by Peter Maass
Instead, the pro-shah soldiers were arrested outside Mossadegh’s residence. When dawn broke with news of the failed coup, the shah boarded a twin-engine Beechcraft and fled to Baghdad. Roosevelt, however, did not retreat. Although troops loyal to Mossadegh were deployed throughout Tehran, Roosevelt instructed his agents to organize so-called black crowds to shout support for Mossadegh and communism while beating up bystanders and looting shops. It was a violent smear job. As Roosevelt later wrote, “The more they ravaged the city, the more they angered the great bulk of its inhabitants.”
Roosevelt also paid for other crowds to hit the streets—except these were in favor of law and order and the man who, they proclaimed, would bring it to the now-chaotic city: Shah Reza Pahlavi. A $10,000 bribe was even given to a religious leader to bulk up the proshah crowds with Islamic devotees. Roosevelt had shown a dark genius. Chants of “Death to Mossadegh!” mingled with “Long live the shah!” As CIA rent-a-crowds seized government buildings, pro-shah troops ransacked Mossadegh’s house. With his control of the city lost, the prime minister surrendered. The shah, returning home in triumph, told Roosevelt, “I owe my throne to God, my people, my army—and to you!”
The White House was not foolish enough to raise a “Mission Accomplished” banner, but it was delighted with the ousting of the inconvenient Mossadegh. Yet like the invasion of Iraq a half century later, the intervention led to disaster for America and the Mideast nation whose destiny and oil it hoped to control.
Though on opposing sides of the desert front line in 1990, George H. W. Bush and Saddam Hussein shared a predicament: they could not call the war by its name. Even for a dictator, it is not acceptable to announce that you are going to war to seize another country’s oil. Principled excuses must be offered. Saddam spoke of Iraq’s long-dismissed claim to Kuwait and portrayed the invasion as restoring territory that colonial mapmakers had lopped away. He also accused Kuwait of stealing oil by slant-drilling across the border (that is, drilling at an angle rather than straight down). Officially at least, invading Kuwait for its oil and the power and glory it would bring to Iraq was the last thing on Saddam’s mind.
American marines in the burning oilfields of Kuwait during the Gulf War of 1990-91
Bush was in a bind too, because Americans, horrified when they hear that Kathie Lee Gifford’s clothing line is made with child labor, also do not want to hear that the gas in their SUVs requires the shedding of blood. Such truths were unspeakable, literally. This was acted out years before in the brilliant film Three Days of the Condor, which starred Robert Redford as a naïve CIA researcher and Cliff Robertson as his cynical boss. Redford, learning of CIA killings related to the Middle East, tells Robertson that Americans will not support murder for petroleum. “Ask ’em when they’re running out,” Robertson replies archly. “Ask ’em when there’s no heat in their homes and they’re cold. Ask ’em when their engines stop. Ask ’em when people who have never known hunger start going hungry. You wanna know something? They won’t want us to ask ’em. They’ll just want us to get it for ’em.”
A month after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, President Bush made his case in a speech to Congress. The war would not be for oil but for the rule of law and the sanctity of human rights. Bush quoted from a letter an American soldier, based in Saudi Arabia, had sent to his parents. “I am proud of my country and its firm stance against inhumane aggression,” Private Wade Merritt had written. Bush outlined the steps he would take to “defend civilized values around the world,” and he spoke for the first time of the grand design the war would buttress. “Out of these troubled times,” he said, “a new world order can emerge. … A world quite different from the one we’ve known. A world where the rule of law supplants the rule of the jungle.” He did not mention oil until one-third of the way through his speech, then quickly moved on.
It was true that Iraq’s invasion was illegal and brutish, and that if it was allowed to stand, the post-Cold War era would begin with a major violation of international laws. But international laws were violated every day across the globe. Liberia was being savaged in an atrocity-filled conflict that the White House rarely bothered to condemn. The call to high morals was particularly odd because American soldiers would sacrifice their lives in Kuwait to restore an all-powerful monarchy that had disbanded the parliament and banned political parties. And for years the U.S. government had abetted Saddam’s regime. It was an odd time and an odd place to champion war for democracy. It didn’t add up.
