⋙ [PDF] Gratis Fuel on the Fire Oil and Politics in Occupied Iraq Greg Muttitt 9781847921116 Books

Fuel on the Fire Oil and Politics in Occupied Iraq Greg Muttitt 9781847921116 Books

Download As PDF : Fuel on the Fire Oil and Politics in Occupied Iraq Greg Muttitt 9781847921116 Books

Fuel on the Fire Oil and Politics in Occupied Iraq Greg Muttitt 9781847921116 Books

- To mock John Lewis Gaddis’ phrase. Opponents of the war on Iraq deeply suspected it was “all about the oil,” but could not know exactly how. Greg Muttitt shows us, being privy to the debates – and let’s state it frankly, conspiracies – hatched to facilitate the resource looting behind the regime change. Human beings do have the capacity to sincerely hold self-serving beliefs, blinding themselves to deeper motives - as Muttitt generously advocates in his conclusion. But his own experience as exquisitely detailed in his book leaves no doubt that colonial punishers and privatizers, like neo-con “Viceroy” Paul Bremer, contract-packing oilmen, and carpetbagging exiles knew exactly how craven they were.

He doesn’t dwell on the geopolitics, confining his analysis to the actions of Western politicians and oil executives working in tandem to rip the place apart and gulp its innards like desert jackals. If this sounds extreme, reading of the neo-con justification for launching the war leaves no other conclusion. Having failed to replace the Shah as pro-Western strongman, not only Saddam Hussein was to be removed, but the Iraqi state was itself to be broken: no new Saddam would ever use Iraqi oil to fuel a war machine challenging the balance of power in the Middle East. For the neo-cons, controlling the oil controlled local politics, ensuring the resources flowed into the right military-industrial complex. For the petro transnationals it was all profit. A weak Iraq served both: artificially fragmented into regions, segregated into religious factions by administrative dictate, held in place on the map more by external borders than its own cohesion. Muttitt reveals how the scramble for oil shaped the entire occupation, from Bremer through “the Surge.” What’s also demonstrated is the rank collaboration in this deception by the media and academia: self-serving stereotypes about Iraq and Muslims are still uncritically propagated, leaving a puzzled public sensing it’s somehow being cheated by smooth tricksters as on a Bourbon Street sidewalk, but not understanding how.

Yet Muttitt also shows Iraqi resistance to Big Oil and its military-political allies: firstly by insisting they were Iraqis at all, not just Arabs, not confined by sectarian identities. Muttitt describes his shock at discovering that these “divisions” were, at the outset, not entrenched like the religious chasm of Northern Ireland. Rather they were deliberately exaggerated and forced on the population by unrepresentative, collaborating politicians, creating a segregation enforced by local “klans”. He follows Iraqi unions as they fight proposed oil laws, designed to justifying resource rape and tying the victims’ hands by injunctions of “contract.” The control of said resources was behind the century-long anti-colonial conflict of the West vs. nationalist Iraq; this entire history was to be completely reversed by deconstructing 20th century Iraq to its most primitive level and colonizing its sands. Thanks to resistance – not just “the insurgency” but how Iraqis chose to define themselves and what they wanted – this new/old order did not quite succeed.

The book was written before the rise of ISIS, ISIL, IS, or whatever it will next call itself. How this new round of war was shaped by the previous decade is not hard to understand, thanks to incisive reporters like Greg Muttitt. A weakened Iraqi state, unable to control its territory, its society pummeled by war, fueled (pun intended) by a decade of forced poverty, its resource revenues gone (water shortage another big issue) thusly surrendered to “white space” on its map like creeping desertification. ISIS merely filled this empty quarter, justifying a new round of American conquest. All a conspiracy to continue resource extraction? We’ll soon know if so, thanks to honest investigating insiders like Mr. Muttitt.


