20 years of the Iraq war: A war for oil, fuelled by lies

On 5 February 2003, Colin Powell, the then US Secretary of State and till then a staunch critic of the US intervention in Iraq, sat in front of the members of the UN Security Council and made a case for invasion as the world watched.

Citing "solid source" and claiming that these were not "assertions" but "facts" based on solid intelligence, Powel went on to claim, "Saddam Hussein has chemical weapons."

"And Saddam Hussein has no compunction about using them again – against his neighbours, and against his own people," he added.

Powell repeatedly argued that Saddam had been harbouring terrorists like Abu Musab Al Zarqawi (later the founder of the Islamic State) and that Saddam's regime had developed "weapons of mass destruction (WMDs)".

Infograph: TBS

Zarqawi's name was uttered 21 times and WMDs were mentioned 17 times.

Following a month-long propaganda campaign, both domestically and internationally, to gain support for the invasion, the United States invaded Iraq on 20 March 2003.

Over the next decade, the war would take at least 150,000 lives, displace millions and ravage one of the oldest civilisations in the world, in the process sowing seeds of discontent that continue to fuel sectarian violence in the country to this day.

But as the world continued to gawk, interestingly enough, the US neither found any WMDs in Iraq, nor was Saddam harbouring Zarqawi. Even the CIA, later, went on to acknowledge that it had no evidence to suggest that any of the two claims were factual.

A war for oil, fuelled by lies

Months before the invasion, the US had been plotting to remove Saddam Hussain from power. Ironically, a young Saddam was also successfully recruited by the US intelligence services to launch a coup against the then-Iraqi prime minister Abd al-Karim Qasim when he wanted to renegotiate terms with US and UK oil companies.

Powell's scathing and false indictment of the Iraqi regime came after months of failed attempts at convincing allies of the Saddam Hussein threat to the West or that he had any connection to 9/11.

What came to the fore, eventually, is a carefully orchestrated farce – one which benefited the Halliburtons and the British Petroleums of the world.

Iraq boasts one of the largest oil reserves in the world, second to only Saudi Arabia. More importantly, Iraqi oil is also considered to be of high quality given its high carbon and low sulphur content. It is also relatively cheaper to produce (it costs $1 to $1.5 to produce a barrel of Iraqi oil while that from other competitors like Malaysia, Oman, Russia and others costs about $5 to $8).

With recoverable oil valued at nearly $3.125 trillion, Iraq was considered a cherished jewel for oil corporations.

However, much like his predecessors, Saddam wanted to put an end to the US-UK oligopoly on Iraqi oil fields. First, he nationalised the Iraqi oil fields in 1972. Then in the 1990s, he began negotiating with French, Russian, Japanese, and Chinese corporations, as Iraq was in dire need of alternate investment and technology. Given the previous records of the United States in Latin America and Central America (Guatemala, Nicaragua, Chile, etc.), an attempt to remove Saddam Hussein from power was inevitable.

The conflict of interest for the contemporary US and UK government officials was also clear as day. Most of them either owned oil corporations or worked as top executives for them.

For instance, both President George W Bush and his father served as the head of their respective oil firms. Vice President Dick Cheney was the CEO of Halliburton, the largest US oil services business, and then National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice was a director of Chevron Texaco. Tony Blair, the then Prime Minister of Britain, was so closely associated with British Petroleum, that the oil giant was sometimes referred to by the press as "Blair Petroleum".

And unsurprisingly, they were the ones who benefitted the most from the war.

Just a few weeks after the invasion began, Kellog Brown and Root (KBR), a subsidiary of Halliburton, was awarded a no-bid contract to extinguish oil well fires in Iraq.

In the first year of the Iraq war, Halliburton reported a 680% year-on-year increase in their revenue. Between 2003-2013, KBR received a total of $39.5 billion in Iraq-related contracts.

The 2003 Iraq invasion violated the Nuremberg principle

After World War II, initiating and waging wars of aggression was one of four charges on which, during the Nuremberg Trials, the International Military Tribunal convicted and sentenced 12 Nazi leaders to death. Among them were Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop and Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel.

