The real Grand Chessboard and the profiteers of war

In March 2001 the biggest oil majors (Exxon Mobil, Chevron, Conoco, and Shell) had their opportunity to design the incoming administration's energy strategies, including Middle East policy, by participating secretly in Vice-President Cheney's Energy Task Force. The Task Force, we learned later, developed a map of Iraq's oil fields, with the southwest divided into nine "Exploration Blocks." One month earlier a Bush National Security Council document had noted that Cheney's Task force would consider "actions regarding the capture of new and existing oil and gas fields." Earlier the oil companies had participated in a non-governmental task force calling for "an immediate policy review toward Iraq including military, energy, economic and political/diplomatic assessments." Of course, oil companies were not alone in pushing for military action against Iraq. After 9/11, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Douglas Feith established the Pentagon's neocon Office of Special Plans (OSP), which soon "rivalled both the C.I.A. and the Pentagon's own Defense Intelligence Agency, the D.I.A., as President Bush's main source of intelligence regarding Iraq's possible possession of weapons of mass destruction and connection with Al Qaeda." Neocon influence in the Administration, supported by Lewis Libby in Vice-President Cheney's office, trumped the skepticism of CIA and DIA: these two false charges against Saddam Hussein, or what one critic called "faith-based intelligence," became briefly the official ideology of the United States. Some, notably Dick Cheney, have never recanted. Many journalists were eager to promote the OSP doctrines. Judith Miller of the New York Times wrote a series of articles on Saddam's WMD, relying, like OSP itself, on the propaganda of Iraqi exile Ahmed Chalabi. Miller's book collaborator Laurie Mylroie went even further, arguing that "Saddam was not only behind the '93 Trade Center attack, but also every anti-American terrorist incident of the past decade, from the bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania to the leveling of the federal building in Oklahoma City to September 11 itself." Many of these advocates, notably Feith, Libby, and Mylroie, had links to Israel, which as much as any oil company had reasons to wish for U.S. armies to become established militarily in Central Asia.