the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
Jun 30, 2008
Ever since the build-up to invade and occupy Iraq, the U.S. government has vehemently denied that the Iraq War was about oil. From the start, everyone knew that it was a lie. But a June 19 announcement is the final confirmation of that fact. Four Western oil companies, Exxon Mobil, Shell, Total and BP, are in the final stages of negotiations with the Iraqi government to gain the right to run the biggest oil fields in Iraq.
Since the 1920s, these four companies had complete control over the rich oil industry in Iraq, their semi-colony. “We basically had the whole country,” said a “nostalgic” Lee Raymond, the former chief executive of Exxon in an interview in Newsweek magazine last year.
Thus, the most valuable resources of an entire country went to enrich these oil companies and their stockholders. For decades, the Iraqi people fought to overturn this. Finally, in 1972, the Iraqi government nationalized the Iraqi oil fields and those oil companies lost some control.
The bloody U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq has thus restored these same companies back to their perch and returned Iraq back to semi-colonial status–at a cost of over a million lives and the destruction of an entire country.
It really is a war of blood for oil.