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Plan A was short and sweet to be completed in three days if all went as intended. An insider told Greg it was to be "an invasion disguised as a coup" with a friendly Ba'athist general parachuted in to replace Saddam. Colin Powell and the State Department supported this plan because it avoided occupying the country which he opposed. So much for the nonsense that Powell was against the war. He wanted one like the others in the Bush administration and only disagreed on the tactics. As we know, Powell's view lost out to the war hawkish neocons including Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and other signers of the Project for a New American Century (PNAC) - an imperial plan for US global dominance to extend well into the future to be enforced with unchallengeable military power.The neocons wanted and got Plan B which was to be anything but quick and easy. It was detailed and designed to conquer and occuply Iraq followed by a total transformation of the nation's policies, laws and regulations making it into a neoliberal free market capitalists' dream. It was to be an incubator for all conquests to follow essentially making it heaven for US predatory corporations and the rich and hell for the Iraqi people and US taxpayers who have to pay for it.
The biggest prize of all in the plan, of course, was Iraq's immense oil reserves which may be much greater than the 115 billion barrels of known reserves. The Bush war hawks even made clear what they wanted by the name they first chose for their adventure: Operation Iraqi Liberation - O.I.L. The plan involved selling off all the country's oil assets "from the pipes to the pumps to the crude in the ground." As Greg in his humorous style put it: "even if we didn't go into Iraq for oil (why else would we have gone), we sure as hell weren't leaving without it." How true indeed, and so far it still is despite the living hell we created there for all sides including our own.
During his tenure in Baghdad for the empire, Bremer performed admirably. The "Pasha Omnipotent" showed his contempt for democracy and signed into law (the new law because we said it was) an array of orders creating the neoliberal utopia of corporate America's dreams. Whatever that fraternity wanted, they got, but at the expense of the Iraqi people who lost everything: the right to run their own country, to have a decent job with income enough to support themselves and their families, to organize unions to represent them, to be safe in the streets when they went into them, and just about everything else they had once had but no longer did thanks to the US illegal invasion and occupation. The US aggression actually achieved the impossible. It made Iraqis wish they had Saddam back.
Greg covered much more in this chapter that's far too detailed to recount here. Let me just explain his account of "the war for OPEC" which is important and readers can get all the rest in the book. Buttoning down control of Iraq's oil treasure was central to the US imperial mission. Saddam was little more than an inconvenient irritant to be removed so we could get on with why we went there in the first place. The issue was how to do it. It turned out the neocons from right wing think tanks like the notorious Heritage Foundation, which Greg called "the madrassa of neo-con fundamentalism," had one idea and Big Oil another very different one. The HF notion was to break the back of OPEC by privatizing Iraq's oil industry, maximizing oil production way above Iraq's established quota, getting oil prices to tank setting off bickering among its members, and breaking the power of Saudi Arabia.
There was only one problem with this plan - Big Oil wanted no part of it. It was the last thing they wanted, especially if it would break the back of OPEC that's essential to the oil giants' strategy to keep prices high and profits growing. That's because the power of the cartel to control output effectively controls the price as well, and that's what good business is all about. It's particularly true if that business is supplying the world with a commodity it can't do without. So to get right to the point of Greg's detailed account of a confrontation of strategy that wasn't so epic, guess who won out. It's not hard to imagine with an administration in Washington run by former oil men and at least one powerful woman who had an oil tanker named after her. Final score: Big Oil - 1, Heritage Foundation neocon ideologues - 0. Case closed. Iraq's oil industry remained a state enterprise with its output set by OPEC quotas, we know what the price of gasoline and heating oil are today, and now we should know why.
Greg also tried to fathom a better explanation of why Saddam had to go. It had nothing to do with the "now you see 'em, now you don't WMDs." We knew years earlier he had none or at least almost none. Greg posits the notion that Saddam was playing fast and loose with his oil spigot - alternating between raising and cutting production as he chose, which, of course, affects the price of crude. He also chose to sell oil in euros which angered the US, but not enough in Greg's judgment to be a reason for his removal. Greg and I disagree on this point as I believe in the virus theory.
