Blood for Oil
News today was that exactly half of Americans polled believe that President Bush "deliberately misled" the nation about whether Iraq had WMDs in making his case for the invasion of that country. This means that half of all Americans, either still believe that Iraq had WMDs or that Bush did not deliberately deceive. Of course, Iraqi, not American, civilians, are the ones paying the price for Bush's lie, so perhaps that makes it easier for some to swallow (from The Independent):

Terrified US soldiers are still killing civilians with impunity, while the dead go uncounted
By Patrick Cockburn, 24 April 2005

An American patrol roared past us with the soldiers gesturing furiously with their guns for traffic to keep back on an overpass in central Baghdad. A black car with three young men in it did not stop in time and a soldier fired several shots from his machine gun into its engine.

The driver and his friends were not hit, but many Iraqis do not survive casual encounters with US soldiers. It is very easy to be accidentally killed in Iraq. US soldiers treat everybody as a potential suicide bomber. If they are right they have saved their lives and if they are wrong they face no penalty.

"We should end the immunity of US soldiers here," says Dr Mahmoud Othman, a veteran Kurdish politician who argues that the failure to prosecute American soldiers who have killed civilians is one of the reasons why the occupation became so unpopular so fast. He admits, however, that this is extremely unlikely to happen given the US attitude to any sanctions against its own forces.

Every Iraqi has stories of friends or relatives killed by US troops for no adequate reason. Often they do not know if they were shot by regular soldiers or by members of western security companies whose burly employees, usually ex-soldiers, are everywhere in Iraq.

[snip]

It was obvious to many American officers from an early stage in the conflict that the Pentagon's claim that it did not count civilian casualties was seen by many Iraqis as proof that the US did not care about how many of them were killed. The failure to take Iraqi civilian dead into account was particularly foolish in a culture where relatives of the slain are obligated by custom to seek revenge.

The secrecy surrounding the numbers of civilians killed reveals another important facet of the war. The White House was always more interested in the impact of events in Iraq on the American voter than it was in the effect on Iraqis. From the beginning of the conflict the US and British armies had difficulty in working out who in Iraq really was a civilian.

Marla Ruzicka, the American humanitarian worker who was buried yesterday in California, had established in her last weeks in Iraq that figures were kept based on after-action reports. Officially, she found, 29 civilians were killed in fire fights between US forces and insurgents between 28 February and 5 April. But these figures are likely to be gross underestimates.

US soldiers are notorious in Iraq for departing immediately after a skirmish, taking their own casualties but sometimes leaving damaged vehicles. They would not have time to find out how many Iraqis were killed or injured.

[snip]

The immunity of US troops means that there is nothing to inhibit them opening fire in what for them is a terrifying situation. For all their modern armament they are vulnerable to suicide bombers and roadside bombs. In the first case the attacker is already dead and in the second the man who detonates the bomb is probably several hundred yards away and in cover. With nobody else to shoot at it is the civilians who pay the price.

Meanwhile, BP announces record profits for the first quarter of this year:

For the first three months of the year, the UK's biggest listed company made $5.49bn (£2.87bn). The figure, the equivalent to earnings of £1.3m an hour, comes two months after BP announced a record annual profit of £8.7bn - a result that sparked calls for a windfall tax on energy companies.

David Sirota had an excellent post this morning on the build-up of cash reserves at Exxon, and Bush's total silence on the issue of price-gouging by oil companies in his few public statements on the rising cost of gas. These profits are not simply coincidental:

Perhaps The UK's rush to war was in part fuelled by a desire to see its corporations at the front of the queue in post war Iraq? Lord John Browne, chief executive of BP has made no secret of his company's desire to re-enter Iraq, where it helped to discover oil reserves before it was forced out by nationalisation.

And, sure enough, as the AP reported last month, "Through 15 years of conflict and sanctions, major oil companies never lost sight of Iraq's enormous proven reserves: the world's second-largest after Saudi Arabia . . . The world's three biggest integrated oil companies - BP PLC, ExxonMobil Corp. and Royal Dutch/Shell Group of Cos. - recently struck cooperation or training deals with Iraq."

Blood for Oil.
- posted by TJ @ 1:41 PM