James Baker: The Man Behind the Handshake (Pt. Two)

Gulf War architect James Baker resurfaced in the amnesiac clattertrap that masquerades as the U.S. mainstream media this fall, when he was tapped to co-chair the Iraq Study Group (ISG)- a bipartisan committee, congressionally-mandated to assist in the formulation of a new Iraq strategy. After several weeks of deliberation, the group published a list of seventy-nine recommendations on how to better manage the increasingly unpopular occupation. Their findings elicited varied reactions – ranging from those who looked upon the report as a panacea to all the problems in the Middle East to those who viewed it as an act of high treason and cowardice. As is commonplace in contemporary American political discourse, these positions were widely presented as the two extremes of a dichotomy in national opinion. Much like during the media storm that preceded the 2004 Presidential election – when two candidates with nearly identitcal platforms ‘debated’ over how best to execute the ‘War on Terror,’ fight Al Qaeda and win the war in Iraq – the boundaries of rational debate on a very important subject were narrowed to exclude any viable suggestions that did not conform to Washington’s long-term geopolitical visions for the New Middle East.

Predictably, the tendency towards gross oversimplification and contrived objectivity that are the hallmarks of the 24-hour U.S. News Networks served to obscure several important policy suggestions outlined in the report. The overwhelming focus instead fell on proposals that the White House immediately dismissed out of hand – most notably, the suggestion that the U.S enter into negotiations with Iraq’s neighbors, Iran and Syria – and the relatively minor adjustments in troop deployment that comprise the focal point of Bush’s new ‘surge’ strategy.

This over-saturation of the national dialogue by buzzword-spouting pundits serves to shield the American public from any true understanding of the real motives behind the “War on Terror:” namely, the current drive for geopolitical leverage in Western and Central Asia, the gradual erosion of civil liberties at home and the climate of rampant corruption and hyper-capitalism that a state of perpetual war fosters and encourages. In the end, it would make no real difference if President Bush had followed the recommendations of the Iraq Study Group report to the letter, or if Barack Obama were to be elected President in 2008 – American policy will not deviate substantially from the road map that the “War on Terror” provides.

For all the reporting on the op-ed battles that raged between the Neocons and the “Old Guard” realists of the first Bush administration after the release of the report, the differences between the two ideological classifications are matters of style – not substance. The Neoconservatives, owing largely to the unimaginable sense of hubris with which they approached the war with Iraq, no longer possess the credibility to advise the President on the issue. Americans remember that it was Paul Wolfowitz, the former second-in-command at the Pentagon, who so infamously predicted that U.S. troops would be greeted as liberators by the conquered Iraqis.

Many of the chief Neocon policymakers have already departed from the Bush administration, or are well on their way towards doing so. Prominent Neocons Donald Rumsfeld and John Bolton both tendered their resignations in the face of last year’s mid-term election results to great fanfare. Also driven from his post was Cheney’s former Chief of Staff, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, who resigned after being served a federal indictment for the supporting role he played in the “Plamegate” scandal. Several other members of the clique have simply chosen to slink back to their positions in the private sector and the various like-minded thinktanks in which their opinions are still held in high regard. No doubt they will make their triumphant return to Washington when their services are requested by some future administration (Richard Perle, Douglas Feith and Stephen Cambone are excellent examples of this latter species of Neoconservus Oppertunicious). Meanwhile, Wolfowitz – the erstwhile “leading light” of the Neoconservative movement – has moved on to greener pastures with his appointment to President of the World Bank, a position he was granted in spite of the gross level of incompetence he demonstrated during his tenure in the Department of Defense.

With the departure of the Neocons from the office of the executive, a vacuum was created. After the disaster created by Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz & Co., minor changes in personnel and policy became necessary in order to attempt to regain some semblance of credibility with an increasingly disillusioned American public. Enter James Baker.

