Home > Pentagon Thievery An Interview with Jeffrey St. Clair
Jeffrey St. Clair is the co-editor of CounterPunch (online at CounterPunch.org) and the author of numerous books, most recently Grand Theft Pentagon: Tales of Corruption and Profiteering in the War on Terror (Common Courage Press 2006). He recently spoke with me about his latest book.
Joshua Frank: Jeff, it’s been three long years since the US invaded Iraq and there has been a mountain of speculation as to the real motives for the war and occupation: Was it for oil, Israel? No WMDs have turned up, and there weren’t any connections between Saddam and Bin Laden. After reading Grand Theft Pentagon, however, it’s hard not to think that perhaps a larger reason the US invaded was to benefit economically. Can you talk about this a bit? Why the heck are we in Iraq anyway?
Jeffrey St. Clair: Josh, stop cribbing questions from Helen Thomas! The invasion of Iraq had a MIRV warhead full of motives, none of which had to do with eliminating Saddam’s arsenal of WMDs. They knew all he had at most were a few aging mustard gas bombs and the like that had been rusting away since the first Iran/Iraq war. (I believe we may be in the opening acts of the second Iran/Iraq war.) That’s precisely why he felt so comfortable in launching the invasion with such a relatively small force. A lesson Iran and North Korea have taken to heart. Second, they knew Saddam the Atheist and Osama the Fundy loathed each other. But most Americans had no clue about this long-standing antagonism, so they were easily, and to some extent, willingly duped by this fictional alliance.
The neo-con claque in the White House and in the salons of Washington had their own motives, some of which they publicized, such as imposing another US client state in the heart of the Middle East; some of which they kept relatively submerged, that is, annihilating a threat to Israel. But the neo-cons are zealots and even many inside the Bush White House recognize them as such. Useful zealots, just like Franklin Graham and Pat Robertson. But its vital to understand that the key players in the Bush inner sanctum: Rove, Card, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Powell and Armitage are not neo-cons. So they had other motives, some political, some strategic and, yes, some economic. Bush needed a scalp after 9/11. Toppling the pitiful Taliban wasn’t going to be enough to mask the troubling questions about his administration’s incompetence leading up to 9/11. Saddam was sitting out there as the perfect object of sacrifice. They could inflate this marginal regime into a threat the size of a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade balloon, knock them down swiftly with minimal US casualties and then have access to a huge trove of oil, as a kind of tribute of war, which they could use to pipe money into the portfolio of private contractors who acted as a kind of second invasionary force.
After 12 years of nearly daily bombings and a vicious sanctions regime, the Bushies knew that the basic infrastructure of Iraq, from power plants to sewage plants, was broken. And what had survived the sanctions was slated for being destroyed in the invasion. Post-invasion Iraq was going to be the biggest reconstruction project in history. The contracts would largely go to companies hand-picked and vetted for loyalty to Bush by Douglas Feith, the former Undersecretary of Defense, Paul Bremer. And the funding was supposed to come from Iraq’s oil revenues, once Halliburton and Parson’s got the spigots opened, to the tune of $100s of billions. It was all meant to be a big feast and your ticket to the feeding frenzy was a big political contribution to the RNC. Guess who came to dinner?
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