Even just one large oil producer abandoning the dollar, sacred to how the US wants oil traded, isn't catastrophic enough to harm the value of the currency. But if enough other nations got the same idea and began doing it too, the effect on the dollar would be enormous as would the reverberations on the US and world economies. The US will never allow that to happen, and will even go to war to prevent it. In my judgment, that was definitely a factor in removing Saddam, but the dominant reason was our unwillingness to tolerate any leader of a developing nation unwilling to sell out his nation's sovereignty to US interests. Saddam played by our rules in the 1980s when he committed his worst crimes. We ignored and financed them because he was a valued ally. It was only when he became independent that he had to go. Independence is the one unforgivable "sin" that won't go unpunished.
Chapter Three - The Network - The Dream of A Borderless Interconnected World That's A Corporate Utopia
Greg is referring to a world ruled by money and the power that goes with it. It a world controlled by the "multi-national dominion of dollars; multi-dollars, electro-dollars and...petro-dollars." He begins his discussion explaining that the Saudis and other oil producing nations suck out our billions of dollars and then loan them back to us by buying US Treasuries to fund our our budget and trade deficits. They also buy plenty of our expensive weapons. He then goes on to call China the other Saudi Arabia as that country is now the location of so much former US manufacturing that went there for its near chattel-level wage scale. The combination of China and other low wage countries we import from along with petro-dollar outflow has created a huge and growing trade deficit that's only manageable through the kindness of strangers.
Greg goes on to explain what the folks who brought us an endless war on the world and massive transfer of wealth from most of us to the rich have in mind ahead if they accomplish what they want. It's a brave new world order with the US increasingly taking on the characteristics of the developing world - low wages and no government provided essential services like Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid if the Republican ideologues get their way. It's a race to the bottom to enrich giant corporations at the expense of people here and everywhere who are just used as commodities - to be used as production inputs at the lowest possible cost and then discarded when no longer needed. That's how it is in China, India, the new Russia and "liberated" Eastern Europe and coming soon to a city or town near you so we all can enjoy the fruits of predatory capitalism.
It's called "the free market" meaning the corporate giants are allowed to operate without restraint - no unwanted regulations or even need to obey the law, tariff-free entry to foreign markets but protectionism at home, little government spending except for corporate welfare, no unions, no worker pensions or other benefits and no government anywhere interfering with their divine right of capitalism. It's a world ruled by the privileged, mostly sitting in corporate boardrooms, and the halls of dominant governments and one in which they alone benefit and at our expense. It's a world where no "outliers" are allowed - democrats like Venezuela's Hugo Chavez who's viewed as having the temerity to dare think he can choose to serve his own people rather than the interests of the US and Global North. It's a "flat borderless world" where people everywhere are losing out to the interests of power, privilege and profit. It's a world no one should want or have to live in. And it's one extolled as being the best of all possible ones by the likes of nobel laureate economist Milton Friedman and his well-paid empire flack namesake Thomas selling his snake oil at the nation's unofficial ministry of information and propaganda - the New York Times.
Chapter Four - The (Election) Con - Gore and Kerry Really Did Win in 2000 and 2004
Greg was the first investigative journalist to document how the Republicans stole the 2000 presidential election depriving Al Gore of the office he won. Back then, the story was Florida and the recount that never quite happened because five High Court justices decided they alone and not the people had the right to decide who would become President. The rest, as they say, is history, though we may need to rephrase the famous aphorism attributed to Mark Twain that "history doesn't repeat, but it rhymes." It repeated closely enough in 2004, except for the change in the crime scenes and some of the methods used. Republican machinations worked so well in 2000 they went for an encore four years later and pulled it off again - this time principally in Ohio and New Mexico where Kerry won the popular vote but Bush got the ones that were counted and Kerry had lots of his deleted.
How was it done? Republicans were just learning their trade in 2000 as a warm-up for what they had in mind henceforth. They cleansed the voter roles in heavily Democrat counties, never counted opposition ballots they said were spoiled (remember the hanging chads), obstructed black voters from getting to the polls and used assorted other dirty tricks. They wanted to be well prepared for a more sophisticated heist in 2004 and did it following the sure-fire wisdom of Joe Stalin who once reportedly said: "It's not the people who vote that count; it's the people who count the votes." Uncle Joe wasn't so dumb after all. He gained and held on to power for over 30 years and survived the likes of his rivals, Adolph Hitler who wanted his head, and a hostile US that felt the same way. In the end he proved to be a rarity among tyrants - he died in bed.
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