March 2005
Juan Cole
Thoughts on the Middle East, History, and Religion
Juan Cole is Professor of History at the University of Michigan
Friday, March 18, 2005
Wolfowitz's Plot to Destroy OPEC
And Why it was always Ridiculous
some excellent reasons why Paul Wolfowitz should not head the World Bank. But there may be others.
http://www.salon.com/src/pass/gateway/index.html?
opinion/conason/2005/03/18/wolfowitz_mismanagement/index_np.html
The BBC Newsnight
reports the titanic struggle between the Neoconservatives and Big Oil over Iraqi petroleum. If this story is true, it is some of the best reporting to come out of the Iraq scandal for months, and Greg Palast and his colleagues have scooped the Washington Post and the New York Times.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/newsnight/4354269.stm
It is a story that also has a bearing on Paul Wolfowitz's bid to become chairman of the
World Bank. I have some questions for him. Does he want to reduce the Arabs to poverty? Is
he hostile to the very existence of OPEC and of producer cooperatives in primary
commodities? Does he favor the use of warfare by states to permit their corporations to
take over public energy resources in the Global South? Are his economic policies going to
be rooted in a desire to further the interests of the Likud and other rightwing parties in
the Global South?
As Palast tells the story, the Neoconservatives (presumably Wolfowitz, Perle and Feith)
and the Department of Defense were dedicated to privatizing the Iraqi petroleum industry
as a key plank of their Iraq project. They hoped that Iraq's privately-owned (presumably
by American petroleum corporations) petroleum industry would secede from the Organization
of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and would pump large amounts of petroleum,
refusing to stay within the bounds of the Iraq OPEC quota. By setting quotas for members,
OPEC attempts to keep the price of petroleum from falling too far or from oscillating too
wildly.
That there was a cult of privatization at the Pentagon has never been in doubt. Iraq has
been a socialist country since at least 1968 (and had elements of socialism in the period
of military rule 1958-1968). Most major industries were publicly owned. Moreover, the
Iraqi population liked it that way. Opinion polls show that 80% of Iraqis think the
purpose of a government is to take care of people.
Paul Bremer, the second US civil administrator of Iraq is a fanatical laissez-fairiste.
The privatizers would set up private corporations to sell you creek water and oxygen if
they could get away with it. In a BBC interview, Jay Garner alleged that the Department of
Defense dissolved the Iraqi army and sent it home, causing all of us no end of trouble,
because they were afraid that retaining a large Baath institution like that would form an
obstacle to radical privatization. Bremer wanted to allow foreign companies to buy any
firm in Iraq and to be able to expatriate profits immediately. (The abolition of currency
regulations, advocated by Washington Consensus free marketeers, contributed to the
meltdown of the East Asian economies in 1997; Malaysia escaped devastation by thumbing its
nose at the privatizers and slapping on currency controls. It turns out that if there are
no regulations about currency transfers, speculators take advantage of it; Surprise!)
Obviously, the real prize in privatization would be the petroleum industry. No other
state-owned Iraqi industries are worth much, and will be difficult to sell to private
owners because they are bloated bureaucracies and inefficient.
The prospect of the Iraqi petroleum going into foreign hands, however, impelled many
Iraqis to begin sabotaging the pipelines, or to support the saboteurs. Palast reports,
Mr Aljibury, once Ronald Reagan's "back-channel" to Saddam, claims that plans to
sell off Iraq's oil, pushed by the US-installed Governing Council in 2003, helped
instigate the insurgency and attacks on US and British occupying forces. "Insurgents
used this, saying, 'Look, you're losing your country, you're losing your resources to a
bunch of wealthy billionaires who want to take you over and make your life
miserable,'" said Mr Aljibury from his home near San Francisco. "We saw an
increase in the bombing of oil facilities, pipelines, built on the premise that
privatisation is coming."
Iraq should be able to produce 3 million barrels a day, but it has often only done a
million or a million and a half because of sabotage, reducing the Iraqi government income
from petroleum to only $10 billion or so a year, when it could have been $20 billion or
more.
According to Palast, it was the Coalition Provisional Authority officials from a Big Oil
background, like Philip Carroll, the former CEO of Shell Oil USA, who told Bremer
"No!"
The US petroleum companies haven't been interested in owning Middle Eastern petroleum for
decades. Most Middle Eastern oil producers nationalized their industries in the 1970s. The
US companies moved into refining and distribution, which is plenty profitable. Trying to
own the oil fields had long caused them a lot of trouble. The attempt of Prime Minister
Mohammad Mossaddegh to nationalize Iranian oil in 1951-1953 had led to a US/UK boycott of
Iranian petroleum and ultimately a CIA-backed coup that ended the last democratically
elected government in Iran in 1953. Since that time, Middle Eastern peoples had become
much more politically and socially mobilized, and popular demands for ownership of
national resources became irresistible.