As outlined in part one of this article, Baker fits the perceived role of problem solver quite well – owing to the meticulous political execution of the first Gulf War and his reputation as ‘the Bush family fixer.’ While he has certainly proven his mettle in the latter regard, it is certainly worth pointing out that Baker’s experiences in Operation Desert Storm are largely irrelevant when applied to the current conflict. Baker oversaw the diplomatic execution of the first Gulf War. His duties included negotiating with the Arab League on a unified response to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, assembling a war-time coalition, working out the requisite United Nations resolutions legitimizing U.S. military intervention and then urging Israeli restraint following Saddam’s decision to fire Scud missiles into Tel Aviv and Haifa. While he displayed a high level of competence in his co-ordinating role, making comparisons between Operation Desert Storm and Operation Iraqi Freedom is like comparing the carpet bombing of Kosovo to the Vietnam War. Desert Storm was a conventional, aerial-borne assault on a retreating army, followed by a limited ground campaign whose primary aims were to chase the Iraqi Republican Guard forces back from the border and to protect the region’s oil reserves from further sabotage. The current Iraq debacle, on the other hand, is a nearly four year old quagmire that has spawned a deadly and determined insurgency and a veritable orgy of sectarian killings that threatens to tear the country apart at its seams.

The policies instituted in the immediate aftermath of the invasion have proven catastrophic to the long-term stability of the nation, and the heavy-handed military approach adopted by U.S. military planners during the subsequent years of occupation has sown widespread resentment among the Iraqi populace. In addition to its failed military tactics, the political capital of the United States on the world stage today is perhaps at its all-time low. While the Gulf War arose in response to an act of flagrant military aggression, the current war is itself an act of aggression, waged in open defiance of the United Nations Security Council and the most basic principles of international law. Prior to the initial campaign of “shock and awe,” millions of people across the world had already taken to the streets to protest – in by far the largest world-wide public display of opposition in recorded history. It has been verifiably demonstrated that the war was launched on false pretenses, having nothing to do with Iraqi WMDs – which, ironically enough, were largely supplied by U.S. companies in the first place – or the country’s alleged connections to Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda network. Recent polls demonstrate that a majority of Americans believe that the war was a tactical mistake, while in Iraq the overwhelming majority blame the United States for their long-deteriorating security situation. Many analysts have suggested that the war is unwinnable and that the United States must come to terms with this reality… and quickly, before dooming itself to the economic and geopolitical suicide that it is committing by continuing its costly and seemingly endless occupation.

It is through this paradigm that the recommendations of the Iraq Study Group must be viewed. While the war may well be considered “unwinnable” when appraised using the goals retroactively adopted after its inception, this does not necessarily mean that the U.S. cannot achieve its true goals in Iraq. After all, this conflict has never been about “liberating Iraq,” “fighting terror,” “spreading democracy,” or any of the other bumpersticker justifications attached to Operation Iraqi Freedom since the original casus belli turned out to be nothing more than a pack of lies. The true goal of this conflict, as has long been understood by many of the administration’s critics, is long-term U.S. control of the region’s vast natural resources – the most important of which being its massive oil deposits.

The occupation of Iraq is a key step towards implementing the foreign policy blueprint outlined by former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski in his 1998 book, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives. In this seminal work on U.S. foreign policy, Brzezinski argued that in order to maintain American primacy over potential rivals Russia and China, the U.S. would be required to take concrete steps towards establishing economic and military control over the energy resources of Eurasia – specifically those contained within the “axis” of the supercontinent, said to encompass the area stretching from the former Soviet states of the Caucasus region to the states of the Mediterranean and Persian Gulfs. A report released in 2000 by the Neoconservative think-tank, Project for a New American Century, entitled Rebuilding America’s Defenses, echoed many of these suggestions, including the need to establish a long-term military presence in Iraq and a larger military footprint in central Asia.

Brzezinski, a nonpartisan pragmatist who served in the Carter and Ford administrations, is an adherent of the same school of thought that counts figures such as Henry Kissenger, the former President Bush, Brent Snowcroft and James Baker as members. The understanding of realpolitik that peppers their views on geopolitical strategy serves to distinguish the members of the “Old Guard” from their much more idealistic and rash counterparts in the Neoconservative movement. Both groups, however, share a similar grandiose belief in the providential role that America is destined to play in history. For the most part, they also agree on the path that America should follow in order to fulfill that destiny. That being said, there are certainly several important distinctions between the two camps. Perhaps the primary ideological nuance between the two schools of thought (aside from the disparate level of Neocon devotion to the Israeli right) is the stance taken by each group on the importance of traditional allies in the United States’ current quest for a lasting Pax Americana.

