Africa Speaks Reasoning Forum

When Colin Powell’s former chief of staff Lawrence Wilkerson publicly decried the Bush administration’s bungling of U.S. foreign policy, the focus of the press coverage was on Wilkerson’s depiction of a “cabal” headed by Vice President Dick Cheney that had hijacked the decision-making process.

Largely overlooked were Wilkerson’s frank admissions about the importance of oil in justifying a long-term U.S. military intervention in Iraq. “The other thing that no one ever likes to talk about is SUVs and oil and consumption,” the retired Army colonel said in a speech on Oct. 19.

While bemoaning the administration’s incompetence in implementing the war strategy, Wilkerson said the U.S. government now had no choice but to succeed in Iraq or face the necessity of conquering the Middle East within the next 10 years to ensure access to the region’s oil supplies.

“We had a discussion in (the State Department’s Office of) Policy Planning about actually mounting an operation to take the oilfields of the Middle East, internationalize them, put them under some sort of U.N. trusteeship and administer the revenues and the oil accordingly,” Wilkerson said. “That’s how serious we thought about it.”

The centrality of Iraq’s oil in Wilkerson’s blunt comments contrasted with three years of assurances from the Bush administration that the war had almost nothing to do with oil.

When critics have called the Iraq War a case of “blood for oil,” George W. Bush’s defenders have dismissed them as “conspiracy theorists.” The Bush defenders insisted the president went to war out of concern about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and Saddam Hussein’s links to al-Qaeda, neither of which turned out to be true. Later, Bush cited humanitarian concerns and the desire to spread democracy.

Always left out of the administration’s war equation – or referenced only obliquely – was the fact that Iraq sits atop one of the world’s largest known oil reserves at a time when international competition is intensifying to secure reliable oil supplies.