Energy and US Foreign Policy: The Quest for Resource Security After the Cold War by Ahmed Mahdi

Author:Ahmed Mahdi [Mahdi, Ahmed]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: International Relations, Geopolitics, Political Science, General
ISBN: 9781280876714
Google: MhCMDwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 21475372
Publisher: I. B. Tauris
Published: 2012-01-30T08:33:27+00:00

Conclusion: Iraqi oil, energy security and the Arab spring: The collapse of the Bush vision

If the Bush administration managed to impress the world with the easy victory over Iraq, it squandered the narrow window of opportunity to devise a realistic policy to remake the Middle East. The invasion of Iraq was meant to hold the four US foreign-policy strands together, by transforming the country into a model for a transformed Middle East, and Iraq’s oil sector was central to rebuilding Iraq into a model for the region. When Iraq collapsed, the ambitions of the Bush administration collapsed with it, as it was too dependent on success in Iraq, and the failure in Iraq made the administration more dependent on Saudi Arabia for strategic assistance and swing production of oil.170

Due to the lack of political stability and control in Iraq, al Qaeda flourished in Iraq after the invasion, and Bush repeatedly argued that failure in Iraq or premature US withdrawal would give terrorists access to Iraq’s oil revenues, enabling them to finance terrorist attacks against the West. ‘An emboldened al Qaeda with access to Iraq’s oil resources could pursue its ambitions to acquire weapons of mass destruction to attack America and other free nations’, he said.171 He also said that ‘failure in Iraq would be a disaster for the United States’ because radical Islamic extremists in Iraq ‘would be in a better position to topple moderate governments, create chaos in the region, and use oil revenues to fund their ambitions’.172

The Bush administration also saw oil as a factor that should help keep Iraq united, as it called for oil revenues to be divided equally among Iraq’s population (not according to each region’s share of the oil reserves, where the Shiite south contains about 65% of Iraq’s oil reserves and the Kurdish north about 10%) in order to prevent Iraq from splitting into three Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish regions. Bush repeatedly echoed this argument, rejecting the partition of Iraq. ‘I happen to believe the oil belongs to the people and to the extent that they understand that, it’ll help unify the country’, he said.173 Rice, too, said that oil should be a resource for the Iraqi people as a whole, ‘not one that would help to make the country less unified’. She said that Iraqi leaders must settle their differences, and that Kurdish independence, especially if it meant taking control of the northern oilfields, was something that Washington would not support.174

An Iraqi oil law was originally drafted in 2006 to settle the disputes between the regions over oil revenues.175 But the passage of the law was delayed due to disagreement between the government in Baghdad, the Kurdish government in Irbil and various Iraqi factions and parties over control, revenue distribution and foreign companies’ involvement in Iraq’s oil sector. Due to these disagreements, it may be years before the law is passed.176 Thus, in November 2007, Iraqi oil minister Hussein Shahrestani announced, to Washington’s relief, that the government would work with foreign oil companies without the Iraqi oil law.

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