on this Christmas tree, but the “reform” of Iraq’s taxes—from soak the rich to fleece the poor—carried the unmistakable fingerprints of Norquist’s soft little hands.
Acting on this scant info, I took a chance and dropped by the super-lobbyist’s Washington office tower on L Street. Norquist greeted me under a huge wall-spanning photo of his idol, Richard Nixon, with the disturbing slogan, “Nixon—NOW MORE THAN EVER.”
With his pudgy red freckled face under a Dennis-the-Menace hairdo, Norquist looked like an oversized toddler. His rivals call him Gopher Nose-Twist, but they’re just jealous of Norquist’s ability to auction off access to the White House.
As Nixon’s eyes followed us to his desk, Grover saw the 101-page Iraq plan in my hand and beamed. His baby! Rather than attempt to cover his involvement, he nearly autographed it. He couldn’t wait, now that I was in on the secret, to boast how he’d waltzed with ease through the Pentagon, the Treasury and the State Department, busy for months before the invasion, planning Iraq’s economy for the Iraqis.
In Iraq, the neo-con plan would create a private enterprise utopia in Mesopotamia. The model, said Norquist, was Chile under General Augusto Pinochet.
Chile’s low-tax free-trade property-rights model led to its growth…even though at the time it was not fully democratic.
Not fully democratic is one way of putting it. Pinochet, a South American Saddam Hussein, created his free-market “miracle” in 1973 after he murdered Chile’s elected president and executed 3,000 dissenters. The Chile model is indeed instructive of what was in store for Iraq. Pinochet’s cronies plundered the government’s assets and drove the nation into a deep depression. But Norquist found the free-market “deregulation” that the dictator ordered very much to his liking. Iraq, he decided, could do with a little of the Pinochet treatment.
In all fairness to the rottweiler of the radical right, the hidden plan had an unwitting public proponent stationed within the influential liberal chatterati. The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman also pumped for democracy à la Pinochet in Iraq. “Economic reform” first, vote later, he wrote in his column. For Friedman, “economic reform” translates to privatization, asset sales and free market rigmarole. Now that we’ve seized Baghdad, U.S. occupiers…
…
should not focus on holding national elections—the hardware of democracy. Elections should come last. Instead, it must start with the software.
Software? “Free press, free speech,” Friedman begins promisingly, but, first and foremost, “economic reform”; which Friedman defines as lots of deregulation and privatization.
While star columnist Friedman was motivated by his dilettante’s exuberance for economics lessons half learned, Norquist’s well-heeled backers and corporate allies would have had different motives: Undoubtedly, they would have expected something tangible from their investments in Washington politicians. And they got it. Through the Economy Plan, Iraq became Pig Heaven with something for everybody in corporate America. This was undoubtedly history’s first military assault plan appended to a program for toughening the target nation’s copyright laws. This change in “intellectual property” rules suggested by Norquist means that nevermore would Iraqi Ba’athists threaten America with bootleg dubs of Britney Spears’s “…Baby One More Time.”
Wolfowitz’s Gusher
Whether it’s Wal-Mart or war, Americans just can’t pass up a bargain. As tanks rolled toward Baghdad, Paul Wolfowitz offered America the Bargain of the Century: a free Iraq—not “free” in the sense of “freedom and democracy” but free in the sense of this won’t cost us a penny.
On March 27, 2003, the Deputy Secretary of Defense testified:
There’s a lot of money to pay for this that doesn’t have to be U.S. taxpayer money.
And where would these billions and billions come from?
It starts with the assets of the Iraqi people. We’re dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction and relatively soon.
We could bomb them and then the wrecked nation would pay to rebuild itself—free of charge to the USA!
Now, wait a minute. The President’s own Chief Economist, Larry Lindsey, had said a war in Iraq could cost $100 billion. The Bush Administration corrected Lindsey’s error: He was fired.
Lindsey, apparently, didn’t figure in the Black Gold. Wolfowitz, by contrast, gushed before Congress:
The oil revenues of that country could bring between $50 and $100 billion over the next two or three years.
This was no small matter. The vulpine Deputy Secretary was the Bush team’s salesman-in-chief for the war. For Europeans, the question of invading Iraq was a joust over whether Saddam did or did not have evil germs and nukes. U.S. Congressional debate fixed on the weightier issue, “What’s this little war going to cost us?” There was no way the Senate would vote to authorize an adventure with a price tag of $100 billion.
That’s when Wolfowitz made oil spring forth from the desert.
Wolfowitz said it and the sheep-o-witz press published it. The sale was made and Congress voted for Wolfowitz’s invasion on the cheap.
The Wall Street Journal editorial page went further: The invasion would be cheaper than free. With the colossal oil strike Wolfowitz promised we’d find in Iraq, it stood to reason that the price of oil would fall worldwide. The invasion would not only be free to the U.S. taxpayer, gasoline would flow like discounted milk and honey into our SUVs. But I had some questions. Between Lindsey’s calculations in September 2002, and Wolfowitz’s testimony in March 2003, who discovered this massive oil windfall? Who said that Iraq could pump that much oil?
“Nobody ever said that,” Aljibury told me, speaking of his hidden group of oil experts working with the State Department. Well, what did the experts tell Wolfowitz?
Looking back, it’s easy to say Wolfowitz was wrong: stunningly, breathtakingly, eye-poppingly wrong. The bill for Bush’s big adventure in Iraq has taken over a quarter trillion dollars from the U.S. taxpayer. Wrong is one thing. Anyone can make a mistake. But if Wolfowitz was told one thing in his ear but something else came out of his mouth, that could be perjury.