The Neocons are the champions of the pre-emptive strike. They believe that by asserting its dominance in a spectacular fashion, unilaterally when necessary, America can effectively discourage any potential state – or combination of states – from ever seeking to challenge its supremacy. The policymakers of the “Old Guard,” on the other hand, continue to place their trust in the twin bulwarks of multilateral alliances and global institutions that have traditionally granted the United States its definitive advantage in international affairs.

These stylistic idiosyncrasies have come to a head over Iraq – not only with regards to the manner in which the pre-war diplomacy was executed, but also over the political and economic strategies pursued since the onset of the occupation. As Greg Palast wrote, in a 2005 piece that won him a coveted Project Censored Award, the two factions have been quietly quarreling for several years over what to do with OPEC, now that the U.S. has effectively been granted membership to the cartel – owing to its proxy control over Iraq’s oil fields.

The Neoconservatives – led by Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and the visceral Elliot Abrams – supported the idea of throwing the doors of Iraq’s oil industry open to a frenzy of foreign investment, thereby causing a massive surge in production that would have effectively smashed OPEC. As Palast writes:

[...] if Iraq’s fields were broken up and sold off, a dozen competing operators would quickly crank up production from their individual patches to the maximum possible, swiftly raising Iraq’s total output to 6 million barrels a day. This extra crude would flood world petroleum markets, OPEC would devolve into mass cheating and overproduction, oil prices would fall over a cliff, and Saudi Arabia – both economically and politically – would fall to its knees.

On the other side of the divide sat those who remained loyal to OPEC – and to the hyper-inflated oil prices that the organization’s stringent system of quotas exists to uphold. It is under the stewardship of the OPEC cartel that oil companies such as Shell, ExxonMobile and ConocoPhillips have been able to consistently post record-breaking profits over the past several years. This system has also been quite adept at keeping the coffers of the oil rich Gulf monarchies filled to the brim – thereby insuring their continued loyalty to the “Washington Consensus.” The main proponents of maintaining the status quo vis-a-vis OPEC have been Vice President Cheney, the former Vice President of ConocoPhillips (and chief advisor to the Iraqi Oil Ministry) Bob McKee, and James Baker, acting through his deputy, Amy Jaffe – head of the James Baker Institute’s Energy Forum, and major contributer to the ISG Economic Reconstruction Group.

In light of these closed-door discussions, perhaps the most important component of the ISG report is the chapter covering the Iraqi oil sector – as it appears to signal an end to the controversy over OPEC’s future. While the majority of the reporting on Bush’s new Iraq strategy has focused on his decision to send over 20,000 additional troops to pacify the Iraqi capital, a story with perhaps more far-reaching consequences went largely unnoticed. In the days before Bush’s nationally-televised speech, the Iraqi government quietly announced plans to draft new petroleum legislation that will directly implement several of the recommendations made in the ISG report. These suggestions include a call for a nearly two-fold increase in Iraqi oil production – extending the country’s current output of approximately 1.5 to 2.0 million barrels per day to a projected goal of 3.0 to 3.5 million – and a recommendation that the U.S. “assist” the Iraqi government in drafting a new national oil law that allows for generous production-sharing agreements with Western oil giants.

Under the terms of this new edict, Iraq’s (relatively meager) share of its national oil wealth will accrue to a state-run oil company, where it will be redistributed to the country’s eighteen provinces based on their respective populations. The new petroleum act would also open up Iraq’s oil industry to large-scale foreign investment, while adhering to the production quotas dictated by OPEC. Iraq’s quotas have traditionally mirrored those of Iran, whose production limit is currently set at just under 4.1 million barrels per day. The oil revenue would, in turn, be used to finance Iraq’s reconstruction, thereby taking some of the pressure off the U.S. taxpayer.

On paper, the plan certainly seems reasonable – or, at least, no worse than many of the other schemes foisted upon third-world nations by predatory international institutions such as the I.M.F. and World Bank. Baker’s seemingly benign advisory role in the drafting of this policy, however, hides an insidious conflict of interest.

