Mission Not Yet Accomplished

In the lovely, historic halls of the Rayburn building on Capitol Hill, I am closing in on Dennis Kucinich. The slight, boyish-looking congressman from Ohio is walking briskly by himself, without attracting the slightest attention. As I weave my way past congressional aides and tourists in the crowded hallway, trying to catch up with him on a hot mid-July day, I am struck by his anonymity. Dennis Kucinich may not be a household name, but he is running for president of the United States and appears in nationally televised debates — a kind of Ralph Nader, but within the Democratic Party. I finally catch up with him outside, just after he’s gotten into a modest car parked there waiting for him. He is settling into the front passenger seat when I tap on the window. To my surprise, he lowers it, a friendly smile spreading across his elflike face. After I explain why I want to interview him, he agrees to meet later that day. My heart pumps a little faster. Dennis Kucinich may not have a hope of winning the Democratic race, but this is surely still the closest I’ll ever get to a brush with the presidency.

There’s a reason I’m chasing Kucinich — and it’s essentially the same reason he’s no more likely to win the Democratic nomination than Miss Saudi Arabia is to be the next Miss Universe. Kucinich has been speaking out about a rather remarkable set of developments going on inside Iraq. Amid all the death and mayhem, the Iraqi government is under intense pressure from Washington to implement a proposed new law that would begin the process of parcelling out Iraq’s vast undeveloped oil reserves.

In the Western media, the proposed law has generally been described as an “oil revenue–sharing law” — that is, a law that sets out how Iraq’s potentially massive oil revenues will be split among its warring ethnic factions, the Shiites, Sunni Arabs, and Kurds. But the law is actually about much more than that. It’s also about creating a legal framework for foreign investment in Iraq’s oil sector, thereby potentially reviving a dominant role for big multinational oil companies — a role they’ve been excluded from since a powerful wave of oil nationalism swept the Middle East in the 1970s and left the region’s bounteous reserves in the hands of national governments. Ultimately at stake is who will end up as chief beneficiaries of the immense treasure trove of black gold stored beneath Iraq’s sand: the country’s 27 million largely destitute citizens, or the owners of the wealthiest corporations on earth, otherwise known as Big Oil.

Dennis Kucinich suspects it’s going to be the latter, and he’s been trying to draw attention to what he calls “one of the biggest heists in the history of the world.” One clue that he may be on to something is the very high priority the Bush administration, with its notoriously close ties to Big Oil, is attaching to the Iraqi oil law. In May 2007, Vice-President Dick Cheney made a trip to Baghdad, and, as media reports indicated, his central message was the urgency of passing the oil law.

Yet Kucinich has had no luck stirring up opposition on this front in Washington. Even his efforts to get his fellow Democrats onside against the administration’s apparent attempt to privatize Iraq’s oil has been met with indifference, even hostility. Despite the unpopularity of the war, Democrats have been hugely reluctant to level accusations that hint at a nefarious US motive in connection with Iraq’s oil.

So even as powerful US and British oil companies sit poised to take control of the largest unharvested oil bonanza left on earth — with some 165,000 US troops standing helpfully by — the watchdogs on Capitol Hill and the media seem uninterested. The elephant stands knee deep in oil in the middle of the room, attracting no more attention than Dennis Kucinich in the halls of the Rayburn building. The Bush administration may have botched just about everything it’s touched in connection with its misadventure in Iraq, but it has pulled off one master stroke: it has somehow managed to banish to the margins of public debate any suggestion that it has ever cast a covetous eye on Iraq’s oil.

With the dramatic victory of the Democrats in the mid-term congressional elections in November 2006, change appeared to be in the Washington air. The American public had signalled, in that old-fashioned ballot box way, that it had had enough of President Bush’s hideous war and it wanted the troops home. Adding to that pressure was the publication the following month of a report by the Iraq Study Group (isg) — a bipartisan panel that included ex–secretaries of state and defence, an ex-governor, and an ex–Supreme Court judge. Co-chaired by Republican (and long-time Bush family friend) James A. Baker iii and influential Democrat Lee H. Hamilton, the isg brought clout to a cause that until then had been championed most notably by MoveOn.org.

Much was made of the isg’s call for phased US troop withdrawals and for Washington to initiate talks with the governments of Syria and Iran. Essentially, this high-powered group of Washington insiders was acknowledging the extent of Bush’s debacle in Iraq and, teamed up with the American public, was about to bring the incorrigible younger Bush into line.

Or so it seemed. On closer examination, it turned out the strategy advocated by the isg was largely the same as that of the Bush administration: create an Iraqi army strong enough to handle security on its own, within the context of a US-controlled Iraq. Indeed, the isg report set out a vision for actually extending US control — with US soldiers embedded inside the Iraqi army, American trainers inside the Iraqi police, and fbi agents inside the interior ministry.

Perhaps most revealing was the isg’s conclusion about what should be done with Iraq’s oil. Given that oil accounts for 60 percent of Iraq’s gdp and will therefore largely determine the country’s future, any meaningful notion of Iraqi sovereignty would have to include control over oil. The isg team recognized this, and urged the White House to clarify that it wasn’t trying to gain control of Iraq’s oil. Recommendation 23 of the report plainly states: “The President should restate that the United States does not seek to control Iraq’s oil.”