Tags : Fuel on the Fire: Oil and Politics in Occupied Iraq [Greg Muttitt] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. 'The oil belongs to the Iraqi people. It's their asset', declared George W. Bush, at the end of a day at Camp David with his Generals and National Security Council in June 2006. The next morning he would arrive in Baghdad,Greg Muttitt,Fuel on the Fire: Oil and Politics in Occupied Iraq,Bodley Head,1847921116,Political Science American Government General,Technology & Engineering Petroleum

Fuel on the Fire Oil and Politics in Occupied Iraq Greg Muttitt 9781847921116 Books Reviews

The 'war-for-oil' hypothesis of Iraq 2003 was often derided as a "conspiracy theory", a term used by former UK prime minister Tony Blair. Greg Muttitt's Fuel on the Fire provides an excellent rebuttal to that line of thinking while acknowledging that the war was not fought for any single reason (there may have been some genuine concerns about WMDs, democracy, and human rights, or the US leadership might have held a grudge against Saddam and his ability to thwart US efforts towards his removal, etc.), oil was a prime compelling factor leading to the war.

The book posits three main theses the US-UK invasion was motivated primarily by oil; the Iraqi labor movement was instrumental in hindering key US objectives (in particular an oil law to allow foreign oil corporations to easily acquire contracts for Iraqi oil and gas) from being realized; and the sectarian bloodshed in Iraq was caused in large part by the attitudes and policy decisions of the Coalition Provisional Authority.

Muttitt's understanding of the first point is necessarily nuanced. Few auctioned oil fields have gone to American firms, though most of the service contracting has. (NY Times, 6/16/2011) Thus the war cannot be said to simply be about stealing Iraq's oil. More crucially than adding to the reserves of US multinationals is reducing the price of oil and weakening OPEC. Iraq's oil reserves are large enough to affect the price of world oil, and handing them over to private foreign companies allows production to occur without the blessing of OPEC. Of course Iraq could sign contracts demanding that oil companies adhere to production quotas set by OPEC, but the Iraqi government and oil ministry was under great pressure from the US to give generous terms to oil companies and drew up the contracts in secrecy.

Where Muttitt's argument is weakest is not entirely his own fault; many of the documents needed to conclusively determine the causes of the war are still classified (such as those from Vice President Cheney's energy task force). Instead he provides a substantial amount of suggestive quotes and documents from governments and oil companies as well as a rundown of US behavior during the occupation (such as in pushing the oil law). With those caveats in mind, Muttitt makes a strong case.

He also makes a forceful argument for the benefits wrought by Iraqi labor unions, one the of the few functioning civil society organizations in Iraq throughout the occupation. Despite the Bush administration's alleged concern with democracy, Paul Bremer, administrator of Iraq from 2003 to 2005, maintained a Saddam-era law outlawing public sector labor unions, and furthermore banned workers from electing their own managers. Successive Iraqi governments have further clamped down on unions, yet their influence was strong enough to block an oil law from being passed, which would have allowed oil contracts to be made solely by the executive branch rather than the current Parliamentary approval now required.

Finally, Muttitt demonstrates that most Iraqis do not see themselves in sectarian terms (apart from the Kurds); rather than a Shia or a Sunni, they are Muslim; rather than Turkoman or Arab, they are Iraqi. Yet Bremer's appointed Iraqi Governing Council emphasized the ethnic and religious makeup of the group. The message was clear identity politics would trump policy and ideology. The US preferred an Iraq divided along sectarian lines (though Muttitt is careful not to make this out to be a conspiracy) as a united Iraq could more easily oust the occupiers, since that was the will of the vast majority of the population.

Like many books on post-invasion Iraq, Fuel on the Fire is a grim tale of the suffering of Iraqis under occupation. However, hope still remains, in particular with the labor movement and the rest of civil society; the country is still without the much sought after oil law. For those wishing to understand the invasion and subsequent occupation, this is required reading.
You don't know anything about the invasion of Iraq until you've read this book. Truly groundbreaking work.
Very well researched book. Packed with facts and not just someon's oppinions... I loved it. And I still go back and reread some chapeters here and there.
If you are anything like me, you could never spare the time to really research the war in Iraq and come to an informed decision.

