Oil Crusades

Abdulhay Yahya Zalloum

Description

Oil is the lifeblood of modern economics. It is the precious resource at the heart of empire-building, from the British empire to the American empire today and underpins the world's financial markets. But seventy per cent of the world's oil supplies lie under the sands of the Middle East, which begs the question: did the US invade Iraq to grab Iraq's oil?



Written by an influential oil consultant, with experience of working in both the US and Arab oil industries, this book provides a rare insight into the real motivations behind US intervention in the Arab world, and the relationship between the US and the Arab states. Zalloum provides a historical account of the roots of today's involvement, analysing US intervention in the Arab World since the 19th century.



The book offers a unique perspective on how the US is viewed in the Arab region and how progress should be made if real peace and stability are to be brokered.
Introduction

1. The beginning of the end

2. God, Geopolitics, Geology and Geography: a brief history of oil

3. The scramble for Iraq's oil

4. Black gold and the dollar

5. Inside OPEC

6. Crusading for Israel

7. Oil and God: America's neoconservatives

8. Future imperfect: Why America must change

Bibliography/Notes

Index

Sujets

• Art Plastique
• Arts plastiques
• Art
• Techniques
• Oil Painting

Informations

• Publié par: Pluto Press
• Date de parution: 20 mai 2007
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9781849643276
• Langue: English

Extrait

Oil Crusades

America through Arab Eyes

ABDULHAY YAHYA ZALLOUM

LONDON ANN ARBOR, MI

First published 2007 by Pluto Press 345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA and 839 Greene Street, Ann Arbor, MI 48106

www.plutobooks.com

Copyright © Abdulhay Yahya Zalloum 2007

The right of Abdulhay Yahya Zalloum to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Hardback ISBN-13: 978-0-7453-2560-6 ISBN-10: 0-7453-2560-2

Paperback ISBN-13: 978-0-7453-2559-0 ISBN-10: 0-7453-2559-9

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data applied for

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Designed and produced for Pluto Press by Chase Publishing Services Ltd, Fortescue, Sidmouth, EX10 9QG, England Typeset from disk by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd, Chennai, India Printed in the United States of America

Contents

Acknowledgments Preface

Introduction 1 1 The Beginning of the End? 2 God, Geology, Geopolitics, and Geography: A Brief History of Oil

3 4 5 6 7 8

The Scramble for Oil in Iraq

Black Gold and the Dollar

Inside OPEC, Big Oil’s Invisible Hand

Crusading for Israel

Oil and God

Future Imperfect: Why America Must Change

Notes Index

v

ix xi

8

21 41 69 90 110 155 180

208 217

WAR is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. … It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.

Who Makes the Profits?

Take our friends the du Ponts, the powder people—didn’t one of them testify before a Senate committee recently that their powder won the war? Or saved the world for democracy? Or something? How did they do in the war? They were a patri- otic corporation. Well, the average earnings of the du Ponts for the period 1910 to 1914 were $6,000,000 a year. … Now let’s look at their average yearly profit during the war years, 1914 to 1918. Fifty-eight million dollars a year profit we find! Nearly ten times that of normal times, and the profits of normal times were pretty good. Take one of our little steel companies that patriotically shunted aside the making of rails and girders and bridges to manufacture war materials. Well, their 1910–1914 yearly earnings averaged $6,000,000. Then came the war. And, like loyal citizens, Bethlehem Steel promptly turned to muni- tions making. Did their profits jump—or did they let Uncle Sam in for a bargain? Well, their 1914–1918 average was $49,000,000 a year!

Who Pays the Bill?

We all pay them—in taxation. We paid the bankers their profits when we bought Liberty Bonds at $100.00 and sold them back at $84 or $86 to the bankers. These bankers collected $100 plus. It was a simple manipulation. The bankers control the security marts. It was easy for them to

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viii OIL CRUSADES depress the price of these bonds. Then all of us—the people— got frightened and sold the bonds at $84 or $86. The bankers bought them. Then these same bankers stimulated a boom and government bonds went to par—and above. Then the bankers collected their profits. But the soldier pays the biggest part of the bill.

Marine Major General Smedley Darlington Butler (twice decorated with the Medal of Honor), War Is a Racket(1935)

Acknowledgments

HAVE LED A busy life over my 70 years as a workaholic who averages 16–18 hours’ work a day. My first a I nd energy with which He endowed me, which have made acknowledgment therefore is to God for the good health my working practice possible. For the past ten years I have devoted 4–6 hours a day to reading, researching, and writing, reflecting on my firsthand experiences as well as the experi- ences of others. I first began to record these reflections after the age 60. My parents, who had only a limited education themselves, insisted that I pursue my university education in the United States, an onerous undertaking for them, especially in the 1950s for those who earned their living in the troubled lands of the Middle East to be spent in the much more expensive US. They gave me all their support and stretched their resources until the mission was accomplished. I am eternally grateful to them. I am grateful to an intelligent, loving, and devoted wife, who took on the lion’s share of the responsibility for raising our five children and raised them well. In my culture children and family are the most valuable of our worldly assets. I am grateful for the assistance of many for their contribu- tions to the publication of this book. I start with Roger van Zwanenberg, Chair of Pluto Press, with whom I brain- stormed first by email and later face to face. Roger has unique experiences in this world which he is pursuing through his progressive Pluto Press. If any one person must be singled out for his enormous contribution to this work it is Ehsan Masoud. A London-based journalist, and a gentleman,

