Global Policy Forum

By Linda Diebel

Any day now, there will be bombs falling on Baghdad. Conventional bombs like nothing the world has ever seen. "The bombs will still be ringing in their ears when the 'Third Mech' shows up,'' says U.S. military analyst John Pike, of Iraq's Saddam Hussein and whatever's left of his so-called elite Republican Guard after the first days of aerial pulverization. "The Third Mech will be driving down the main drag in Baghdad.''

Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, describes an assault on Saddam's regime that begins with "shock-and-awe'' aerial bombardment, and quickly moves into crush mode with the Third Infantry Division (Mechanized) rolling up from the Kuwaiti desert and U.S. Marines storming the port city of Basra. "Chances are 90 per cent it will go pretty quickly, and 10 per cent it will turn into one big holy mess,'' predicts Pike. But, before turning to the combat debut of bombs that weigh about 9,000 kilos and can take out an entire battalion, consider why the United States is going to war. Consider who drew up U.S. goals and objectives in the Persian Gulf, when, and why.

Consider oil.

This particular operation — Pentagon working title: "OpPlan 10-03-Victor" — has been on the drawing board for a year, according to defence officials. The immediate goal is disarming Iraq and getting rid of Saddam. It's expected to begin soon, this week or next. Hard to hold back more than 300,000 U.S. and British troops, in place and pumped to go. But the long-term goal, say big-picture analysts, has been in the works for far more than the 23 years since former U.S. president Jimmy Carter linked American security — "the vital interests of the United States'' — to the Persian Gulf and its oil, and threatened military intervention.

This war, say analysts, is about power and oil. It's about control of the Gulf states by means of strategic Iraq and, by extension, a final post-Cold War shakeout to give the U.S. more economic clout over China and Russia by controlling the oil spigot. This is the moment, Thomas Barnett, from the U.S. Naval War College, wrote recently in Esquire magazine, "when Washington takes real ownership of strategic security in the age of globalization.'' The Persian Gulf has the world's biggest oil reserves. After Saudi Arabia, Iraq has the second-largest proven reserves.

"The only precedent to what is shaping up now is the Roman Empire,'' says Michael Klare, professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College. "There is only one power. I don't think Britain, France or Spain even came close in other centuries to the United States today. "If the United States controls Persian Gulf oil fields, it will have a stranglehold on the world economy,'' adds Klare. Washington is betting, Klare believes, that "controlling Gulf oil, combined with being a decade ahead of everybody else in military technology, will guarantee American supremacy for the next 50 to 100 years.''

These ideas aren't new.

For years, a small and powerful group, with corporate and political links, pushed the idea of controlling Persian Gulf oil. They did it publicly, at think-tanks and in the media. Now, this coterie of like-minded strategists controls both the Pentagon and the strategic aims of President George W. Bush's White House. "You've got a team in the White House that is unafraid of world public opinion because they know it is unreliable, self-serving and hypocritical,'' says George Friedman, chair of the intelligence organization, Stratfor.

Originally, this was the "Kissinger plan,'' says James Akins, former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia. He lost his state department job for publicly criticizing administration plans to control Arab oil back in 1975 when Henry Kissinger was secretary of state. "I thought they were crazy then and they're crazy now,'' Akins tells the Star, adding that Congress studied plans to control Persian Gulf oil and concluded the idea was absolute madness. "I thought this whole thing was dead. But now you've got all these `neo-cons' in power, and here we go again,'' says Akins, a Washington-based consultant. "They figure once they take over Iraq, they don't have to worry about the Saudis.''

Akins adds: "These people with their imperial ideas see themselves as part of the Great American Empire." The players have moved steadily through the Republican presidencies of Ronald Reagan and Bush's father, George H.W. Bush and Bush himself. They include: Vice-president Richard Cheney, a former oilman, like Bush, and defence secretary during his father's Persian Gulf War in 1991; Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, once Reagan's personal emissary to the Middle East when Saddam was a U.S. friend and staunch ally; Rumsfeld's deputy Paul Wolfowitz, who began publicly calling for war against Iraq after the 9/11 terror attacks; and Richard Perle, chair of the Pentagon's Defence Policy Board, nicknamed the "Prince of Darkness'' for his political stick-handling.

They are joined by think-tankers from organizations such as the Project for the New American Century, the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) and the American Enterprise Institute. Bush recently chose an American Enterprise Institute forum, rather than the White House, to deliver a major prime-time speech to the American people to make the case for war. Bush often mentions Iraqi oil, a jarring focus for a president on the brink of war.

"We will seek to protect Iraq's natural resources from sabotage from a dying regime and ensure they are used for the benefit of Iraq's own people,'' he said in last week's radio address. Colin Robinson, an analyst with the Washington-based Centre for Defence Information, says: "The United States can stand well-accused of trying to dominate the whole region for its oil. But conspiracy theories are usually too complicated for everybody to carry them off." Friedman says the 1991 war left unfinished business, the "status quo'' of Saddam in power. Not so this time, he says, in a war which, as U.N. diplomats dither, has already begun.

In recent weeks, British and U.S. warplanes strayed outside "no-fly'' zones to bomb Iraqi surface-to-air missiles. Robinson describes these zones, set up by the U.S. and Britain after Desert Storm as "barely legal'' in terms of international law. As well, U.N. officials report violations of the demilitarized zone between Iraq and Kuwait by U.S. soldiers. But the real devastation should begin within days.

"We've got everything we need. We're just waiting on the word, the decision from the president," Maj.-Gen. Buford Blount, commander of the 3rd Infantry Division, told the Washington Post last week from Kuwait. First comes aerial bombardment, an extraordinary 1,500 bombs every 24 hours during the time it takes heavy mechanized divisions to move up from Kuwait to Baghdad. Big heavy bombers, from Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, buttressed by screaming navy and air force jets will pound Iraqi sites, picked by aerial drones and U.S. and British Special Forces already in Iraq. Defence contractors are eager to test out new gadgetry. One new bomb is the 9,000-kilo MOAB (Massive Ordnance Air Burst). "Well, it's very efficient,'' says Friedman. "Let's say you've got a large concentration of Republican Guard units, instead of having to do repeated bombing sorties, you can take out a battalion (500 to 600 troops) with one bomb.''

Friedman's sources in theatre tell him there are "terrific fights between defence department officials and field commanders who are raring to go now.'' He says time is the enemy of troops in the field. Sandstorms at the end of March, for example, could play havoc with laser targeting systems. Without the anticipated "northern front'' through Turkey, there are plans for C-130s to ferry troops to northern Iraq, as well as missions for U.S. Marines and Special Forces to secure oil sites throughout Iraq. "The U.S. military cannot be defeated on the conventional battlefield,'' says military analyst Pike. But what about the variables? How much of a threat is Saddam? What about chemical and biological weapons? "We gonna find out,'' says Pike.

Meanwhile, Iraqi exiles, opposed to Saddam, have been meeting with U.S. and British oil executives, promising access and leases in return for political power. And, the U.S., as Friedman points out, on the brink of world hegemony, is going to find out who its friends are. "I do so enjoy Canadians (against the war) getting so obsessed with human rights, and then pay no attention to places like Venezuela,'' says Friedman, who thinks Venezuela's Hugo Chavez is next on Bush's military agenda. "I read the Canadian press and I wonder what planet your country is on. "We have allies, and we are going to see who they are,'' he concludes. "If France, if Canada, can't support us in opposition to Saddam Hussein, you can't say you are our allies. Canada consistently says it's an ally of the United States of America ... we'll see, won't we?''