L’Iraq Study Group qui ne perd pas le nord

Certes, le climat (au sens politique) est tragique ; certes, Junior en prend un peu à son aise avec les vieux sages de l’establishment. Pour autant, l’ISG (Iraq Study Group) ne perd pas du tout le nord. Une sacrée boussole, même…

Hier, la station de radio “Democracy Now!”, avec Amy Goodman comme excellente animatrice, recevait l’activiste Antonia Juhasz pour l’interroger sur un aspect très particulier du rapport de l’ISG : la privatisation du pétrole irakien.

Ce “détail” du rapport est à vous couper le souffle. Dans cette tragédie immense qui secoue les USA aujourd’hui, avec des enjeux humains et politiques considérables, avec la perspective de circonstances politiques et militaires très difficiles pour les USA, les hommes sages de l’ISG ont pensé avec attention et le plus grand soin à ménager l’avenir des compagnies pétrolières privées (US, évidemment).

Voici un extrait substantiel de l’interview, qui vous explique, notamment, pourquoi l’ISG recommande que les forces US restent en Irak au moins jusqu’en 2008.

AMY GOODMAN: The Iraq Study Group also recommended for Iraq to privatize its oil industry and to open it up to international companies. The author and activist, Antonia Juhasz, has been closely watching this aspect of the Iraq reconstruction process. She’s author of The Bush Agenda: Invading the World, One Economy at a Time. Antonia Juhasz, thanks for joining us in studio in San Francisco. Your response to the report, not talked about almost at all, the issue of privatization?

ANTONIA JUHASZ: Yeah, absolutely. And good morning, Amy. It’s a completely radical proposal made straightforward in the Iraq Study Group report that the Iraqi national oil industry should be reorganized as a commercial enterprise. The proposal also says that, as you say, Iraq’s oil should be opened up to private foreign energy and companies. Also, another radical proposal: that all of Iraq’s oil revenues should be centralized in the central government. And the report calls for a US advisor to ensure that a new national oil law is passed in Iraq to make all of this possible and that the constitution of Iraq is amended to ensure that the central government gains control of Iraq’s oil revenues.

All told, the report calls for privatization of Iraq’s oil, turning it over to private foreign corporate hands, putting all of the oil in the hands of the central government, and essentially, I would argue, extending the war in Iraq to ensure that US oil companies get what the Bush administration went in there for: control and greater access to Iraq's oil.

AMY GOODMAN: Antonia Juhasz, let’s talk about the members of this Iraq Study Group. That might explain what their approach has been, particularly James Baker, the former Secretary of State, and also Lawrence Eagleburger. Talk about the two of them.

ANTONIA JUHASZ: Both Baker and Eagleburger have spent their careers doing one of two things: working for the federal government or working in private enterprise taking advantage of the work that they did for the federal government. So, in particular, in this case, both Baker and Eagleburger were key participants throughout the ’80s and early 1990s of radically expanding US economic engagement with Saddam Hussein, with a very clear objective of gaining greater access for US corporations, particularly oil corporations, to Iraq's oil, and doing everything that they could to expand that access.

Baker has his own private interest. His family is heavily invested in the oil industry, and also Baker Botts, his law firm, is one of the key law firms representing oil companies across the United States and their activities in the Middle East. And Lawrence Eagleburger was president of Kissinger Associates, which was one of the leading multinational advising firms for advising US companies who were trying to get contracts with Saddam Hussein and get work in Iraq.

Now, these two members of the Iraq Study Group are joined by two additional members who are representatives of the Heritage Foundation, and the Heritage Foundation is one of the few US organizations that point-blank called for full privatization of Iraq's oil sector prior to the invasion of Iraq, as a stated goal of the invasion. And to call point-blank for full privatization, as I said, is truly radical. It’s actually a shift for the Bush administration, which has for the past about two years been working on a more sort of privatization-lite agenda, putting forward what are called production-sharing agreements in Iraq that would have the same outcome of privatization without calling it privatization.

For the Iraq Study Group, which is supposed to be, you know, the meeting of the pragmatists, the sort of middle-ground group that’s going to help solve the war in Iraq, to put forward this incredibly radical proposal and to have nobody talk about it, to me, is fairly shocking and makes clear that still the Democrats, the Republicans, the media are afraid to talk about oil, but that oil, in my mind, still remains the lynchpin for the administration and for all those in the oil sector in the United States, Baker and Eagleburger counted among them, for why US troops are being committed and committed to stay. And the report says troops will stay until at least 2008 — I think that is at a minimum — to guarantee this oil access to US oil companies.

Mis en ligne le 8 décembre 2006 à 16H45