Iraq, oil, lies, theft and building a nation

‘Theft is carried out with a laptop and a legal agreement, a seminar and a treaty, as surely as it is carried out with a gun’, says Solomon Hughes reviewing Fuel on the Fire by Greg Muttitt in the Morning Star last week. http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/news/content/view/full/105171

‘Iraq was about oil? Doh!’ we hear you say. But Hughes points to Muttit’s work in actually searching for and building and analysing the evidence through a painstaking trawl of freedom of information requests.

“BP denied meeting the government before the Iraq war, but Greg shows that in November 2003 its man was telling British civil servants ‘Iraq is the big oil prospect. BP are desperate to get in there’”, writes Hughes.

It is no surprise that Britain had strategic interests in Iraqi oil but the story reveals just how explicit this was. A meeting of civil servants in 2003 thought Iraqis needed to be steered away from the ‘temptation’ of a nationalised oil industry to keep the industry open to ‘international investment.

But just as significantly Hughes describes how the book unfolds how the interests of the occupiers, oil, and global capitalism stunted the building of a new Iraqi nation.

“The book doesn't just deal with the oil-driven wrongs of the war and occupation”, he writes. “It also explains, in a very practical way, what it means to build a nation - how natural resources can be national resources, how the occupiers effectively encouraged a weak state to keep the role of international law and international companies strong and how theft is carried out with a laptop and a legal agreement, a seminar and a treaty, as surely as it is carried out with a gun.

Fuel on the Fire by Greg Muttitt, >http://www.fuelonthefire.com/