Mideast Wars, Oil, Imperialist Rivalry: A Lethal Mix

The murderous conflict in Syria and the killings in Iraq and Kenya are becoming yet another front in the world’s inter-imperialist rivalry. Bosses are jockeying for position in the fight over Middle East oil and gas. U.S. rulers are using a divide-and-conquer strategy — both to oppress the U.S. working class and to maintain their global supremacy over their capitalist enemies.
It is the task of communists in the Progressive Labor Party to transform this imperialist struggle into a class war to overthrow capitalism. Only communism can end the bosses’ perpetual carnage.
In 1990, U.S. president George H. W. Bush invaded Iraq with more than half a million troops to recapture the Kuwaiti oil fields seized by dictator Saddam Hussein. Soon after, U.S. forces withdrew. Then President Bill Clinton used sanctions and missiles to soften up Iraq for George W. Bush’s grab for the country’s oil wealth. Bush’s advisers thought that the collapse of the Soviet Union, previously the main U.S. rival, gave them an opportunity to take over Iraq swiftly, on the cheap, and with a relatively small army.
Over the next 20 years, the U.S. ruling class killed several million Iraqis and forced four million more to flee the country. But it never achieved its goal, and Iraq remains up for grabs. The U.S. rulers are slowly learning this lesson, as their halting threats to attack Syria indicate.

Bosses Choose their ‘Heroes’

When terrorists killed dozens of shoppers in the upscale Westgate Mall in Nairobi, Kenya, the world’s media published touching stories of the victims’ lives and tales of heroism. But workers in Iraq are suffering a Nairobi-level massacre once a week with scant media coverage. Terrorists’ bombs and bullets have killed more than 4,000 people there this year, including 804 in August alone.
Meanwhile, Barack Obama used the attack in the Navy yard in Washington, DC, to tout the victims as heroes and “patriots” and heighten nationalist feeling in the U.S. Soon afterward, a Sikh Indian Columbia University professor was attacked on the street as an “enemy jihadist.”
Two causes underlie the media’s inattention to Iraq. First, since the murdered Iraqis are mainly poor workers, they matter less to capitalist media barons than affluent mall-goers. Second, full publicity would expose U.S. imperialism’s hand in the slaughter.
In 2003, the small number of troops the U.S. put on Iraq’s soil failed to pacify its warring Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish factions, the main sources of today’s terror attacks. In fact, it was only when the Pentagon paid off the insurgent Sunnis to switch sides — as the decisive element of its “surge” — that the U.S. was able to put al Qaeda forces on the defensive. While the payoffs stopped when the current pro-Shiite Maliki regime took control, U.S. rulers are still using religion and nationalism to provoke conflicts in their class interests.
Shaky security, among other issues, blocks U.S. and allied oil companies from significantly raising Iraqi oil production. It stands nowhere near the predicted 12 million barrels a day needed to satisfy both U.S. and foreign firms, and Iraqi factions.

Exxon Divides to Conquer

ExxonMobil also seeks to build its share of Iraqi oil by playing one group against another, further fueling sectarian flames. Exxon was supposed to come out victorious in Iraq. As the U.S.’s flagship oil firm, it had won majority rights to Iraq’s West Qurna I oil fields, one of the largest in the world, with estimated resources of around eight billion barrels. But Exxon is pumping less than a fifth of what it should from Qurna:

Exxon entered into a technical service contract with the Iraqi government in 2010, to boost the production rate from the field to 2.8 million barrels per day (MMBD) from 0.25 MMBD. The field is currently producing over 0.5 MMBD and is expected to reach a level of 0.6 MMBD by the end of the year (Trefis, 9/27/13).

The shortfall is mostly due to the constraints that Iraq’s President Maliki, a pro-Iranian Shiite, imposed on the deal (see box).In addition to dividing anti-Baghdad Kurds and the Maliki government, Exxon is emboldening anti-Shiite Sunnis against Maliki’s wishes: “The Ninewa Provincial Council has authorized Gov. Atheel Nujaifi to negotiate directly with oil companies, including ExxonMobil (Iraq Oil Report, 9/18/13). Nujaifi is a leader of the Sunni Mutahidoun political bloc. So is his brother, Osama Nujaifi, who had met with Exxon’s James Jeffrey a month before (National Iraqi News Agency, 8/19/13). Exxon put Jeffrey, formerly Obama’s ambassador to Iraq, on its payroll early this year (Iraq Oil Report, 2/8/13) to grease its anti-Maliki deals with Kurds and Sunnis.

Maliki Using Syria War vs. Exxon

Maliki, for his part, has jumped on the Syria crisis to temporarily chase Exxon from Qurna:

An Iraqi Shiite militia group has threatened to attack U.S. interests in Iraq and the region if Washington strikes Syria, whose President Bashar al-Assad is backed by Tehran.....Exxon, particularly at risk because as an American firm, is taking no chances, re-basing most of its workforce from the southern West Qurna-1 oilfield project to Dubai until tensions ease. (Reuters, 9/11/13).

Exxon’s short-term plan is to ally with Sunnis and Kurds in an effort to destabilize Shiite-led Baghdad. In fact, Exxon keeps threatening to abandon its pumping operation in Iraq (see box) — a potential problem for Maliki, since Iraq lacks this expertise.
The Middle East’s political complexity makes Exxon’s path a tricky one. The oil company’s main allies, the Saudi monarchs, are Sunnis, but so are al Qaeda fanatics. And Exxon’s hired hand Jeffrey is urging a dialogue with Shiite bosses, even as his employer demonizes them:  “Keep in mind that the states where Shiites are a majority — namely Iraq and Iran — probably have more than 300 billion barrels of oil reserves between them. That is almost two-thirds of the reserves of the Gulf Cooperation Council states, including Saudi Arabia, and more than 20 percent of global reserves.”
Obama understands it would take more than a million troops to conquer Syria. With Congress paralyzed and the U.S. public leery of another Middle Eastern war, the best Obama could do was to brandish a U.S. missile strike —   and then back off as soon as Russian President Vladimir Putin gave the U.S. an out. Confronting Iran would require at least as many troops. Global conflict with China or Russia would demand a full military mobilization.

Answer Imperialism’s Hell with Communist Revolution

All of these imperialist maneuvers spell more death for the workers of the world. Besides the 100,000 killed in Syria, two million workers and their families have been forced to flee their homes to tent camps in nearby countries. U.S. drones are killing thousands in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Yemen, on top of the tens of thousands slaughtered by the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan and the millions killed by the two Iraqi wars and Clinton’s sanctions, including half a million Iraqi children. This does not include the 500,000 U.S. GI’s suffering from post-traumatic-stress syndrome, which results in 18 suicides a day.
There is only one answer to this world capitalist carnage, and to the mass unemployment, racism, sexism and poverty the profit system engenders. That answer is mass communist revolution, which the Progressive Labor Party is organizing. Build PLP. The time to join is now!