Abstract

Fighting for Oil--Still

The author comments on the methods used by U.S. authorities in Iraq to protect the country's oil supply from saboteurs. Although media attention has been focused on civil violence in the Baghdad area, Iraq's vast and vulnerable network of oil pipelines and pumping stations has become a major battlefield in the ongoing struggle between the US authorities and armed opposition forces. The Americans are trying to boost Iraqi oil exports to finance the occupation and increase global petroleum supplies at a time of worrisome shortages; the resistance fighters are trying to sabotage the pipelines and thereby cripple the US-directed reconstruction effort. So significant is this struggle that Washington has resorted to two shameful initiatives: First, it reactivated a US Army reconnaissance unit accused of war crimes during the Vietnam War to hunt down and kill suspected saboteurs; second, it hired a South African security firm with ties to apartheid-era death squads to manage a pipeline-protection service. Both of these efforts are part of a campaign known as Task Force Shield, intended to stop sabotage of the 300-mile pipeline carrying crude oil from fields near Kirkuk in northern Iraq to the Turkish border and thence to the Mediterranean port of Ceyhan. That US troops continue to protect Iraq's oil infrastructure and that the Defense Department has hired South African mercenaries to assist in this function is yet another piece of evidence--if any more were needed--to demonstrate that oil was, and remains, a critical factor in the Bush Administration's decision to occupy Iraq.