It’s viscerally unpleasant for me, as someone who had a lot of scorn for lefties who, in the run-up to war in Iraq, insisted it was all about oil and empire, to read stories like this:
BAGHDAD – Four Western oil companies are in the final stages of negotiations this month on contracts that will return them to Iraq, 36 years after losing their oil concession to nationalization as Saddam Hussein rose to power.
Exxon Mobil, Shell, Total and BP – the original partners in the Iraq Petroleum Company – along with Chevron and a number of smaller oil companies, are in talks with Iraq’s Oil Ministry for no-bid contracts to service Iraq’s largest fields, according to ministry officials, oil company officials and an American diplomat.
The deals, expected to be announced on June 30, will lay the foundation for the first commercial work for the major companies in Iraq since the American invasion, and open a new and potentially lucrative country for their operations.
The no-bid contracts are unusual for the industry, and the offers prevailed over others by more than 40 companies, including companies in Russia, China and India. … There was suspicion among many in the Arab world and among parts of the American public that the United States had gone to war in Iraq precisely to secure the oil wealth these contracts seek to extract. The Bush administration has said that the war was necessary to combat terrorism. It is not clear what role the United States played in awarding the contracts; there are still American advisers to Iraq’s Oil Ministry.
It’s not that I can’t admit that I was wrong about Iraq (I didn’t support the invasion, but I didn’t oppose it either, and I was pretty contemptuous of some of the people who predicted it would go horribly, horribly wrong). I’ve written before about my wrongness, and, in particular, about my failure to apply many of the lessons of Vietnam, which I’d studied, to the prospect of Iraq.
What’s hard is trying to wrap my mind around the possibility that various people to the left of me, with whom I had arguments about whether the war was just about oil, had a more sophisticated paradigm through which to process the world. It seemed evident to me that their understanding of politics was much less nuanced than mine — that history doesn’t just reduce, as they seemed to think, to a series of powerful (white) people acting maliciously to further the concentration of their power.
Here’s the thing. It still seems evident to me that I’m smarter than them. I still think they’re wrong, and I’m right. … Except there are these oil contracts, and the 58 permanent bases that we’re trying to build. Erg.
