The losers in Iraq

As we have discussed here before it's becoming obvious who the losers in Iraq will be. Of course there are the Sunnis who after running roughshod over the Shia and the Kurds for decades may have to flee the country to avoid a slow motion genocide. But the big losers will be the folks who started the war, Dick Cheney's petroleum posse. Steve Soto has an excellent post on the subject this morning. It appears that the Bush administrations replacement tyrants, Allawi and Chalabi will not be participating in the new Iraqi government and so the Cheney Oil Cabal will be left without friends in high places. Steve explains how this is a bit of an embarrassment for the Lord of Darkness since who won't be able to keep a lot of the promises he made.

So if Chalabi and Allawi both find themselves out of power this year, who will be left to steer Iraqi oil towards the United States? No one.

See, I have no doubt that the major reason why Cheney is fighting the release of his Energy Task Force documents isn't so much his long-standing belief in unfettered executive power, but rather the reality that months before 9/11, this group of oil men were told in the White House that the Bush Administration would topple Saddam and get its hands on Iraqi oil by hook or by crook. There were already stories in the media that among the documents being reviewed and discussed at these meetings were the maps of Iraqi oil fields, so it isn't a long shot that Cheney and the PNAC/AEI soulmates were telling the oil companies to start planning for how to access these new fields and break OPEC's stranglehold on world oil supplies and prices.

One of the things that these oil execs would have been told was the grand plan to get rid of Saddam one way or another, and have him replaced with someone like Chalabi or Allawi, two guys only too willing to take our offer of installing them at the head of a new government in exchange for an Oil Ministry that let American firms carve up the country. You can almost hear the speeches by the AEI and PNAC guys to these oil execs now, about how now with the Bush team in charge, a number of dreams could now come true for Big Oil, and as a sidelight, oh yeah, we'd "liberate" the Iraqis and bring the benefits of capitalism to them while their national resources are once again plundered for our benefit.

Yes, Cheney had already divided up Iraq's oil as part of his super secret Energy Task Force and now he can't get his hands on it.

As we discussed below Juan Cole explained that the original intention of the Bush administration was to just turn the country over to the friendly tyrant, Chalabi. There was one small problem with that plan, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani wasn't about to have any part of it. He insisted upon direct elections at once and since he controlled about 60% of the population he got his way. In the words of Robert Burns

In proving foresight may be vain;
The best-laid schemes o' mice an 'men
Gang aft agley,
An'lea'e us nought but grief an' pain,
For promis'd joy!

The irony is the Bush administration cut the Sunnis and the Baath party out right away and those are the ones they probably could have struck a deal with.