Americans sensed this; they were not persuaded about the need to go to war, according to opinion polls at the time. Something else was needed. A month after Bush’s “new world order” speech, a poster child for war emerged. Nayirah, a teenage Kuwaiti girl, testified at a congressional hearing. She tearfully recounted what she’d seen while visiting Al-Adan Hospital before slipping out of occupied Kuwait: “I saw the Iraqi soldiers come into the hospital with guns. They took the babies out of the incubators, took the incubators and left the children to die on the cold floor.” Nayirah’s last name was not disclosed because, the hearing’s organizers said, her relatives trapped in Kuwait would face retribution from the Iraqis.
Nayirah’s testimony spread across America in TV broadcasts and newspaper stories. It went viral. An Amnesty International report (later retracted) raised to more than three hundred the number of infants removed from incubators. Bush reinforced the theme, saying during a speech at Pearl Harbor (no less) that dialysis patients were ripped from their machines and twenty-two babies died after being taken from incubators. In the debate before the Senate voted by a slim margin, 52–47, to approve the Gulf War, seven senators cited the incubator story.
There was just one problem. Like the tales of German soldiers bayoneting Belgian babies during World War I, and like the stories of weapons of mass destruction in 2003, it wasn’t true.
Nayirah was the daughter of Kuwait’s ambassador to the United States and a member of the royal family. Her testimony was arranged by Citizens for a Free Kuwait, which, despite its populist name, was a front created by the royal family to channel more than $10 million to the public relations firm Hill & Knowlton for a campaign in favor of war. Nayirah’s story was shown to be a fabrication. The hospital had only a few incubators at the time, and according to the hospital staff Iraqi soldiers did not throw babies onto the floor.
To generate support for the war, President Bush was obliged to obscure the truth from the public, just as his son would feel obliged to massage the facts twelve years later. Privately, President Bush was honest. Before major military or diplomatic moves, American presidents tend to issue national security directives that circulate at the highest levels of government. If you want to know the truth of war and peace, these secret directives are more useful than public speeches, and thanks to the Freedom of Information Act, it is occasionally possible to know their contents. In National Security Directive 54, issued a month before the liberation of Kuwait, President Bush mentioned oil in the first line and never mentioned incubators or democracy. “Access to Persian Gulf oil and the security of key friendly states in the area are vital to U.S. national security,” NSD 54 began. “The United States remains committed to defending its vital interests in the region, if necessary through the use of military force, against any power with interests inimical to our own.”
On February 24, 1991, a coalition led by a half million American troops crossed into Kuwait and routed Iraqi forces in one hundred hours of ground warfare. As they retreated, Saddam’s army set alight more than six hundred wells. The battlefield was bathed in oil.
For Iraqis, the Gulf War of 1990-91 was not an anomaly in the annals of oil and invasion. Osama Kashmoula was thinking of even more distant events when I found him at the Oil Ministry in 2003.
The ministry’s leadership, handpicked by Saddam, had gone into hiding, leaving senior technocrats like Kashmoula to do what they could to get things going in the postinvasion vacuum. It had been just a few days since the events of
Firdos Square. I heard Kashmoula’s voice at the end of a corridor that had the vacant, unpeopled feel of a ghost town. A breeze rustled through windows shattered by the shock waves of bombs. His office door was open and he was shouting into a satellite phone that had been lent to him by an American officer. Kashmoula was a short and thickset man in his fifties, and like most of Iraq’s engineers he was fluent in English. It was one of the odd facts of life that outlaw Iraq was home to some of the best engineers in the gulf. Saddam’s regime, before achieving its rogue status, had sent its most promising students to British and American universities for postgraduate training, and decades of war and sanctions had turned these men and women into ingenious desperados. They were the MacGyvers of the oil world.