In keeping with a time-honored Washington tradition, after finishing his stint as Secretary of State in 1992, Baker made a beeline for the private sector. In 1993, he joined up with a little-known private equity investment firm – the Carlyle Group. There he was reunited with fellow Reaganite and Princeton alumni Frank Carlucci, who had joined the firm just six days after resigning from the office of the Secretary of Defense, in 1989. The two were soon joined by former President Bush, who was granted a senior advisory position with the company – until accusations of ethics violations forced his retirement, in 2003.

During the 1990’s, Carlyle aggressively expanded into the U.S. aerospace and arms industries, using Carlucci’s ties to the Pentagon to generate large rates of return for their investors. With Baker’s inclusion to their ranks, Carlyle was able to cash in on the former Secretary of State’s existing relationships with prominent political figures in the Middle East – including his friendship with several high-ranking members of the House of Saud. Over a three year period in the mid 1990’s, Carlyle raked in nearly 1.2 billion dollars through its subsidiary, BDM International – a military services company granted several contracts to offer training and material support to the Saudi Arabian armed forces. This was small peanuts, however, when compared to what lay ahead.

In 2000, Baker once again demonstrated why he is known as “the Bush Family fixer,” when he served as the legal advisor to the Bush-Cheney Presidential campaign and assisted in the ‘fixing’ of the Florida election results. It was Baker, working in this capacity, who first intervened in Florida to stop the manual vote recount ordered by the Gore team, and then filed an appeal of the Florida Supreme Court’s ruling ordering that the recount proceed. At this point, the United States Supreme Court stepped in, declaring George W. Bush the forty-third President of the United States with a split 7-5 decision. Two months later, Baker joined former U.K. Prime Minister (and fellow Carlyle crony) John Major, in London’s elegant Lanesborough Hotel, to explain the ramifications of his recent electoral theft to a group of potential investors.

Along with Bush and Cheney, Baker’s red-faced theatrics in Florida also swept a group of policymakers left over from the Ford, Reagan and first Bush administrations back into the halls of power. The members of this cabal of Straussians, having reclaimed their perch in Washington, were determined to carry out the fantasies they had drawn up in their earlier Rebuilding America’s Defenses document. Topping the list was their plan for the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Sure enough, soon after the attacks of September 11th, the focus turned towards Saddam Hussein and his mystical ‘weapons of mass destruction.’ With war on the horizon, Carlyle stood to make a fortune – and Baker was perfectly poised to maximize the windfall.

In December of 2003, President Bush announced that he was naming Baker as his Special Envoy on Iraqi Debt Relief – in order to try and alleviate some of the $120 billion in sovereign debts and $200 billion in war reparations accrued during Saddam’s 25 year reign. Baker set out on a high profile tour of Europe, Asia and the Persian Gulf in an attempt to convince the United States’ allies to drop their claims to the billions of dollars owed to them by the former regime. Bush, for his part, called it a “noble mission,” adding in a written statement that the staggering level of debt “endangers Iraq’s long-term prospects for political health and economic prosperity.”

At the time this announcement was made, not much was reported on the sheer irony involved in putting Baker – a man who had, as Secretary of State, personally approved a $1 billion loan to Saddam’s government and who was, as a key author of the Gulf War ceasefire, largely responsible for saddling Iraq with billions of dollars in crippling war reparations – in charge of “restructuring” Iraq’s debt. But then again, the Washington press corp is not known for its sense of irony.

How successful was Baker in his efforts to minimize the economic hardship that the people of Iraq have been made to incur, in part, due to the policies he himself enacted as Secretary of State? According to Naomi Klein, in an article published in the November 2004 issue of The Nation, the answer is: Not very.

In a flagrant display of chutzpah that one stunned observer termed “one of the greatest cons of all time,” Baker used his position as Special Envoy to ensure that Iraq’s debt payments to Kuwait (totaling a whopping $57 billion) would be exempted from any ‘restructuring’ plans embraced by the international community – on the condition that the Kuwaiti government invest a substantial portion of the recovered funds back into the Carlye Group. In a confidential sixty-five page document entitled Proposal to Assist the Government of Kuwait in Protecting and Realizing Claims Against Iraq, dated January, 2004, the scheme is laid out.