We wanted to find out what Wolfowitz had been told—the Administration’s real working numbers for Iraq’s potential oil production. These would have come from Guy Caruso, head of the Energy Information Administration. Caruso, a source informed us, was stunned to hear Wolfowitz’s oil-gusher claims. The informer, a Saudi intelligence operative I reached by phone in Riyadh, said, “Guy Caruso, he was like ‘what are they getting this from?’”
But Caruso, who’d come to the Energy Information Administration job from the CIA, knew how to keep a secret. Caruso’s little secret—that Iraq could not produce what Wolfowitz promised—was significant. Just as significant, the Saudis, not the U.S. Congress, knew about it. “Leading up to the war,” the Riyadh source told me, “I was just giving the Saudi view on this. I was [saying], ‘You gotta be joking, right?’”
Some joke. In March 2004, I flew to Washington to ask Caruso himself about what Wolfowitz knew and when he knew it. It was Caruso’s job to project those Iraq figures for the Pentagon. At his Energy Department office suite, an affable, sharp and very guarded Caruso led me through an enchanting forest of technical details—“West Texas Intermediate,” “7-11 buy-back,” “bandwidth”—which, when I did the arithmetic, got us less than halfway to Wolfowitz’s magic $50 billion. Did Caruso give the Deputy Defense Secretary this bad news? Knowing where I was heading, he passed the buck to “my numbers man, Bob Ebel,” who had performed the calculations and carried them, in confidence, to the Defense Department, Wolfowitz’s warriors.
That grabbed my attention: Robert Ebel doesn’t work for the government. I found Ebel at the Washington Center for Strategic and International Studies, one of those think tanks where our betters choose our wars for us. It’s an ecumenical house of power worship. Its fellows include National Security Advisor Richard Allen, former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, Nixon’s chief-of-staff and Reagan-era Secretary of State Alexander Haig, and a “Henry Kissinger chair” for them to sit in funded by corporate donors. Ebel is no hands-off think-tank egghead. For eleven years, Ebel was the CIA’s brain on oil. Other posts of influence followed, including fourteen years with international energy giant ENSERCH Corp.
With Caruso’s unofficial approval, Ebel agreed to speak with me. He said he’d been quietly dispatched in 2002 and 2003 to London and elsewhere by the Pentagon to meet with Saddam’s former Minister of oil and his “Future of Iraq Group.” How odd. In September 2002, the State Department insisted to The Washington Post that the U.S.-sponsored Future of Iraq Group “does not have oil on its list of issues.”
State Department pronouncements notwithstanding, Ebel last met with Saddam’s former oil minister Fadhil Chalabi before Wolfowitz testified. Fadhil Chalabi (not to be confused with Ahmad Chalabi), in frustrating exile in London, had big plans for Iraq’s oil. You could read Chalabi’s thoughts in a report on the target nation’s petroleum industry. He sold copies for $52,000 each, with lunch and a seminar thrown in. Given Chalabi’s influence over the Pentagon’s team of handpicked rulers-to-be, it was an offer oil companies could not refuse.
Ebel didn’t need a copy. He had clearance and access to the CIA reports showing Saddam’s fields in a crippled state. Repairs and new equipment for a big new drilling push, Ebel knew, could eat up $40 billion, more than Iraq could sell in years. The get-together was less than pleasant. Ebel told Fadhil and his chums flat out that their projections of pumping three to three and a half million barrels a day out of a post-invasion Iraq were “ridiculous.”
Fadhil Chalabi didn’t want to hear that. There was more at stake in the big numbers than flim flamming a docile Congress. Joining Fadhil in the meeting with Ebel in London was Ibrahim Bahr al-Ulum, son of a top Iraqi sheik. He was quiet and subservient, and nodded, grinned and agreed when Fadhil spoke. The sheik’s son had plans to sell off Iraq’s oil fields as soon as the 82nd Airborne had them in hand. The sell-off was worth billions of dollars—maybe a trillion to Iraq. The wannabe rulers’ trillion-dollar oil field sell-off hung precariously from Wolfowitz’s phantasmagorical projections of the amount that could be pumped.
Which takes us back to our original questio
n: Was it madly wrong or was he trying to mislead Congress? If Fadhil Chalabi’s oil projections were “ridiculous,” what would Ebel call Wolfowitz’s testimony promising up to $100 billion in oil profits to pay for reconstruction? After our formal television interview for BBC was over, I asked Ebel, What about the Wolfowitz numbers? Ebel smiled. “It was just part of the sales pitch, wasn’t it?”
The sales pitch. War for sale—cheap!
You could say that one man’s sales pitch is another man’s perjury. If Wolfowitz had knowingly concealed the Caruso team’s findings while testifying under oath, the question of perjury arises. In fact, another Bush neo-con poobah, Elliott Abrams, was convicted in 1991 of lying under oath to Congress over selling arms to Iran. But no need to worry yourself with these weighty questions. Wolfowitz can’t be guilty of perjury. Since Abrams’ conviction, Wolfowitz and other Bush boys do not testify to Congress under oath.
He did not raise his hand and swear to “tell the whole truth, so help me, God,” he’s off the hook. How the Lord will judge Wolfowitz’s testimony, we cannot say.
PART 2
CHICAGO TAKES BAGHDAD
On March 17, 2003, President George Bush gave Saddam and his sons 48 hours to get out of Baghdad—or we were coming in to take him out. Like a scene from High Noon: forty-eight hours to get out of Dodge.