The least surprising thing about Kashmoula was that he was an optimist. Nationality does not matter; all oilmen are optimists. It stems from digging a dozen dry holes before striking oil, and from the tremendous hazards that are regularly overcome to extract the treasured liquid. Oil is beneath layers of Alaskan ice? No problem. It is under treacherous seas off Sakhalin Island? A way will be found to get it. In the middle of a desert? It shall be extracted forthwith. Trained with this mind-set, Kashmoula was hopeful for the future because United Nations sanctions that had strangled Iraq would be lifted and America, with its world-class technology, would open its arms. He recalled visiting Russia a few years earlier and realizing that Russia’s best machinery came from Germany. If things worked out right, Iraq would be rebuilt with Western hardware and would produce more oil than ever before and make everyone happy—not just Iraqis, who would become rich, but also Americans, who would have a new friend in the Mideast and cheap gas in their cars.
Yet Kashmoula was bothered by one thing.
“The Americans and British are talking to the Iraqi people as though we are naïve,” he said. “You say you are here to free us, but this is ridiculous.”
His face assumed a knowing look, somewhere between a scold and a laugh. He mentioned Stanley Maude, the general who led British troops into Baghdad in 1917. Maude is all but unknown in America and little remembered in Britain, but Iraqis memorize his role in their history. Before the end of World War I, Baghdad was a regional capital of the tottering Ottoman Empire. Maude led a British expeditionary force into the city, signaling its involuntary transfer into the custody of the British crown. Maude soon issued his Proclamation of Baghdad, in which he stated, “Our armies do not come into your cities and lands as conquerors or enemies, but as liberators.” Later that year, Maude died from cholera, one of the first victims of his own triumph.
It was an odd liberation. The League of Nations soon recognized the newly created Iraq but placed it under a British mandate. The British imposed a Sunni king even though Sunnis were a minority, and this prompted the first Iraqi insurgency of the twentieth century, in which Kurds and Shiites fought their foreign occupiers. Iraq gained quasi independence in 1932 but British troops remained, because among the country’s attractions, a massive oil field had been found near Kirkuk. Maude’s evocation of the harsh Ottoman period that preceded British intervention—“your forefathers and yourselves have groaned in bondage”—predated by almost a century the 2003 speeches of George W. Bush, who also offered a liberation narrative to justify his occupation.
Kashmoula pointed to the bullet holes in the chairs and walls of his office, the consequence of negligent strafing. “They could have been more surgical,” he said wryly. What offended him most was not the invasion’s violence or his need to acquire new furniture but the excuse, first evoked by Maude, that foreign incursions were for the sake of freedom and democracy. “We are educated,” Kashmoula said with a smile. “I lived in the West for more than seven years. We know you have certain targets and reasons for coming here. We have oil and you need it. The whole world is built around oil, so let’s talk about it honestly.”
A few weeks later, I saw Kashmoula again in a conference room at the ministry, which was finally bouncing back to life. With April turning to May, more workers were allowed to return to their desks, though marines frisked everyone who entered and exited, lest they bring in bombs or carry out secrets. The conference room, off the marble-floored lobby, had become the setting for a series of first dates in which Iraqi officials met American experts who represented the occupying power but stressed that they were advisers rather than bosses. The irony (or significance) was lost on no one that the first senior American to meet Kashmoula and other top ministry officials was a former ExxonMobil executive, Gary Vogler, who arrived at the ministry one day with a crew cut, flak jacket and bodyguards. Walking into the conference room, Vogler encountered more than a dozen Iraqis and attacked them with a firm handshake.
“Oh, you’re the guy we need to work with,” Vogler told one of the Iraqis, pumping his hand enthusiastically.
“Good, good,” he told another, moving farther around the table.
“Great, we’ve got work to do with you,” he said to yet one more.
And so he circled the room, issuing superlatives rather than directives. Tea was served. I was nudged out of the room, but Kashmoula had already told me that occupier-to-occupied commands were not necessary. The Americans and Iraqis in the ministry shared the same short-term goal, to get oil flowing again. Whether Iraq would withdraw from OPEC, whether it would privatize its fields, whether American firms would receive preferential deals, whether the invasion was for petroleum rather than democracy—for oilmen, these issues were secondary to the task of repairing damaged wells and pipelines.