Greg Muttitt has done a stellar job of accumulating, organizing, and presenting and incredible amount of information. Aside from numerous instances of using various freedom of information laws, Muttitt has multiple personal interviews with the central figures Iraq oil politics, and writes firsthand accounts of several meetings about Iraq oil policy that he was invited to by virtue of his position as an international oil expert and activist.

In short, it is all the information you wished you had time to research for yourself, and a whole lot more, written in clear and engaging prose.
- To mock John Lewis Gaddis’ phrase. Opponents of the war on Iraq deeply suspected it was “all about the oil,” but could not know exactly how. Greg Muttitt shows us, being privy to the debates – and let’s state it frankly, conspiracies – hatched to facilitate the resource looting behind the regime change. Human beings do have the capacity to sincerely hold self-serving beliefs, blinding themselves to deeper motives - as Muttitt generously advocates in his conclusion. But his own experience as exquisitely detailed in his book leaves no doubt that colonial punishers and privatizers, like neo-con “Viceroy” Paul Bremer, contract-packing oilmen, and carpetbagging exiles knew exactly how craven they were.

He doesn’t dwell on the geopolitics, confining his analysis to the actions of Western politicians and oil executives working in tandem to rip the place apart and gulp its innards like desert jackals. If this sounds extreme, reading of the neo-con justification for launching the war leaves no other conclusion. Having failed to replace the Shah as pro-Western strongman, not only Saddam Hussein was to be removed, but the Iraqi state was itself to be broken no new Saddam would ever use Iraqi oil to fuel a war machine challenging the balance of power in the Middle East. For the neo-cons, controlling the oil controlled local politics, ensuring the resources flowed into the right military-industrial complex. For the petro transnationals it was all profit. A weak Iraq served both artificially fragmented into regions, segregated into religious factions by administrative dictate, held in place on the map more by external borders than its own cohesion. Muttitt reveals how the scramble for oil shaped the entire occupation, from Bremer through “the Surge.” What’s also demonstrated is the rank collaboration in this deception by the media and academia self-serving stereotypes about Iraq and Muslims are still uncritically propagated, leaving a puzzled public sensing it’s somehow being cheated by smooth tricksters as on a Bourbon Street sidewalk, but not understanding how.

Yet Muttitt also shows Iraqi resistance to Big Oil and its military-political allies firstly by insisting they were Iraqis at all, not just Arabs, not confined by sectarian identities. Muttitt describes his shock at discovering that these “divisions” were, at the outset, not entrenched like the religious chasm of Northern Ireland. Rather they were deliberately exaggerated and forced on the population by unrepresentative, collaborating politicians, creating a segregation enforced by local “klans”. He follows Iraqi unions as they fight proposed oil laws, designed to justifying resource rape and tying the victims’ hands by injunctions of “contract.” The control of said resources was behind the century-long anti-colonial conflict of the West vs. nationalist Iraq; this entire history was to be completely reversed by deconstructing 20th century Iraq to its most primitive level and colonizing its sands. Thanks to resistance – not just “the insurgency” but how Iraqis chose to define themselves and what they wanted – this new/old order did not quite succeed.

The book was written before the rise of ISIS, ISIL, IS, or whatever it will next call itself. How this new round of war was shaped by the previous decade is not hard to understand, thanks to incisive reporters like Greg Muttitt. A weakened Iraqi state, unable to control its territory, its society pummeled by war, fueled (pun intended) by a decade of forced poverty, its resource revenues gone (water shortage another big issue) thusly surrendered to “white space” on its map like creeping desertification. ISIS merely filled this empty quarter, justifying a new round of American conquest. All a conspiracy to continue resource extraction? We’ll soon know if so, thanks to honest investigating insiders like Mr. Muttitt.