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THE BATTLE FOR IRAQI OlL US Corporate Skulduggery since WWI Oi THE BATTLE IRAQI FOR US Corporate Skulduggery since WWI The Bush administration's current warmongering stance against Iraq has a history that can be traced back to the carve-up of Iraqi oil at the end of World War I. ow and why did US involvement in Iraq begin? In all the countless hours the corporate media devote to broadcasting the Bush administration's lies and deceits about Iraq, that simple and crucial question is almost never addressed. And for good reason. Since its very beginning eight decades ago, US policy toward Iraq has been intensely focused on one objective: taking control of that country's rich oil resources. The roots of US intervention in Iraq lie in the aftermath of World War I. It was a war between capitalist empires. On one side were the German, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman (Turkish) empires. On the other side was the British-French—Russian imperial entente. Most of the Middle East was under Ottoman control. The British, through their agent T. E. Lawrence—known to moviegoers as "Lawrence of Arabia"—promised Arab leaders that if they fought with Britain against their Turkish rulers, the British would support the creation of an independent Arab state after the war. At the same time, the British, French and Russian foreign ministries were secretly sign- ing the Sykes—Picot agreement. Sykes—Picot re-carved the Middle East. The agreement was made public after the Russian Revolution of 1917 by the Bolshevik Party, which denounced it as imperialist. Mass revolts broke out all over the Middle East when the Arab and Kurdish peoples discovered their betrayal at the hands of the imperial "democracies". The rebellions con- tinued throughout the colonial period. Repression was brutal in the extreme. In 1925, for instance, the British dropped poison gas on the Kurdish town of Sulaimaniya in Iraq—the first time that gas was deployed from warplanes. BRITAIN AND FRANCE DIVIDE UP THE MIDDLE EAST After the war ended in 1918, Britain and France proceeded with their plans. Lebanon and Syria, they agreed, would be incorporated into the French Empire. Palestine, Jordan and the two southern provinces of Iraq—Baghdad and Basra—would become part of the far-flung British Empire. What they didn't agree about was who would get Mosul province, the northern area of present-day Iraq. According to the Sykes—Picot accord, it was part of the French "sphere of influence". The British were determined, however, to add Mosul, which was mainly Kurdish in population, to their new Iraq colony. To back its claim, the British Army occupied Mosul four days after the Turkish surrender in October 1918—and never left. The resolution of the inter-imperialist struggle between Britain and France over Mosul brought with it the beginning of the US role in Iraq. Mosul's importance to the big powers was based on its known, but as of then largely undeveloped, oil resources. The United States had entered World War I on the side of Britain and France in 1917, after both its allies and enemies were largely exhausted. US conditions for entering the war included the demand that its economic and political objec- tives be taken into account in the postwar world. Among those objectives was access to new sources of raw materials, particularly oil. In February 1919, Sir Arthur Hirtzel, a top British colonial official, warned his associates: "It should be borne in mind that the Standard Oil Company is very anxious to take over Iraq." (Quoted in Peter Sluglett, Britain in Iraq, 1914-32, London, 1974.) In the face of the British-French domination of the region, the United States at first demanded an "Open Door" policy. US oil companies should be allowed to negotiate by Richard Becker © 2002 Reprinted from Workers World October31, 2002 Workers World News Service Email: ww@wwpublish.com Website: http://www.workers.org Reprinted from Workers World October31, 2002 Workers World News Service Email: ww@wwpublish.com Website: http://www.workers.org NEXUS = 21 by Richard Becker © 2002 DECEMBER 2002 — JANUARY 2003 www.nexusmagazine.com