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x OIL CRUSADES he employed his professionalism to polish this book through superb editing that made a difference. To him I am thankful. Knowing the United States and the West for more than half a century, almost a quarter of the life of the American Republic before it became an empire, living in and experiencing the worlds of Islam and the West, and traveling extensively in Africa and large parts of Asia, including India and China, I learned that the “conventional wisdom” promoted by the establishment and corporate media is in many instances no wisdom at all. I learned that it is not only people that lie, but also governments, corporations, and even history books. I learned that a religious police is not only a feature of some Middle Eastern countries, for “thought police” exist in a more sophisticated guise even in the self-proclaimed bastions of liberty and freedom. Mainstream corporate media, controlled by five corporations mainly in the US, broadcast establishment views and narrowcast everybody else’s. I learned that the grass is not always greener on the other side of the fence, as one of those conventional wisdoms claims.

Preface

Permit me to control the money of a nation and I care not who makes its rules.

Mayer Rothschild, founder of the

Rothschild dynasty S A YOUNG STUDENT in elementary schools in A Jerusalem, when it was the capital of Palestine prior the creation of Israel in 1948, our history teacher taught us about the Balfour Declaration—the document in which Lord Balfour, the British Foreign Secretary, wrote to another British peer promising to create a Jewish homeland in someone else’s country. To my young, inquisitive mind I wondered how a British politician, Lord Balfour, could promise a British financier, Lord Rothschild, someone else’s country—which happened to be mine! This relationship between financiers and politicians puzzled me and I longed to find an answer. After I graduated from high school my parents insisted I go to America for my university education. That was where a good education in the land of equality, freedom, and the pursuit of happiness could be found—or so they were told. Unlike other imperial powers, the US government, strong as it was, never waged war–except “to end all wars”! At the age of 18 I left East Jerusalem airport bound for Beirut, where I boarded a ship that sailed first to Port Said and Alexandria in Egypt, and then to Europe, where I boarded theUnited States, then America’s fastest and finest transatlantic ocean liner. On arrival in the US, I went by train from New York to Austin, Texas. On the bus to the university campus I thought it odd that African-Americans occupied the rear seats only. It must be a

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xii OIL CRUSADES coincidence, I said to myself. Then, in the long registration line, I was aware of the absence of black students. When I inquired further I was told that “negro” students were not admitted to that state university. To my surprise, when I went downtown, “Whites Only” or “No Negroes” signs were common features in restaurants, parks, and public toi- lets. However, history books taught that, almost a century before I arrived in the United States, Abraham Lincoln was supposed to have fought a war to free those very people. But 1,400 year earlier, the Prophet Mohammad had preached that all people are equal regardless of color, creed, or race. And he practiced what he preached. His council was multiracial—among its most trusted members were Bilal, a black African, Suhaib, a Roman, and Suleiman, a Persian. My sense of shock is best expressed by quoting from Colin Powell’s memoirs,My American Journey:

While we were training in the north Georgia mountains the only black church was some distance away in Gainesville. I wanted to go to services on Sundays, and the Army thoughtfully provided me with a half-ton truck and a driver, a white corporal, to take me to Gainesville. There I sang and swayed with the rest of the Baptist congregation. The next Sunday, the corporal pointed out that because he had to drive me to church, he could not attend services himself. Would it be all right, he wanted to know, if he joined me? The minister was a kindly man and said it would ordinarily give him great pleasure …. But his presence in a black church might not sit well with the local white folks. It might be wiser if the corporal waited in the truck. What my father had feared … the reality I wanted to ignore, was forcing its way into my life, the lunatic code that made it wrong for two men to sit together in a house of God, or share a meal in a restaurant, or use the same bathroom. (1996, p. 41)

I was asking similar questions four decades before Powell did. In an optional history course I took, I was very surprised to discover that during World War II all Japanese in America were held in detention camps, including American citizens of

PREFACE xiii Japanese descent, simply because of their race. But I had thought detention and concentration camps were exclusive to the Nazis. Then I learned that during World War I the FBI imprisoned anyone who distributed anti-war leaflets, and I had thought such acts were only practiced under communism! I graduated in engineering, then in business administration and advanced management from top universities, including Harvard. I was appointed the first Arab operations manager in an OPEC oil company, I set up my own consulting company to cater for petroleum projects management, I was involved in several oil companies’ creation from their inception, and I formed my own group of companies. In the early 1970s the US withdrew from its commitment to the Bretton Woods Agreement of 1944 which had fixed exchange rates between currencies, after which it guaranteed a fixed rate between various currencies and the dollar, and then between the dollar and gold at $35/1 oz gold. Nations, central banks, and individuals now bought dollars on this basis. When the US unilaterally withdrew from the Bretton Woods Agreement the price of gold shot up tenfold to $350 dollars/1 oz. The dollars I had would now purchase just 10 percent of the gold I was promised under Bretton Woods. Who had stolen 90 percent of my gold? When I started to delve deeper I noted that financiers functioned globally long before the term globalization became common currency. Take Mayer Rothschild, the patri- arch of the Rothschild dynasty. Based in Germany, he had branches in London, Paris, Vienna, and Frankfurt and he installed a son in each branch. Through the Morgans and the Rockefellers they covered America and then much of the world. Capitalism, as the name implies, centers on capital and money, and those who own the money own capitalism then and now. Consider George Soros. He was able to take on the Bank of England in the early 1990s and make billions of dollars in one week. In his bookThe Crisis of Global