As Klein explains:

The secret deal involves a complex transaction to transfer ownership of as much as $57 billion in unpaid Iraqi debts. The debts, now owed to the government of Kuwait, would be assigned to a foundation created and controlled by a consortium in which the key players are the Carlyle Group, the Albright Group (headed by another former Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright) and several other well-connected firms. Under the deal, the government of Kuwait would also give the consortium $2 billion up front to invest in a private equity fund devised by the consortium, with half of it going to Carlyle.

Carlyle also stands to earn a rate of return of “five percent or more” on the funds it recovers for the government of Kuwait. That works out to at least an additional $2.85 billion, on top of the initial $1 billion investment. The money flagged for paying back Iraq’s “restructured” debt will come from the nation’s soon to be reconstituted oil industry, as crude oil is virtually the only export that Iraq currently produces. During the height of the oil-for-food program, in 1996, Iraq was paying 30 percent of its oil revenue to a fund set up by the United Nations to distribute reparations. A United Nations Security Council resolution, in 2003, lowered this figure substantially, down to the current level of 5 percent. The wording of the resolution, however, left a clause that could play heavily into the final draft of Iraq’s new petroleum law, currently making its way through parliament:

…unless an internationally recognized, representative government of Iraq and the Governing Council of the United Nations Compensation Commission, in the exercise of its authority over methods of ensuring that payments are made into the Compensation Fund, decide otherwise, this requirement shall be binding on a properly constituted, internationally recognized, representative government of Iraq and any successor thereto.

It is likely that the “internationally recognized, representative government of Iraq,” headed by Iraqi P.M. Nouri al-Maliki will, at the behest of his U.S. puppet-masters, raise the percentage of Iraqi oil revenue divested away from his country’s reconstruction towards the payment of war reparations. Should this happen, the economic fallout will doom Iraq to decades of economic enslavement, as their national oil reserves are gradually looted to the gluttonous aggrandizement of Western oil companies, Iraq’s many creditors and odious vultures such as Baker’s Carlyle Group.

The binding shackles of any permanent national oil law will guarantee a future of servitude – transforming the once prosperous nation of Iraq into a perpetually weak and restive U.S. client state. For years, Iraq will be plagued by humanitarian catastrophe, as their society struggles with rampant disease, rolling blackouts, a shortage of clean drinking water and a pandemic of depleted uranium-related cancers and birth defects. They will watch with a collective sense of rage and despair as billions of dollars in oil revenue is stolen by Western oil giants, even as their medical and educational sectors – once the envy of the Middle East – sink further into disrepair.

The next generation of Iraqis will no doubt grow up blaming the rape of their nation on President George W. Bush – the smirking American who spoke in lofty terms of freedom and democracy yet left nothing but squalor and death in his wake. They would do well, however, to remeber the role played by James Baker – the former Secretary of State whose assurance to Saddam Hussein that the U.S. had “no interest” in Hussein’s quarrel with his neighbors was followed by a sustained campaign of terror that has continued, unabated, since that fateful day over sixteen years ago. For his part, Baker, and indeed all Americans, would do well to remember a warning that Saddam issued to the United States in that same meeting – a warning that has become hauntingly prescient in the years since it was first uttered:

“You can come to Iraq with aircraft and missiles but do not push us to the point where we cease to care. And when we feel that you want to injure our pride and take away the Iraqis’ chance of a high standard of living, then we will cease to care and death will be the choice for us. Then we would not care if you fired 100 missiles for each missile we fired. Because without pride life would have no value.”

This chilling threat, forever immortalized in the annals of history, will serve as an explanation to future historians of the true nature of the bloody free-for-all that has followed the “democratization” of the Land of the Two Rivers. Without the binding pride of Iraqi nationalism – fatally fractured by years of living under the boot of occupation and grinding poverty – the Shias and Sunnis of Iraq have gravitated towards religious sectarianism, shrouding themselves in the romance of death. Where once stood the epicenter of a re-emergence of the type of Pan-Arab nationalism made popular by Gamal Abdel Nasser in the 1950’s, now lies a dismembered landscape of rubble and blood-stained sand.

Posted by Heatscore
A jaded Raskolnikov waiting in disgust for this sick society's imminent paradigm shift.

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