After the trials, the International Law Commission of the United Nations codified the underlying legal principles in a document known as the Nuremberg Principles. The Principles state that anyone who commits a crime under international law is responsible for it and liable to be punished, regardless of the legality of their behaviour according to the domestic law of the country in which they acted.

The document sets out several crimes under international law, including "Planning, preparation, initiation, or waging of a war of aggression or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements, or assurances" and "Participation in a common plan or conspiracy" to initiate or wage such a war.

Saddam Hussein neither possessed WMDs nor was he harbouring Al-Qaeda nor did he have the plan or the capabilities to cause any significant harm to the Western allies. Therefore, when the US decided to invade Iraq, it not only violated the Nuremberg principle but also violated another UN charter which made it illegal for members to use threats or use of force that compromise the sovereignty of another nation.

Interestingly, the CIA claimed later that the speech they sent to Powell did not contain any information on Zarqawi. Instead, it was tailor-made by Cheney's office. Moreover, Bush and Cheney had knowledge of torturing prisoners by the CIA in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay under the guise of  "enhanced interrogation".

In December 2020, the BBC reported that the International Criminal Court (ICC) says it will not take action against the United Kingdom, despite finding evidence that British troops committed war crimes in Iraq.

This happened after a 180-page report said hundreds of Iraqi detainees were abused by British soldiers between 2003 and 2009. At the time, the ICC told the BBC: "It is without dispute there is evidence war crimes were committed."

The aftermath quagmire of the Iraq invasion

Following the invasion and the toppling of the Saddam administration, the US went on to "de-Ba'athify" Iraq by removing loyalist members of Saddam's political party from the army and government. The Shia majority population had long-held resentments against the ruling.

With de-Ba'athification underway, the jobless Ba'athists had become easy targets and sectarian violence ensued, which persists to this day. Abu Musab Al Zarqawi, an Al-Qaeda reject, exploited this opportunity, and founded the Islamic State. And the rest, as they say, is history.

Although democracy returned in Iraq, at least on paper, the four administrations since the first election in 2005 have failed to establish free and fair institutions, from the judiciary to the bureaucracy. Backroom deals are rather ubiquitous and the judiciary and the ministries rely on the whims of political leaders to reach a decision.

Today Iraq is one of the most corrupt countries in the world, receiving a score of 21 out of 100 in Transparency International's 2021 Corruption Perceptions Index, placing it 160th out of 180 nations.

Iraqi experts often blame the US' tendency to install and/or support corrupt but loyal politicians in power to keep exploiting the natural resources in the country.  In the best-case scenario, the Coalition Provisional Authority, the occupying power in Iraq led by Paul Bremer, had zero experience in Iraq and worked exclusively with returning exiles (for example, Ahmed Chalabi, who was a secular Shia close to the Bush administration and later became the Oil Minister of Iraq), who themselves had not been in Iraq for decades.

Unfortunately, these exiles and outsiders drafted the constitution, hastily propped up a political system and declared national elections before actually engaging with the people of Iraq.

Eventually, it was the elite exiles, loyal to the West, who ended up empowering themselves.

In fact, the US set up the governance framework in such a way that to gain power in Iraq, parties had to be in the good graces of the West and amenable to their exploitation of Iraqi resources.

Moreover, the US had made all efforts to keep anti-occupation and nationalist interests at bay and out of power. Sunni political parties, previously loyal to Saddam Hussein, were excluded from any discussion regarding the reconstruction efforts.

Anti-occupation popular Shia politicians like Muqtada al Sadr, although his party would eventually win the 2021 national elections, would not be able to form a government as establishment politicians (pro-Iran or pro-West) did not feel comfortable with an anti-establishment leader on the top.

In short, Iraq remains a highly corrupt, ethnically segregated state (one can go as far as consider it a puppet state of the West) which despite being "freer" on paper, continues to face grim realities. And unless and until, Iraqi governments can foster independent institutions and governance, free from the influence of regional (Iran) or extra-regional powers (the US), it is unlikely their fate would change any time soon.