Yet something odd was happening. The passing inconvenience of postinvasion looting was turning into a permanent condition. A ministry official, Mohammed Aboush, who was responsible for the northern portion of Iraq’s oil industry and who was in the conference room with Vogler, told me afterward that his car had been stolen, and that when he traveled to Kirkuk, a hundred miles away, he took a taxi because he didn’t want to risk losing another vehicle. Where oil still flowed, smugglers tapped into pipelines. Where it didn’t flow, looters walked off with the pipelines, selling them as scrap metal. Iraq was now in the ironic situation of importing gasoline from Kuwait, yet even so—and here humiliation was piled onto disgrace—people waited for days in dystopian lines stretching for miles to buy some of it. Iraq had joined Nigeria and Iran in the dumbfounded ranks of oil exporters that had to import gasoline. “We had meetings with KBR,” Aboush said, referring to the Halliburton subsidiary responsible for helping to patch up the oil industry. “They took notes of our problems and promised to look into it. But they are very bureaucratic. So far, nothing. The chain of command”—Aboush broke into laughter at this—“even Mr. Bush cannot do anything, apparently.”
Aboush’s office reflected the chaos that continued to linger in the country. His computer and his wall decorations, which had vanished during the fall of the regime, had not been replaced. Before U.N. sanctions had been imposed in the 1990s, Aboush had been responsible for evaluating the bids of foreign companies; he’d realized that the worst were Chinese and Russian (“lousy, incompetent”) while the best were American. The French were technologically adept but financially unsavory—they would cheat their grandmothers, Aboush said. Of course, none of this mattered back then, as Saddam awarded contracts for political rather than technological reasons. Things worsened once U.N. sanctions limited Iraq’s industrial partners to shady firms willing to operate on the margins of international law. The invasion, Aboush hoped, would change everything. As he wishfully told me, “Instead of giving contracts to people who don’t know the difference between oil and fish and chips, we will be deciding between Exxon and Conoco.”
Yet Aboush was not enjoying the luxury of such choices. The famous disarray of the occupation—the lack of troops to provide security, the scarcity and cluelessness of reconstruction experts—plagued the oil sector, too. Vogler, the former Exxon executive, did not appear in Baghdad until weeks after U.S. troops, and he arrived without a boss. It wasn’t until early May t
hat Philip Carroll, a former chief executive of Shell, was named as the top American oil adviser, and he didn’t get to Baghdad until weeks after that. The midlevel American official through whom I tried to arrange interviews with Vogler and Carroll was hobbled by the fact that he shared a computer and satellite phone with several other occupation officials, and he did not have his own vehicle to travel between the ministry and the American headquarters at the Republican Palace, a few miles away. With my own laptop, sat phone and SUV, I was better equipped than a key official in the postoccupation oil hierarchy. This was not how Aboush imagined an invading superpower would manage the world’s third-largest reserve of oil.
Aboush, who was as round as he was tall and as warm as he was round, launched into an explanation of the attractions of Iraq’s oil. He talked of the vast stretches of desert that had not yet been probed, he noted the attractive shallow depths of the nation’s reservoirs, he emphasized the low cost of extraction, he praised the prowess of American firms—“even without arm twisting, they will get the contracts”—and he said world prices would fall once oil flooded out of rebuilt Iraq. Why did he bother mentioning the obvious? It struck me that Aboush was urging more American attention to Iraq’s oil rather than less. His main fear wasn’t that Iraq’s petroleum would be owned by Halliburton but that it would be ignored by Bush. An expert in what happens above-ground as well as below, Aboush sensed that Iraq’s geological potential might be defeated by its geopolitical dilemma. “We are one of the wealthiest countries in the world, but our wealth has not been used well,” he noted. “Oil has not been a blessing. Without oil, we would not have had these wars. But I am a patriot. I want to see my oil spent on my people.”