(Max Boot, who thinks Middle Easterners are just Filipino peasant villagers circa
1902--poor, illiterate, unconnected and politically naive--exemplifies the basic Neocon
fallacy. The Neocons haven't even caught up to the 1950s or read Karl Deutsch on the
social mobilization of the Global South. People can't be occupied so easily once they
are urbanized, industrialized, literate, connected by modern communications, and
politically aware. This is why Boot and Wolfowitz did not anticipate a long-term guerrilla
war in Iraq, or how savvy and effective it would be. They really think they are Lord
Curzon dealing with backward WOGs).
So the Neoconservative/ Department of Defense plan to privatize the petroleum industry was
swimming against history, and proved impossible to implement because a) the Iraqis
wouldn't put up with it and b) even US Big Oil could see that it was a disaster waiting to
happen.
The other thing wrong with the Wolfowitz/Perle/Feith plan to destroy OPEC via Iraq is that
it cannot be done. If they thought it could be done, they are ignorant of the petroleum
industry and also of basic economics. About 80 million barrels of petroleum are produced
in the world each day (it fluctuates, so this figure is inexact). The Saudis can produce
as much as 11 million of that (they are expanding capacity now to 12 or 13). The Saudis
can, however, get along with only producing 7 million barrels a day (maybe even less at
today's prices). Most oil producers use a lot of their own petroleum. The US, Russia,
China, etc., produce petroleum but then they consume a lot of it themselves. The Gulf
producers, in contrast, have small populations and cannot absorb much petroleum use, so
they are the ones who can export in large amounts.
The Saudis are now and for the foreseeable future the major swing producer. It takes them
three days to gear up production from 7 million barrels a day to 11, or to ratchet things
back down. They can put 5 million of the approximately 80 million on the market or take it
off, virtually at the stroke of a pen. Between this ability and their influence in OPEC,
the Saudis have some ability to influence (but by no means control) petroleum prices.
Iraq can only produce about 2.5 to 3 million barrels a day now if there is no sabotage.
With the investment of billions and lots of security and rebuilding, they might get that
up to 5 million a day within 5 years. It would take them 15 to 20 years to have a capacity
similar to that of Saudi Arabia. In the meantime, OPEC countries will probably increase
their capacity by 20 million barrels a day, completely offsetting any Iraq increases.
Moreover, Iraq is a real country, with a population of 25 million and many industries, and
Iraq will use a lot of its own petroleum. What it has available for export will be only a
portion. Iraq will never be the kind of swing producer that Saudi Arabia is.
There are already a lot of countries that are not in OPEC and pay no attention to quotas.
They haven't destroyed OPEC, and one more (Iraq) wouldn't, either. The cartel effect of
OPEC is simply not that great, and oil prices have fluctuated dramatically every decade
since it was formed. OPEC has mostly failed even to dramatically influence, much less
control prices. In 2004-5, Bush administration policies in Iraq plus a rise in demand from
China and India plus strikes and other problems in places like Nigeria and Venezuela put
the petroleum price up to as much as $55 a barrel, whereas OPEC's target for many years
was $25 a barrel. The Neocons by their Iraq war have managed to double OPEC's income,
beyond even what OPEC wanted!
So Iraqi petroleum cannot destroy OPEC for the foreseeable future, even if whoever was in
charge of it wanted too. In fact, there is every reason for any Iraqi government to want
to keep petroleum publicly owned, and to cooperate with OPEC in attempting to smoothe out
extremes in the price cycle.
Primary commodities suffer from big swings in prices. You see this in coffee and cotton,
too. There are booms and then busts and then booms. If you are a producer, this
rollercoaster ride is inconvenient and could bankrupt you some years. High prices bring in
more money but also bring lots of new competitors who can only compete when the prices are
high because of natural disadvantages. Really low prices are devastating. So coffee
growers, petroleum producers, and other primary commodity producers often form cartels in
an attempt, not so much to keep prices high, as to keep them from jumping all around. With
the exception of the DeBeers diamond racket in South Africa, most cartels have only a
minor effect on price cycles.
Now the Neocons are all becoming Greens and arguing for solar or other forms of power in
order to cut down on US oil dependence. This is code for making sure the Arabs cannot use
petroleum to influence the US in the Arab-Israeli dispute. I'm all for getting off the
carbon-based treadmill. But petroleum has other uses than providing energy, especially
petrochemicals, and Arab producers are going to be rich off such uses for decades or
centuries.
The story Palast tells is one of crackpotism run wild, and it would be more than tragic if
it is what dragged us into the Iraq quagmire.
posted by Juan @
3/18/2005 06:30:00 PM