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Powell's
Smoking Gun on America's Oily Adventure
By Tony Iyare
 If
any doubts existed about America's oily gamble in Iraq, last week's
press conference by Secretary of State, General Colin Powell seem
to have erased all that. Shrugging off any link between the Iraqi
government of Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda, which he brands a terrorist
organisation, Powell said, "I have not seen smoking-gun, concrete
evidence about the connection". The former chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff who betrayed little trait of his recent surgery
for prostrate cancer said, "but I think the possibility of such
connections did exist, and it was prudent to consider them at the
time we did".
Powell had maintained
before the UN Security Council on February 5, 2003 that a "sinister
nexus" existed "between Iraq and the Al Qaeda terrorists, a nexus
that combines classic terrorist organisations and modern methods
of murder". Writing under the title Powell Admits No Hard Proof
in Linking Iraq to Al Qaeda, The New York Times Friday (January
9, 2004) quoted Powell to have told the Security Council that he
was cock sure about a link. Hear the first African American to rise
to the pinnacle of the US Army as he baited the UN, "Iraq today
habours a deadly terrorist network, headed by Abu Musaab al-Zarqawi,
an associate and collaborator of Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda
Lieutenants". Iraqi officials denied this accusation of ties with
Al Qaeda but Powell who managed Gulf War 1 in 1991 dismissed these
denials as "simply not credible". What was then the basis for the
aggression and barbaric attacks against the Iraqi people?
The case for
war as told by the authors is daily proving a huge storm in a tea
cup and one tale meant for the marines. It is becoming clearer that
all the chess game on Iraq was just a facade for America's oily
business. We had long suspected that it was a charade for using
Iraqi territory to pull chess nuts out of the fire.
Now Powell has confirmed that the blood of Iraqis had to water the
American thirst for cheap oil and extend the frontiers of business
for its citizens. So all the raining of bombs even on Iraqi markets
and hospitals, thanks to Al Jezeera were all a ploy to plunder the
rich resources of the people. We have had the crap here before when
the European expeditions designed to cart away our gold, ivory and
rich forest resources were dubbed civilising missions. It even took
the garb of missionary exploits.
They exploited
the ignorance of our people to railroad phoney treaties and pillaged
our resources. Where they met resistance like the Benin Empire,
they waged a war of perdition on the people. The Iraqi war has provided
a platform for more juicy reconstruction contracts to shore up an
economy that was beginning to show signs of wane. US companies are
virtually having a ball smiling home with a huge dole of the $89
billion bid, leaving the crumbs to junior Allied partners. All those
who voiced their stand against the war like Russia, France and Germany
have been excluded from the loot. They are however to respond to
the clarion call to write off Iraqi debt estimated at $130 billion.
Is it still foggy that the Americans acted a script by feverishly
pushing the bogey of WMD? Does it surprise anybody that the jostle
for the contracts supervised by USAID took off at the incipient
stage of the war? it by accident that the oil production cities
of Monsul, Basra and Kirkuk were the first areas to be encircled?
Was it not intriguing that the Iraqi Oil Ministry was spared from
the heavy bombardment rained on the capital, Baghdad? Could it be
just happenstance that Halliburton, a firm formerly presided over
by Vice President Dick Cheney and mired in allegations of over invoicing
on oil supplies by a Pentagon audit, has been granted a waiver by
the US Army under a no-bid deal to bring fuel into Iraq? Just like
we saw the somersault of the spurious charge that Iraq possessed
Weapons of Mass Destruction WMD, we are seeing another alibi for
Gulf War 11 collapse like a pack of cards. Since the official end
of hostilities on May 1 last year, the world is yet to be given
any shred of evidence that Iraq had stockpiles of WMD. The Allies
have even attempted to pull wool over our faces that it was no longer
necessary. The Italian Prime Minister also provided some comic relief
when he said the December 13 capture of former Iraqi strongman,
Saddam Hussein from his fortress in a rat hole near Tikrit, his
home town was the ultimate WMD. To nail the lie on WMD, the Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace, a non-partisan Washington based
research centre also said Thursday (January 8, 2004) that Iraq's
weapons programme did not "pose an immediate threat to the United
States, to the region or to global security".
Their third reason for invading Iraq in order to enthrone 'democracy'
has been suspect and balderdash from onset. If it was true that
Saddam presided over a ruthless machine and gassed the Kurds, Iranians
and his own citizens, the apostles of democracy should explain their
convenient chummy relationship with some of the world's most despotic
regimes dotting the Middle East. Why is General Pervez Musharraf,
a man who sacked the democratic government in Pakistan and has embarked
on the same ruinous path of General Sani Abacha by transmuting himself,
suddenly the toast of the American government? Unknown to many,
the American permutation to get cheap oil for its citizens is already
acting itself out in several places on the African continent.
We are seeing protracted wars suddenly giving way to emergency truce,
courtesy of America's oily business. The Yankee brokered truce in
war thorn Sudan where the government of Mohammed Al Bashir agreed
to ease the push for Sharia law in the troubled but oil rich South,
controlled by John Garang led Sudan Peoples' Liberation Army SPLA
is a case in point. The renewed interest in Angolan oil located
in Cabinda has also led to the contrived death of former leader
of UNITA, Jonas Savimbi and the final end of a war that has ravaged
the country since its independence in 1975. America is of course
not relenting on its lobby to get Nigeria out of OPEC as part of
the gamut of securing some safe landing outside the potentially
volatile Middle East region. Countries like Gabon, Equitorial Guinea,
Chad, Sao Tome and Principe and other oil rich nations are also
embedded in this grand plan. It is part of the calculation to raise
oil import from Africa to 25 per cent and perhaps more.
America's oily foreign policy is certainly dead set about something.
Is there then a dialectical connection between the need to pump
more oil from Africa and the plan to dot the continent with American
military bases? The Guardian of London reported June 17, 2003 that
Nigeria's oil rich Niger Delta would at least, host one of the bases.
It is obvious that in spite of the denials, the next target of Powell's
smoking gun is here.
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